In this episode of CropLife Retail Week, Erin Hightower of RDO Equipment talks about the experience for growers when onboarding technology and what tech providers can do to improve it. Erin also shares valuable insight, tips, and troubleshooting on precision technology in her CropLife column here.

*This is a partial and edited transcript.

Lara Sowinksi: Hello, everyone. This is Lara Sowinski, Group Editor for the CropLife Media Group. I am hosting this week, with Eric Sfiligoj out on a business trip. My guest today is Erin Hightower from our RDO Equipment Company in the beautiful Pacific Northwest.

Erin, let’s get started. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Erin Hightower: My name is Erin Hightower. I’ve been working in the Pacific Northwest for almost 20 years. I started my career, actually, in natural resource sciences, where I was really working in 2006 or 2008 with spot spraying technologies. I then later moved to RDO here about seven years ago, where now I’m full time as an Agronomist.

If it does not impact the agronomy and the growing capacities for the producers, then it wasn’t a good solution for them. So I do a lot of research in that realm. I do a lot of, you know, going in and onboarding people with new technologies on an agronomic standpoint. And then, yes, on my free time, I am a pilot, a woman pilot, and I’ve been a pilot since 2015.

LS: Oh, good for you. Well, congratulations. I started my, private pilot studies. Gosh, I think it was in 2008, right when the economy was taking a dive. So I got as far as my my solo, but I didn’t do my cross-country solo. And I was flying out of Santa Monica, on the West Coast at the time. So it was cool.

I did have a couple questions maybe to kind of start off. Can you describe that onboarding process, for the growers and maybe what’s changed for them over the years? And then for those providers of technology, what should they be aware of and consider?

EH: One of the first things that I really want to say about onboarding technology is that it really has to be personalized vs. anything that’s canned. First off, the producers see right through it. They’ve got better things to do than get a canned message that they can go on, maybe YouTube and get, and it also must involve a lot of patience.

I actually learned that the hard way with a dairy a few years ago, where I was out there helping them get started. I was out there once a week, every week. At one point I got a little impatient. I think we all do that right around planting season and it showed and they were negatively impacted by it.

So I learned very quickly that patience is the first key. And going back to the personalization, you know, I never started onboarding out, especially when something like Operations Center, which is a farm management software, without going, what’s your farm like? What keeps you up at night? Who do you report to? Because as soon as I know whether they report to farm service agency or crop insurance, now I’m personalizing that message because I know these are the things that they have to answer to at some point in the year.

One of the biggest things I learned was from my former boss was to be willing to make a mistake. If you do not know the answer, go to the same help documentation that you would want them to go to and search it together. Or, you know, sometimes I call my own one 800, you know, audio equipment companies, one 800 number in front of the producer and put it on speaker phone. And we’ll answer that question together because then when they see that we are willing to make mistakes, and here’s how good our resources are, if you’re showcasing those resources, you’re going to end up making a better impression.

And they don’t feel like they have to learn it all at once. It’s changed a lot, though, in the last few years. It used to be that you could just sit down and have a nice little once-a-year seminar and everybody would get what they needed. But I think technology is moving too quickly for that to be an answer.

And then again, that being able to personalize that message. One of the things I really do the minute I get to that farm, they sit down and then I have them actually click the buttons to kind of see what they are doing. So they’re seeing it in real time. They’re physically using the mouse or the iPad or whatever the device is.

And that’s going to allow them to have visual, auditory and then also muscle memory. When it comes to learning things, it seems to have sunk in a lot more with producers when you do it that way. Yeah. Yeah, I, I really love the, approach. You know, the personalized approach, the customized, you know, high touch. super. You know, let’s go through this together, especially with, kind of the grower experience component, where a lot of times, you know, everything looks, you know, nice and new and shiny out of the box, if you will.

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