MFA Incorporated is a midwest based regional farm supply and marketing cooperative serving agronomy and grain business units across 166 locations in Missouri.
The Road to Internal Adoption
Top-Down Reinforcement and Focused Training
In the spring of 2024, MFA launched a digital platform called MFA Connect with AgVend. When they came to AgVend their goals were to achieve buy-in from the entire organization which would gain them greater efficiencies, and a top-tier customer experience across their teams and customers. From the jump, MFA leadership advocated across the organization in different ways – team trainings, digital lead assignments to drive the initiative and transparency with goals and objectives of their new digital tools.
With measurable goals like 100% internal adoption, 100% of legacy portal users activated and 500 quotes on fungicide prospects in the first three months, MFA wanted to get their team up to speed quickly. Through emails and texts, the MFA team shared expectations and online training courses and then coupled that with hands-on training. The training brought in over thirty internal MFA team members, focused on how the portal can improve both team and customer experience through the digital tools.
“Without buy-in from the entire enterprise, our internal activation would look a lot different – much lower and much less engaged. Now, we can be confident in our team using the tools with our customers and gaining efficiencies where they can.”
– Jason Worthington, Senior Director of Sales & Agronomy, MFA
The Evolution of Portal Activation
Strong Internal Resources Influence Engagement
After the initial training, MFA executed a train-the-trainer approach and hosted ten district trainings across the enterprise to ensure the team was equipped to launch to customers.
In the first week after the MFA Connect launch, they captured 70% internal portal activation.
Streamlining Success: Strategies for Saving Time and Boosting Profitability
Team Performance Levels Up With Reporting
Being hyper focused on internal engagement from the beginning not only made their team more efficient but also drove higher team execution.
The portal significantly transformed MFA’s reporting capabilities. Generating reports, which previously required extensive manual effort within the ERP system, is now a convenient way to keep company and individual progress clear and easy to access. It also empowered managers to coach and guide their teams more effectively.
High Portal Interactions Drive Team Efficiencies
When MFA kicked off, they hoped for high internal adoption and based goals around account activation. Because of focused training and leadership influence, account activation quickly transformed to high internal portal engagement. Since launch, the MFA team has achieved over one thousand interactions, including 598 interactions logged on seed growth targets and 539 on feed growth targets. Everytime the team logs activity, they’ll see team efficiency and ultimately more dollars to the bottom line of MFA.
“A tremendous times savings will be during seed sales. Our guys won’t need to do the back and forth on a paper quote. They can do it all right there on the app during one conversation. It’ll save a couple of trips back and forth to the office.” – Matt Hill, District Sales Manager
As the team continues to log their activities and refine their processes, they are not only enhancing operational efficiency but also driving significant business growth. The work up to this point is just the beginning for MFA to improve engagement for their team and customers, paving the way for even greater time savings and efficiencies in the future.
