How Strategic Farm Marketing Saves 6 Hours Per Week with Combyne Copilot Reports

Categories

• Case Study

The Challenge

• Danny Pfoff and Cody Dust, at Strategic Farm Marketing (SFM), were spending 6 hours each week manually creating crop marketing reports

• They had not yet found a tool for efficient and effective collaboration with farmer clients

The Solution

• SFM uses Combyne Copilot to instantly generate crop marketing reports for each client

• Danny and Cody helped develop this functionality with the Combyne team

The Results

• These reports save SFM 6 hours weekly, time that was previously spent making manual reports. The time saved can now be used to focus on one-on-one risk management with farmer clients

• SFM utilizes these reports to enhance their recommendations and strategies

• SFM has rolled Copilot out to the rest of its crop marketing team, enabling further efficiencies

 

“The word ‘efficient’ doesn't fully do Copilot justice. It’s a great platform to make the best risk management decisions possible.”

– Danny Pfoff
Grain Marketing Advisor,
Strategic Farm Marketing

 

About Strategic Farm Marketing

Location: Champaign, Il

Operation: Grain Marketing Experts

Size: Operates in 12 states

As a self-described “information company,” Strategic Farm Marketing (SFM) provides tailored, one-on-one advisory services to farmer clients. Their services encompass crop marketing, operational organization, and ultimately, all things related to managing risk, uncertainties, and the future.

The Challenge

Danny Pfoff and Cody Dust – Grain Marketing Advisors at SFM – had a problem. They needed a way to communicate and collaborate efficiently with their farmer clients so they could focus their time and energies on offering their hallmark risk management and crop marketing recommendations. However, none of the tools they tried did the job.

To stay on the same page as their clients about important crop marketing details, Cody and Danny were attempting to use a different piece of software that was too unclear for their clients to interpret. They also tried building their own software tool, which as Danny describes, “proved to be futile.” As did approaching other software providers, whose tools were rigid, set-in-stone, and unable to meet SFM’s needs. Neither building nor buying was proving fruitful.

As a result, Cody explains, “we would have to take screenshots of data such as a farmer’s sold position, put it into a Word document, convert to a PDF, and email that out to each individual client. We would burn 6 hours on a Friday just doing time consuming work.”

The Solution

On a suggestion from one of SFM’s farmer clients, Danny and Cody met with the Combyne team. Combyne had created a suite of tools aimed at supporting collaboration between advisors and farmers on crop marketing, hedging, and risk. Combyne Copilot (the advisor portal) and the Combyne App (the farmer-facing app) sync with one another, which enables advisors and farmers to be on the same page and draw on a shared system of record to inform crop marketing decisions or recommendations.

While some farmers like using the Combyne App for communication and collaboration with their trusted advisors, some farmers just don’t want another app and prefer to get a PDF or printed report – including many of Cody and Danny’s clients. Combyne makes it possible to do either and work with farmers at their preferred speed. “I just remember Danny being excited that we found a good solution. And then the development piece of that started,” recalls Cody. In those initial meetings with the Combyne team, they presented Danny and Cody a reprieve from build-versus-buy deliberations. SFM and Combyne began a long-term partnership to build reporting functionality within Copilot together, functionality that complements Copilot’s existing feature set.

With SFM having such a hands-on approach with their own clients, Combyne’s hands-on approach with advisors was a no-brainer. Cody explains that the Combyne team has supported them by “essentially allowing us to help build from the beginning. Nobody else was willing to do that. In the meetings that we had prior to starting with Copilot, we were being sold a product that was already developed, whereas Combyne was asking us to help build features that advisors and farmers actually wanted.”

The Results

SFM no longer needs to spend 6 hours per week manually creating reports for their clients. They use that time to instead focus on the unique one-on-one risk management advisory discussions they have with each client – advisory services that are in turn enhanced by Copilot’s functionality. “The word ‘efficient’ doesn’t fully do Copilot justice. It’s a great platform to make the best risk management decisions possible,” says Danny. “Now I can click a few buttons, and a report is sent… If I’m talking to a client who is 10% sold on corn versus a guy who is 70% sold on corn, it’s a way different phone call. Copilot allows you to know the whole story and offer different advice.” SFM can instantly generate and send each client a clear and detailed report that synthesizes all things related to their marketable crop, such as sold position pie charts for multiple crop years, contract information from every buyer, average contract prices, and advisor notes.

The result has been a complete transformation in the ways SFM collaborates and communicates with their clients. SFM has rolled Copilot out to the rest of its crop marketing team, and adoption of Copilot was quick and easy across the board, creating further efficiency throughout the organization. Ultimately, such efficiency facilitates Cody and Danny being able to focus on what truly matters to their clients: “spending more time on actual risk management.”

The Future

For Danny and Cody at SFM, a primary focus is helping their clients manage risk, market their crop, stay on top of the most pertinent information for their farm businesses, and think about the future. In the past, Cody and Danny relied on other tools that never succeeded in the all-important job of keeping farmer and advisor on the same page. After adopting Combyne Copilot, the dual challenge of wasting time creating manual reports and finding a way to strengthen communication and collaboration with clients has truly become a thing of the past.

 

 

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