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Every farm has what's called friction. It's hiding in your website, it's hiding in your offers, in your checkout process, maybe even in your production systems. Many of us don't even know that it's there. And so today, I'm going to help you become Friction Detectives so that you can uncover the hidden obstacles that are costing you sales and hopefully start removing them one by one. Let's get started. Hey there. This is Corinna Bench, and welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast. In today's market, it's not enough to just grow your product. You've got to know how to sell it, too. Welcome to the My Digital Farmer Podcast, where we reveal online marketing strategies and tips to help farmers like you get better and more confident at marketing, learn how to find more customers, increase your sales, and build a strong brand for your farm. Let's start the show. Well, welcome to episode 370 of the My Digital Farmer Podcast. I am your host, Corinna Bench, one of the farmers at Shared Legacy Farms out in Elmore, Ohio. I'm also the founder of mydigitalfarmer.com, which is all about trying to help other farmers like you get more confident in your marketing and sales strategy so that you can also grow a profitable farm business. Welcome back to all of my regular listeners. I really appreciate you checking me out from week to week. And for those of you who are new, thanks for coming. I'm glad you're here. I hope you get a lot out of this episode. It's going to be a good one. And if you want to learn more about how to get better at farm marketing, I encourage you to go back and search through the archives. There's so many good topics in this podcast. If you need to kind of learn the ropes of marketing, though, I. I want to challenge you to start at the beginning and learn the Just listen to the first 10, because that's where you're going to hear the basic main concepts. You can also get onto my email list. That is a great. A great opportunity as well. Go to mydigitalfarmer.com forward/subscribe. When you do, I'm going to send you an email every week about this podcast. I'm also going to be sending you an email every week that just onboards you into the key marketing principles you need to know. Each email builds on the next so that you really do kind of get like a crash course in farm marketing over the course of several months. It's really good. MyDigitalFarmer.com subscribe is the place to go to get that. And it's free. Today's podcast is sponsored by my friends at Local Line. If you run a csa, sell direct or wholesale, or manage all three, summer is when it all happens at once. Packed markets, weekly CSA boxes, and a harvest that keeps coming. Localline helps you handle your busiest season with less stress and more control. In 2025, farms and food hubs using localline grew their sales by 33% with average order values up 31%. That's real results across operations of all sizes on the platform. Localline brings everything together in one platform. CSA management, wholesale ordering, automated inventory, box builder, and pos. Run all your direct channels from the same place, whether that's your CSA market, sales, farm stop, or a food hub. And through their marketplace partnerships now, you can reach chefs and buyers nationwide through Cisco Gordon Foodservice and US Foods. With a low barrier to entry, switching is easy too. There are no setup fees, no sales commissions, and their team will migrate your storefront for free, even mid season. And it only takes a few days. As a podcast listener, you'll get one premium feature free for a full year when you use my coupon code, MDF2026 at checkout. So head to mydigitalfarmer.com localline all one word, and then enter that coupon code MDF2026 at checkout. Make the most of peak season with Localline. It's streamlined and it's efficient and it's built for growth. And now back to the show. Well, I'm recording this on July 4th weekend and wow, we just came through a crazy heat wave in Ohio. Record heat index. We actually sent our crew back home in the middle of the afternoon and had them come back in the evenings. Did just the morning and evening shifts because it was so intense and, man, we're just kind of drained, you know, you just want to. You just want to come inside and turn on the air conditioning and take multiple showers and, like, take a nap. So we're just having one of those weeks. This is a big week for us too, because our son Jed is leaving for basic training next Tuesday, July 7th. He'll be gone for eight weeks. We're actually going to go see him graduate in San Antonio. We're going to take a week off and just pause the CSA that week so we can go experience that. I've been told it's really cool. And so I'm just trying to do, do things with him this week. We're going to do a special prayer blessing over him and just invite some key people from his life around, around him the day before he goes. And I've lined up different people in his life to send him letters so that he's getting mail three to four times a week. So I'm being very strategic about how I can support him from afar. I'm really proud of him. He's going to do well. So for all of you who've been cheering for him or who have someone who is serving in the armed forces, just thank you. Thank you for. Thank you for your service. And I just ask that you would be praying for my son. If you are the praying type, send good vibes his way. All right, Today I wanted to talk about friction. Friction in sales, friction in our business. And this is something that is often the source of problems in our sales process. It deserves a solid episode. I bet you could think of a moment this past week where you experienced friction of some kind in your farm business on the sales and marketing side. Something that just caused a customer to hesitate, or maybe it caused you to hesitate from doing something that you, quote, unquote, should be doing in the marketing space. And it may be led to a frustrated customer or maybe you lost a sale because of it. I have this one situation that keeps showing up for me and I am not really quite sure how to optimize it any further. So we have an online store as one of our marketing outlets. It's the thing that's growing the most. The thing about the online store, we use localline and it's a great system and I love how local line allows me to set different pickup locations, different times for those locations so people can go and choose where they want to pick up and what time they want to pick up. But obviously there has to be a window of time when the ordering process closes because I can't have someone try to order a product in the two hours that my crew is actually packing the product for everyone. Like, we have a set time where we pack all the store orders. It's on Tuesday morning and Thursday morning. And so if someone's trying to place an order on Tuesday morning, well, it's too late because we've already harvested the product. I'm not going to go send out one of my guys to, to get, you know, a bunch of kale and a bunch of chard and, and two summer squash for one order. Like they're. People have to place their order within the right window. And so I have this cutoff time. I explain it on my store. I explain it in every email at the end that there is a deadline to place their order by for the and it's different for the different locations. So I get that it's confusing. But this continues to be a source of confusion for brand new customers who want to buy for the first time, who get all excited when they see me post about my black raspberries social media and then I put a link there for how to get on my email list or sometimes I take them right to the store and then they go and they, they try to place the order and maybe they see that post the day after the window closes or maybe the only site that's showing because they come in on a Tuesday and they want to order for one of the Tuesday sites but they can only order for the Thursday site. And they just, they don't understand right. And so I get these emails every week from people who are like, I tried to order XYZ from your store and it won't let me. There's something wrong with your store. Every time I get an email like that I just go, ah. I actually have a template email now that AI has helped me write that I can just copy and paste into my, my Gmail so that it's a little bit faster. But it's a point of friction because I have to stop what I'm doing, interrupt my workflow and respond to this customer and explain to them why they can't order that. No, it's not my store, it's just our process and why we have this process. So this is a classic example of a point of friction in my business, in our buying process. And once a customer learns it, it's no longer really a point of friction because they get trained and they understand how it works and they learn to create a habit within my boundaries, within my rules. But it does, I know, cause me to lose some first time customers because they just don't have the patience to figure it out. They don't have the patience to email me and ask me what's going on. They just probably abandon. And I've done a few things to try and address this issue, like making it very clear at the top of the online store how to place an order, like putting these reminders in the weekly emails, putting it all over the place in my social media every week, but it still keeps coming up. And so every time I have to email a response and use precious time to do that, I tell myself there's gotta be another way, there's gotta be something I'm missing. Is there. Is there something I could do differently? Do I need to just change my workflow or my process? Maybe there's something I'm not seeing right, And I haven't solved this problem yet. But this is an example of a point of friction. Friction is a real thing in sales and marketing, and it's acting like an obstacle between the customer's desire to buy from you and the actual point of purchase. And every point of friction is costing you sales, is costing me sales, even if we maybe don't realize that it's there. And so I wanted to spend an entire episode walking around this problem of friction. And my. My hope is that by the end of the episode, you're going to recognize that friction exists and that it's. That it's kind of normal to have some in your business. You're not going to remove all of it, maybe to start looking at your business through a different lens. And. And I'm. I've kind of coined this phrase, becoming a friction detective. So hopefully you'll be able to identify at least one point of friction that you are committed to reducing or flat out eliminating sometime this week. I know I can. I'll probably bring up a few more in this podcast that I'm currently dealing with or that I have dealt with in the past, and I want you to. To come up with one as well. And hopefully there's one that you're like, you know what? I'm going to finally deal with this, and I'm going to create an SOP around this, or I'm going to fix something in the text so that this stops happening. So friction is anything that's making the buying process harder than it needs to be. So it could be a delay for your customer. It could be confusion. It could be an extra step or effort. It's just like, making it harder. It could be, I don't know, some kind of obstacle. Sometimes it shows up as asking someone for too much commitment before they're ready, and there's just not enough. Like, there's not really a guarantee that they're going to like it. Too many steps and friction is normal. Every business is going to have some it, you're not some of it, you're not going to eliminate all of it. That's not the goal of this episode. And I do think that some friction is unavoidable. It might even be healthy, because friction causes you to pause and causes your business to have points where things pause. And you can be thoughtful and help a customer kind of slow down, which maybe is a good thing, but. So some friction is unavoidable, and some friction isn't worth fixing yet or ever. You may determine after this episode that, yeah, I've got these three or four things that are points of friction. But you know what? The amount of time and effort and expense that it would take to fix them, there just isn't an ROI on it. Like, it's not worth. I wouldn't make a ton of extra money. I can deal with the friction. So I thought that it would be helpful for us to look at some classic examples of where you might find friction in your business. And I want to help you spot some of them. I know that right now. I'm going to ask you right now to just. If you can try to identify a few sources of friction in your business right now before I even start pointing to examples. Hopefully there are a few that are jumping out at you. Points where, you know, it's slowing the customer down, it's costing you sales, where there's confusion. And now as I go through these categories and give some more examples, I'm hoping that maybe I'm going to make you see some things that might be going on in your business right now that you hadn't considered. Maybe you didn't realize, oh, that's causing friction. And some of these, as I go through them, maybe you can jot them down and be like, you know what? I do have that problem, and I can totally solve that. That is an easy lift. You might end up at the end of this episode being like, wow, there's a lot of these things she mentioned that are on my friction audit, and I don't have time to fix all of them, but there might be a few that are. That are worth it, that are worth taking 30 minutes to go in and take care of, because it ends up opening the floodgates and bringing the traffic in. You know, I think of the metaphor of a traffic jam being on the interstate, and then all of a sudden there's an accident ahead, and we all just come to a stop and. And start crawling down the highway. And it's taking a long time to get to where we want, and it's frustrating. It's not a good experience for us as a driver. Right. We want to speed things up. We want to be able to go where we want to go quickly. We want to get off on the exits we want to get off on. We want to get to our destination. And when we're talking about the sales process, your customer is like that person in the car. And we just want to make the whole buying experience feel seamless and, and easy and quick so that they can get off of the highway, take the exit and get to where they want to go and not even really notice that there's any kind of slowdown. So the first kind of category that I want to walk around, I talk about it a lot on this show, is the first time buyer friction. And I really want you to think about how hard is it for someone to buy from me for the very first time. I'm not talking about people who come back who've figured it out, who've already purchased and now they're repeat customers. I'm talking about the very first purchase, the first time they spend money with you. And we create all kinds of obstacles, points of friction that make it difficult for a first time buyer to actually complete a sale. So here are just a few examples and ask yourself if some of these may be happening. Are you asking people to commit to a csa, a big time commitment before they just try out your stuff? This comes up again and again in my coaching calls in farm marketing school where, where there just isn't a good easy gateway offer. Instead it's like leap to this really big expensive thing as your very first purchase. And that's just a point of friction. No judgment. I'm just telling you that is a point of friction. That's a lot to ask. Another common example would be requiring that people create an account in the online store before they can even browse your products. Or I know I see this with some e commerce platforms where you can't see the prices of the products until you log in and create an account. So I mean one of the trade offs there is that you capture an email address if you force someone to have to log in and create an account first to even be able to pop buy from you. But that does keep some people away who aren't ready to, to take that next step and give you their contact information. Having a complicated ordering process and I can raise my hand here, I feel like this falls into, I fall into this category. It is not super easy, seamless to buy from our online store for the first time because we have these weird ordering windows. And so if I'm trying to advertise all week long and about my gateway into my business, which is the online store, it's almost like I really can only advertise that on Saturday, Sunday and Monday because those are really the only three days a person can purchase. All the other days the store closes and I'm re. Re tallying the inventory and getting ready for the next weekend. So that's, that's a complicated ordering process making to asking your customer to make too many decisions. Not having a starter offer in the first place. So a person comes in and just sees all these great products, can tell that you have abundance but they aren't sure where to begin. You don't have a very clear starting point or the thing that you know, people probably would love to buy first is hidden in the middle of your store or hidden in the middle of your display at the market. And it's not the first thing that they see to pull them into your booth. Another example might be not having a lead magnet at all in your sales process. So I often say that the lead magnet is actually the first offer that you make before you pitch a first product offer. A lead magnet is an offer, right? You're offering something in exchange for their contact information. In many cases it's a, I don't know, it could be a produce availability list that you promise to send them every weekend or first dibs on what you have available or it could be a guide you're going to send them. It could be a video of how to fill out a cut list, whatever you're offering in exchange. Some, some businesses just haven't even put that in place. And so that is a point of friction. There isn't a piece of content that allows them to slowly get to know you and just get on your contact list. And a couple of other things I brainstormed here was a confusing pickup process for those of you out there who have a lot of different ways they can pick up different locations and they've got a, you know, move through that information and find their, their location like that could be an extra step that's making their brain have to work hard or to having a call to place their first order. Sometimes I hear this from, from farmers during my coaching calls that the way that they place their order is by making a phone call. And being that isn't necessarily scalable. And for some people calling someone on the phone these days is actually not their favorite way to make first contact. They would rather text or send an email. So this, these all kind of fall under that category of first time buyer friction. And so I probably missed a few. But I just want you to be thinking about how have you greased the wheels for this particular category. Is it, is it hard for someone to buy from you for the first time? Is it not clear where they should begin and really just take a look at that. The second element that I want you to take a peek at now is what I call website friction. And this is where someone goes to your website. If you have one, hopefully you have one. If you don't have one, well, that's a big source of friction. But when someone goes to your website, can they figure out what to do in 10 seconds or less? This is where I want to refer you to the book by Don Miller called Building a Story Brand. I've talked about it here on the podcast before. That is a great classic read that's going to give you everything you need to know about how to make a really clear website message. He talks a lot about this idea of the caveman test that a person should be able to come to your website and within 5 seconds be able to tell what you sell, what problem you solve, what you sell, and how to go about getting it. And if that isn't clear, if they can't grunt that out like a caveman in under five seconds, then you have a communication problem. You have a confusion problem. So you want to take a look at your website and ask yourself, can my customer tell what I sell? Very quickly visually, but also with the words you're using, Do I have a clear call to action button? What does it say? Is it different on every single button on that page or is there the same thing? We're all pointing to the same call to action over and over again? Another common issue that I see is that it's. You can't tell where you're located. It's not clear what state you're in or what city you're in. The hours that you're open aren't clear. Maybe your telephone number isn't easy to find and there's no pricing. Oh, I hate that. I hate when I go, when I go to, like a service website, if I need to purchase the services of a plumber or whatever and I can't find how much they're going to cost and that I have to call them like that just really annoys me. I would rather just see what it is so I can make a decision. So not having pricing listed, the confusion of your navigation, having broken links because you're not updating it. Um, you know, incidentally, I've had the situation where my lead magnet that I post on social media, so this isn't on my website, but it's kind of related. I will, I will post my lead magnet on my social media for my farm periodically. And some people will message me and say the link isn't working for me, like it doesn't open and I'll go click on the link that I put in there and it works for me. So I don't understand what the issue is. Then I'll have other people test it and it works fine. I've tried using the kit version URL. I've used the pretty link version. It still is a problem. And you know, that's an example of friction. Like somebody's trying to get subscribed to my list, they're clicking on the button and it's not taking them to a page to allow them to do that. So sometimes there's issues with pop ups like that slow pages that load. This has actually been a problem of mine on my own website and I continue to struggle with this. And that's just a technical fix. That's something where you have. You often have to hire someone to help you figure that out or you have too many plugins and it's slowing things down or you've got pictures that are taking up a lot of memory slowing things down. So you can hire someone to kind of help you figure that out and just not sure how to place an order. That's a very common website friction point. They can see what you offer, but maybe it's not clear how to go about buying it. That first step, the first stone in the creek, as Donald Miller likes to say in the story brand framework, is not clear. So as I'm talking this out, maybe that's worth taking some time this week to just go look at your website or ask a friend who isn't super familiar with how your business works to just go look at your website homepage and ask them, how's it doing? How's it scoring? Where is the friction? Where are the questions showing up? Are they clear what to do? This also goes for your online store too. So when they go to your actual online store, which may be different than your website, are they having trouble there? So some of you are going to use this section, go through those questions and come up with some problems and some issues that maybe you can address. Today's podcast is sponsored by Farm Marketing School, my monthly membership for farmers. Before we dive back into the episode, I want to speak to a very specific kind of farmer for a second. If you're a year or two into your business and things are working, but your marketing still feels kind of scattered, like you're posting, you're sending some emails, you're running promotions, but it all feels disconnected and you're not sure what's actually driving sales. I just want to say that's not a lack of effort, that's just a lack of structure. Because most farmers don't need more ideas. What they need is a system that connects everything together. And that's exactly why I built far marketing school inside. I teach you how to actually design your marketing so that it works like a machine, a system, not a bunch of random tactics. We map out your full customer journey. We build your email engine, we create intentional promotions and product pathways so your marketing starts handing off from one piece to the next like a relay race instead of you running every leg yourself. And we do it through 30 day project builds. So you're not just learning about marketing, you're actually finishing things. You're actually building the marketing assets in your marketing machine. Your sales funnel, your promotions, your lead magnet, your weekly email rhythm, all your marketing assets. And that's when the shift happens. Marketing starts to feel lighter, the flywheel starts to spin. Sales start to feel more predictable and you finally feel like, okay, I'm on the right track. I know what I'm doing. If that's what you've been longing for and what you've been missing, then I want to invite you to join Farm marketing school just for a month. Come inside and see what it's all about. You can learn more@mydigitalfarmer.com FMS and now back to the show. Let's move on to the third category. I didn't know how to name this. This is friction around the issue of social proof and trust. And this is like, have you earned enough trust for your customer to say, yes, I'm ready to buy or are you rushing the process too soon? Examples of this might be that you don't have testimonials anywhere in your on your website or in your social media or in your process, in your sales process. Um, you don't have like a warmup process, you just go right for the jugular. Like as soon as they meet you, you're on down on one knee and you're asking them to buy. And that can feel a little bit icky for a brand new customer. And you know, a good business will have like a slow on ramp where you know, first you, you just kind of watch from afar, follow them for a while, see what they're doing and then you get invited to join the list and you dabble in that for a little bit. And then there's a first offer which is like low dollar and it's not too scary. And you just try that out and then there's multiple more offers and slowly you turn into a big buyer. Right? That's a warm up process. And a lot of businesses when they're first starting don't realize how important that is. They don't have that. And so there's just this friction in the buying process because there is no warmup system, there's no credentials being shown if you are certified organic. I got this call, I'm sorry, I got a, a message on Facebook last week when we were pitching our black raspberries or I was talking about them on social and the message said, are your black Raspberries certified organic? And I thought to myself, did I not put that in the post? I must, I must not be, I must not be using that phrase enough in my social media. I think I'm just assuming that everybody knows I'm certified organic. So it was a reminder to keep using that every time I post, keep reminding people that we're certified organic. I know my customers know that now, but if you're brand new, you don't know. And a lot of the social media that I'm creating is really for the top of the sales funnel. It's for the people just coming into my world and, and they need to learn that. So I've got to be repetitive about that. So if you've got any kind of credentials like that or special seals that show you have authority and credibility, be putting those out there. That really takes a lot of the friction away. People are looking for evidence that your solution works, that your product is great, that other people like it and often they are looking for the testimonial. You guys do this when you shop online? I know you do. When I admit I do shop on Amazon and a lot of times I'm choosing the product from the many options based on how many stars it got. I'll go and look at what the testimonials have to say before I shell out a bunch of money for a big investment. Many people aren't even aware that they do that, but they are looking for the review. So if you have a review there, easy to find, it really greases the wheels and removes a lot of the friction. So putting that in place, not having a refund policy or in some cases a guarantee. Now I know that makes some of us nervous. Like, well, you know, I don't, especially in, like in the CSA world, like I can't guarantee anything but putting the fine print out there so everybody knows what they're committing themselves to. But if you have a refund policy, like tell people that because that removes risk for them. And then just in general, not leveraging social proof, not telling the social proof that you know you have, you need to make people aware of that other people like your stuff. So this is a source of friction. If you're not pointing to all the evidence of trust, then you will have people that will hesitate to buy. People can trust you. They can trust you because you're an authority in this space, because you've got credentials behind you, because other people have said you're good. You've got all these reviews. So point out that stuff. So go audit your sales funnel right now and ask yourself, am I doing any of these? A lot of those I think are pretty easy. Easy lifts to quickly add a few testimonials to your online store or your website or even in your product descriptions. Okay, what's on my list? Decision friction. Yeah, this one's pretty big. So am I making people think too hard? Am I making people think too hard? Here are some examples that I brainstormed. The big one is just having too many choices. And I know this is a fine line, isn't it? Because we want to show abundance, right? We want people to walk into our booth and be like, holy cow, there's so much here. It's like paradise. And get all excited and just keep putting more and more things into their basket. But I do think that for a brand new buyer, again, remember when we're designing our booth, when we're designing our online store, we're also thinking through the eyes of a brand new customer, how are they experiencing it? Are they going to feel overwhelmed? It's fine for you to have a lot of stuff because you've got all those repeat buyers coming in and you want them to buy all that other stuff. But do you have a clear yellow brick road for the brand new buyer? So having a start here product or a start here offer or a, you gotta have this recommendation. So ask yourself, do I have a recommendation? Do I have a bestseller label? Do I have a bundle? The obvious like first bundle, do I have too many pricing options on this one thing and it's making people's eyes hurt. Okay, so this could be at the farmer's market, this could be in your online store, it could be on your website, that featured product section where you have 20 different items listed right now instead of just, I don't know, four to eight or three to six. So think through that idea. Am I just overwhelming someone because decision fatigue is real. I know you know that. And we just want to make it really easy for that first person to know where to begin. All right, let's move on to checkout. Checkout friction. This really applies more to all of you who have online sales outlets. So too many clicks, super long forms to fill out with lots of form fields that maybe you don't need to do. All those form fields making people, requiring people to make an account first before they can even shop, throwing in a surprise shipping fee at the very end. That's a lot. And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Then they back out. Coupon code confusion, or not being able to find the place to put the coupon code, a common one. For me, that's. That's coming up right now because I have this online store credit membership that I launched this year and that we're beta testing. I spent a lot of time. I'm still continuing to do it. We're on week three of the season right now. And every week when I email them, I just keep sending them the video, the tech video for how to access their online store credit. Because that was a point of confusion. I had a couple of old lady customers. They were so super cute, and they were like, they would call me like, I can't find my store credit. Where is it? And so I would walk them through. Oh, you just. You just have to log in. You're not logging in. That's why you can't see it. Right. And having to just really explain that. So how do I use my store credit? If I have some, I want to be able to pull from that instead of charging my credit card. Again, that might be a point of friction. Maybe the shipping or the pickup is unclear and they're not sure how to go about actually getting. Getting their order. So once they place their order, what happens next? That is actually a really big thing that I see a lot when I'm auditing websites and farmers are like, I'm just not getting a lot of sales. I don't know if it's the reason that that's happening, but I suspect that it's part of it. Make sure you have instructions for how. What the next step is after they place their order at the top of your online store. So if someone comes right to your online store and doesn't go through some other communication channel like your website where it explains it all, or a social media post where it explains it all and they just land on your store, are they going to be able to tell how it works. So make sure you've got that information there. Weird payment processes too. I'm raising my hand here. I still ask people to pay via check for their csa and actually next year I think is the year we're going to make the switch and we're going to offer credit card payments. We're going to ask them to choose between check and credit card, but if they use credit card, we're going to charge them, we're going to make them pay the credit card processing fee and we'll be really clear about that, but we're going to give them that option. But I am in agreement now that paying by check is is becoming more more and more of a point of friction at a checkout. People are like, I don't even have checks and it just slows down the process of getting payment. So those are just some examples are people having to jump through a lot of hoops at checkout. Take a look at that process. Okay, I have a couple more here. Communication is another area where you might see friction. I've already referenced a few of these, but this is where the right information is not getting out to your customers, either at the right time or in the right place or in the right way. Because not everybody communicates through email. Or maybe it's going to their spam folder and they never see it. Or maybe they're trying to communicate to you through Facebook messenger and you're not checking Facebook messenger at all really. So you're missing key points of information because you haven't created a process or a system or a standard to say, you know what, if you want to talk to me, you've got to do it through email. Like you get to decide that. So here's some examples of where customers getting confused in the communication process. Take a look at like the questions you're getting through email or text. I suppose every week are there a few that are rising to the top? I know I can raise my hand here. One of them is from my CSA members where even though I have trained this in multiple emails and our onboarding where I put it in the end in the PS of every weekly email, I still have people write me and say, hey, I missed my order, I wasn't able to pick up. Can you let me know how do I go about getting it? And I just sigh and then I copy and paste the email response that I've prepared. So that is an example of I still haven't figured out that point of friction and I have to decide do I want to spend more Time trying to dial that in and get it to the point where I never have to email people because it's just so clear. And what would that solution be? I'm not sure that I know. And is it worth spending all this time and effort to figure it out? Or can I just deal with the three or four emails that I have to send a week? Maybe it's. Maybe it's just okay to deal with that. Right? So as we're going through these sources of friction and you're identifying them, you're making these assessments like, well, how big a deal is this? Is this holding me back from really scaling? Is this interrupting my workflow? A lot of. Would I be more efficient in other areas of my business if I didn't have to keep doing all these little nitpicky things to solve the points of friction? Another communication example is customers don't know your ordering deadlines. And I already shared my example with the online store where that's coming up for me. Pick up instructions aren't clear, so they're not really sure how fulfillment works. Something as simple as customers don't know how to find your farm or they don't know where to park when they get there, or if you have an event, they're not sure what to bring or when to show up. Sometimes your website and what you're posting on social media and what you put in the email are different. You don't. They're saying different things and that can create confusion. So just be looking for the repeated customer questions that come back at you. You'll see the patterns. They will arise over time. They will surface and rise to the top. And as they do, make a note of them, jot them down. If you don't have time to deal with it right now, just jot it down. Because that is a little flag waving in the wind saying, hi, I'm a source of friction. You get to decide if you want to deal with me or not. Okay. So just make sure you identify it. Habit, friction. I don't really like that phrase. Okay. This is after they've already become a customer and now there's something standing in the way of that person becoming a regular buyer. Because that's the goal, right? We want to increase the order frequency. We want to pull that lever and get that person to come back and buy as many times as possible. That's how we grow our revenue. It's one of the three main revenue generation sources. So this is where buying from you is not becoming a habit. There is some source of friction in the way that's keeping that from happening. So what is keeping them from buying? Again, this is the key question. They're either forgetting to order, why are they forgetting to order? What is the root cause? Maybe the deadlines are unclear or they move and shift. Maybe you're not reminding them that they can buy or the day that you're sending that reminder doesn't fit their buying cycle. I know one of the things I'm paying more attention to is the fact that my CSA members, they like to go shopping on the weekend for the supplemental stuff, whatever I am not going to be able to provide in the box. So I have to get this information to to them by Friday night so that it makes their shopping outside of my farm, their shopping experience, more beneficial. So I'm trying to not just remember to send them a reminder email, but the timing of when that reminder email drops, that matters. So you want to align it to fit their buying habits. Maybe they don't know what's available. The ordering window is too short. So maybe you got to look at am I willing to extend it to again, meet their needs, their buying needs. And then again, they don't know what the next best offer is. Maybe they bought the first gateway, but you haven't made it obvious what the next thing should be. You've just shown them the whole inventory list and they're overwhelmed again. And that may be the source of why they're not creating a buying habit with you. You why they aren't buying for the second or third time. So think about some of those questions. Maybe there's some others that I haven't thought of what is keeping them from buying again? It could be some technology issues too. It could just be that they're having trouble in the online store because you've got some kinks you have to work out. Okay, and the last one I almost didn't include, but I think this, this could be potentially an issue too. This could be a little Pandora's box. Sometimes the friction is not customer facing. It is an internal business friction. And this is where you have barriers inside of your business and how you're operating your business that are making it. They're having like a consequence where it's leading to lost revenue, lost sales. I have a whole bunch of examples here, and a lot of these are things that I have had to deal with. So for example, the field walk isn't happening at the ideal time. That has nothing to do with something the customer is doing. But like my husband Kurt is supposed to do his field walk on Friday morning so that he can find out what's in the inventory and give me that information so that I can get it into the online store by my deadline, so that my customer can shop at noon on Saturday because that's when their train to shop. And sometimes Kurt is late and I don't get that. And then I don't open the store until 4 or 5pm on Saturday, and I lose sales, a lot of sales. And so that's a situation where, like, we've got to have the field walk happen on this day, by this time. And if that system isn't in place, it has an impact. Okay. That's kind of an example of something that is happening inside the business. Something like, I don't have a set time in my schedule where I announce the offer of the week. So if I move it around. And like, sometimes I send my email on Fridays, sometimes I send it on Saturdays at 4, sometimes I don't wait, I do it until Sunday. Like, I'm not helping my customer get into the habit of knowing when they can expect the offer to arrive. Now. They can't create a habit around my product. Okay. So that's an example of where I have to build a process and make a deadline that I always meet. So I always send the email out around noon to my CSA customers. My online store customers get it at 1pm and my rest of my list gets it at 3pm And I'm really strict about those times because they each have access to the store for a little bit longer than the next tier on purpose. See, I've got so many here not having SOPs. So internally, the systems for how you fulfill or prepare to fulfill or prepare to put inventory in there, like, they're just. They're not happening. And so it's. It's upsetting downstream. Your sales process, you don't have a rinse and repeat system for sales. So every promo, every weekend feels like you're reinventing the wheel, trying to come up with what should my offer be or how should I try to get people to buy this week? And so you don't do it. You don't prepare an offer. You don't, like, have a weekly email that goes out. Maybe you don't even have a template yet. And then you put it off. You keep putting it off because it just feels like a heavy load. And then it's too late and you miss that ideal window. Right? Is this like, I'm totally raising my hand. I have so done this, and now I Have these templates. Like templates are amazing. They're starting points. I have a day of the week, a time when I just. I set it in my calendar and it has got boundaries around it. And I do it bottlenecks in the pack process that slow things down or that create errors. Sometimes the inventory is inaccurate and runs out. And now you have to change your whole. You have to upset a customer or it shuts down the pack process. It's not efficient. You have to wait for the inventory to come back. Right. Needing owner approval for every little step that can have an impact on your sales and revenue downstream. You have the wrong person selling your product at the farm stand. They're not a people person. This is classic example of the wrong person on the bus and you just haven't dealt with it and it's affecting your sales. Right. This is an example of an internal business problem. I could go on. I'm going to pick two more. Let's see. There's a long wait to pick up the order. Maybe your pickup site location only has one lane and so you just can't solve that problem. Or you only have one site host or employee at that site. And so it's just. There's just a long line all the time. And you could solve that problem by going to a different pickup site if you decided you want to do that or hiring another employee. But maybe you've decided you don't want to and you're just going to deal with the lines. But that can have an impact on the experience the customer is having. Things forget to get loaded onto the truck that goes to market because you don't have a checklist. So that's an example of not having an sop, not having a checklist that you go down and make sure everything gets there. And then you. You don't lose sales because you forgot to bring along the bacon or whatever product isn't getting harvested at the. At the ideal time of day. And so the quality of it is poor. That has an effect on sales and repeat sales. Okay, I could go on, but you get the idea. So look at. Just look at some of the things going on on the other side of your business internally. These different systems and processes, sometimes they're out of your control. You know, you could be collaborating with another vendor and they don't come through for you. Or their product shows up at the absolute last second. It creates havoc for you and stress. And you're like, is this worth it? Do I want to do this anymore? It creates anxiety again. Maybe Then you don't start. You don't pitch that offer anymore as much because you're just so stressed out about whether you're going to get the product in time and you find it's affecting your promotion. Take a look at things like that and ask yourself, is this worth spending time to try and remove this friction? So your homework this weekend is simple. I want you to take all of these suggestions in, and I want you to become a friction detective. Okay? I want you to do a friction audit. Walk through your business, through your buying cycle, your buyer's experience, your sales system, all the different stages in the journey of a customer. And you already. I know. You already know one point of friction, right? Like, I know you've pictured at least one. So what are you going to do about it? Is it something you want to fix? Can you fix it? Is it worth it? Or can you live with it? Does it pay to build a workflow around it or to try and address it? Maybe it doesn't and you get to decide that. But become aware of where these sources are and what might. I think there are some that are more difficult than others, right? Some points of friction matter way more than others. And so that's part of this is as identifying them and then deciding, okay, well, this one's really costing me sales, and I have to address it. If I want to scale. We've got to. We've got to deal with that before we even try to scale. And then there's others where you're like, meh, that cost me a few customers, and I'm willing to live with that. So the goal of today was just to help you think through this idea of friction, identify different places where it is to realize that it's normal to have it. There's nothing wrong with you if you have it. I just want you to be aware of it and be intentional about deciding whether you're going to let it live with you and hold hands with it, or if you're going to try and minimize it and come up with a strategy for doing it. Okay? So this week, put on your detective hat, go hunting for some friction, and look for ways to make the buying process feel effortless. I'll see you next week. Today's show notes can be found@mydigitalfarmer.com 370 if you liked this episode, would you please go leave me a rating or a review on Spotify or Apple podcasts or wherever you're listening to this? That would really help me out a lot because this show gets promoted to people based on the reviews. So if you love this episode and you want other people to know about the show, share the link or go leave me a review. I'd really appreciate it. Remember, you can also get onto my email list. I'll send you all kinds of marketing tips. I'll give you a reminder every week about the podcast and what it's about. You can subscribe by going to mydigitalfirmer.com subscribe and hopefully one of you, some of you, will decide to join me inside Farm Marketing School sometime this year. I'm eager and willing to coach you and help you form your farm marketing machine. And you can learn more about Farm Marketing School by going to mydigitalfarmer.com FMS thank you guys for joining me today. Have an amazing week and remember, I believe in you. Bye. Bye.