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Marketing and Sales

Achieve commercial excellence through go-to-market strategy, pricing optimization, and sales execution.
The agriculture industry is facing significant disruption, driven by macroeconomic, grower, and competitive pressures. Feeding an expected global population of 9 billion people in 2050 will require the industry to grow significantly while balancing resource pressure and increasing price volatility. We help clients address these pressing issues by identifying growth opportunities and working with them to achieve commercial excellence through go-to-market strategy, pricing optimization, and sales execution.

What We Do

Help agriculture clients achieve commercial excellence by finding sources of organic growth and achieving above-market returns.
Ensure consistent sales execution with compelling performance evaluation, incentive programs, and rigorous performance management.
Identify growth opportunities based on macrotrends, micromarkets, and data-driven segmentation of customers.
Optimize margins with the right price strategy and architecture, and superior price execution and contract management.
Pinpoint sales growth opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle, through customer acquisition, account management, up-sell and cross-sell, value selling, and retention.
Reinvent the end-to-end customer journey with a streamlined and omni-channel experience.
Set the go-to-market architecture and omnichannel strategy, supported by efficient and effective marketing, retailer selection and enablement, and sales coverage.
Upgrade sales talent and accelerate sales capability building.

Examples of our work

Maximizing growth opportunities

Identified $500 million in growth headroom for a US crop protection producer.

Optimizing pricing through advanced analytics

Enhanced profit margin by more than 350 basis points through pricing discipline and advanced analytics-enabled dynamic price recommendations for a global ingredients player.

Guiding market entry

Identified $80 million in revenue potential for a seed producer entering the Indian market.

Optimizing marketing and distribution

Developed a marketing and distribution plan for specialty products, resulting in a 30 percent increase in projected return on investment for a European input player.

Featured Capabilities

Periscope by McKinsey

The Periscope platform combines world-class intellectual property, prescriptive analytics and cloud-based tools with expert support and training to drive revenue growth now and into the future.

ACRE

ACRE combines proprietary market outlooks, pricing data, and expert insights to help food companies, governments, investors, and agriculture players make better pricing, crop selection, and sales and marketing decisions.

Featured Insights

Article

Unlocking the online retail opportunity with European farmers

– What can digital retailers in the agriculture sector do to encourage what could be a €10 billion market?
Video

Brazilian farmers’ approach to digital: Embracing digital

– McKinsey recently interviewed more than 750 Brazilian farmers in 11 states about their views on the use of digital technologies in agriculture and to better understand the farmer decision journey.
Article

A hard row to hoe—what’s in store for agricultural-input suppliers this year?

– US farmers are under increasing economic pressure. A recent McKinsey survey explores how this will affect their spending on agricultural inputs.
Article

Cultivating the omnichannel farmer

– Smart agriculture suppliers are giving farmers what every consumer wants: a digital interface for speed and convenience and human interaction when they need it. Here’s how they’re doing it.
Article

How to unlock growth in the largest accounts

– Large companies have become increasingly sophisticated negotiators. In response, smart selling organizations are upgrading how they manage their largest accounts.

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