Case Study｜Kubota Corporation

‍Customer management system that is easy to handle even on mobile devices

―What prompted the introduction of UPWARD?

We have 13 sales companies and 700 offices nationwide that sell and maintain farm machinery and provide farming proposals to farmers nationwide.
We adopted Force.com, a CRM from salesforce.com, in 2016 in order to revamp our customer management system and make our sales force mobile work from our existing on-premise environment. However, our customers are also in environments without good communication, so we were looking for a service that was easy to handle on mobile. We additionally introduced UPWARD, which is simple and intuitive to use, even for veterans who are not used to mobile.
We completed the introduction of UPWARD to all sales companies in FY2020 after repeated communication with sales companies, including creating a video showing an image of a day's work using UPWARD to promote penetration.

How can we maintain relationships with our ageing customer base while reaching out to those with high purchasing power?

―What are the challenges your company is currently facing in its sales organisation?

Agricultural technology and agricultural machinery are very closely linked, and agricultural technology grows in step with the development and progress of agricultural machinery. Field salespeople at sales companies have three faces: "diffusion of agricultural technology," "front line of sales strategy development," and "member of the local community.
While the number of farmers is decreasing year by year due to the aging of the farming population and lack of successors, the number of professional farmers (bearer farmers) with large scale operations who have high purchasing power is increasing. These people, who will support the future of Japanese agriculture, are our main customers today.
Of course, we would like to maintain relationships with non-professional farmers, so-called small- and medium-scale farmers, as customers who have supported Japanese agriculture together.
How do we maintain our relationship with these farmers, who make up the majority of Japanese farmers, while allocating resources to professional farmers?
That is the primary challenge we face.

Customer issues are becoming more complex, and the hurdles to sales proposals are getting higher

The second issue is that it has become difficult to find time to meet with farmers due to the diversification of agriculture and changes in work styles.
As the agriculture industry is said to have become a sixth industry, the number of farmers who not only produce but also distribute and sell their products on their own has been increasing. This means that we need to increase not only our production machinery, but also the products needed in the distribution process to meet the needs of farmers, and the proposals of our field sales staff are also becoming more diverse.
The most important job for field sales staff is to meet with customers, share their problems, and take action to solve them.
However, the time spent on paperwork, administrative tasks, etc., resulted in a loss of time to meet with customers, which was a cause of low productivity.

We believe that selling agricultural machinery is not the goal, but rather the start. In local communities, which are becoming increasingly rare, Kubota's salespeople are expected to play a central role in leading horizontal connections and solving the problems of individual farmers to revitalize Japanese agriculture.
To this end, I still feel it is extremely important to maximize the time we have to meet with our customers, and by using UPWARD, we aim to increase the resources we have to meet with them more, while at the same time allocating those resources appropriately.

Three examples of how the introduction of UPWARD has improved efficiency.

―Has anything changed significantly since the introduction of UPWARD?

1: We are now able to visit farmers at the time of their activities, instead of being confined to paperwork in the sales office.

With UPWARD, we are able to go directly to the farmers, which speeds up the process of getting things started.
At first, there was some confusion among management because there were no longer any staff at the sales office, but now that mobile communication has become widespread, we feel that more efficient management has been realized.

2: Better cooperation between sales and service staff and faster response to customers.

Another key point is that location information is now easier to link. Until now, maps were indispensable for understanding where customers were located and where farm machinery was broken down. With UPWARD, we can now refer to customer information from mobile devices based on location information, eliminating the need to carry around thick map books and catalogs, or to write information on printed maps for management purposes.
Also, when the repair staff goes to support the field sales staff, they used to meet at a nearby landmark because they did not know the location of the customer or the sales staff. This has greatly reduced the amount of time customers have to wait.

3: Visualisation of the status of visits to customers on a map has led to increased activity and efficiency of visits.

By visualizing important and promoted customers on the UPWARD map, we are able to prioritize activities and prevent omissions. When farmers suffer agricultural damage due to natural disasters that have been occurring frequently in recent years, we use UPWARD to quickly share the damage situation with the entire company and follow up until the farmers recover from the damage.
Reporting after visits and work has become smoother, and sales logfrom other departments and specialized units can be centrally managed and know-how can be accumulated, so proposals to customers are better than ever before.

Streamline the parts that can be replicated, and let people do the parts that can't.

―What are your thoughts on the future of field sales?

In field sales, there are parts that can be reproduced and parts that cannot.
For the parts that can be reproduced, we thoroughly prepare manuals and make the activities simple and standardized so that there is no difference in the level of each individual. We would like field sales staff to focus their attention on the parts that cannot be reproduced, that is, on refining their sense, such as reading the customer's mind and taking action at the customer's desired timing.
With the advancement of digitalization, I understand that face-to-face sales are generally decreasing. We, too, expect that an increasing percentage of our sales will be conducted online to some extent. However, I believe that the last mile, the final push, will remain in our industry.

―Please leave a message at the end. 

Now that both customer issues and products have become more complex, selling goods is only the start. Leading rural communities and working together with customers to solve their problems through sweat equity is something that cannot be replicated by a system. In other words, I believe that this is "taking charge of the development of agriculture in Japan.
The value of the last mile, which can only be demonstrated by people. We hope that UPWARD's functions will continue to help realize this.