How Onboarding Sets Your Farm Up for Success
Barn2Door Onboarding Manager Briana joins Janelle to unpack exactly what happens after a farm signs up, detailing how the Success Department fast-tracks your setup so you can ditch the office work, and start selling direct to local Buyers.
For more Farm resources, visit: barn2door.com/resources
-
[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Independent Farmer Podcast, the go-to podcast for do-it-yourself farmers who are taking control of their own business, skipping the middleman, and selling direct to local consumers and wholesale buyers. This podcast is hosted by Barn2Door, the number-one business tool for independent farmers to manage their business, promote their brand, and sell online and in person. Let's dive in to today's Independent Farmer Podcast.
Janelle Maiocco: Welcome to the Independent Farmer podcast. I'm Janelle Maiocco, CEO of Barn2Door and your host for today's episode. As you may be aware, Barn2Door is all about helping independent farmers make more money, ditch the office work, and look like a pro. By getting a system in place to sell direct, market under their own brand, and manage orders, farmers can skip the middleman and build a strong local business with recurring sales and maximum profits. And we just debuted helping farmers with local delivery. In today's conversation, we're gonna get into the onboarding experience with Barn2Door. Like, what does it look like when you sign up or right after you sign up?
Today, I am happy to welcome Briana, who is one of our farm onboarding managers—which we internally affectionately call FOMs. Welcome, Briana.
Briana Kupelian: Thank you. I'm so excited to be here.
Janelle Maiocco: It's really neat to, sort of, unpack what it actually looks and feels like for a farmer once they sign up. I mean, we have folks talking to the farmer before they sign up all about how we might help their farm, and there tends to be two or three things they're especially excited about helping with. In particular, just getting organized to manage inventory and orders and make it super easy for all of their customers to buy from them, right? Whether that's buying online through their online store, whether they're invoicing wholesalers, etc. But every farm is unique, right? And so it's so interesting when they get to the other side, and I love that they meet onboarding managers first thing. Tell us how that happens. How do they get in touch with you?
Briana Kupelian: Yeah. So, once a farm signs up, right, they talk to our sales team and figure out really what their needs are. The first thing that they do is schedule their orientation meeting with us. That first meeting typically entails kind of like a meet and greet, right? It's the first time I'm meeting with the farm, so we really wanna get to know them. We wanna get to know their goals, the history of the farm, and then make sure that they're super clear on what we're doing in onboarding to help make sure that we're supporting their business and their business goals. So the first meeting really is just kind of a conversation about best practices and what we're gonna be working on.
Janelle Maiocco: I love it. Okay. I kind of jumped ahead because, really, let's talk a little bit about you first. I mean, how long have you been at Barn2Door? Why do you like being an onboarding manager?
Briana Kupelian: Yeah. So, I've been with Barn2Door almost two and a half years; it was two years in February. I've been on the success team in onboarding since the end of 2025—so about six months now, which is crazy. It flew by. And I love being an onboarding manager because, first of all, I get to meet with farmers literally all day long. I meet with eight to 12 farmers throughout the day—all unique use cases, all different types of products. But it's such a unique point of their time with Barn2Door, right? It's kind of where the rubber meets the road and figuring out, "Okay, this is what you wanna do. This is why you're here. How are we gonna get it done?"
Janelle Maiocco: I love that, and we are gonna talk about that later because, yes, you definitely have every unique f— like eight to 12 farms a day, but they might be small, they might be just getting started and trying to make it a full-time farming business, or maybe they've been at it for a few years and now it's time for them to get really organized with processes and get some systems in place for them to be even more efficient and effective in the use of their time. And then we also have some large and extra-large farms, if you will, right? Where they're at or over seven figures. So it's kind of amazing to be that business software that can help farmers get organized, get off the ground, engage their customers, and track obviously all of their transactions and everything. But it definitely changes your conversation with them based on the size of the farm.
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. It changes the initial conversation. It changes pretty much every conversation after that. And it's really cool being able, for me, to use the software differently for each farm, too.
Janelle Maiocco: Absolutely. I love that. And best practices can get pulled all the way through all those farms, too. There are some things that happen or recommendations I'm sure that you make that are consistent regardless of the size or type of farm. That's awesome. Well, we'll get into that in a minute. I was peeking at—I know this and it's good for the listeners to know—when you have your initial orientation call with Briana, she actually has in the first call what we call an orientation deck. Like, you're actually presenting, just making sure that we actually cover what information needs to be covered in that first call.
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. Yes. I think that's helpful for me, but also for farmers just to kind of reiterate, "Okay, this is what you wanna do. This is how we're gonna do it. This is also a goal. This is how we're gonna do it." And the "why" behind everything, also. So we spend a lot of time talking about subscriptions, for example, and why that is important—because we know that subscriptions drive recurring revenue for our farms. We know that—and I know we'll talk about this later in the call too—but email marketing is super important, so we'll go through why that is and who we use and how we're gonna be setting it up, and just making sure that we're connecting all of the different puzzle pieces for each farmer.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, there are definitely some themes that come through. Tell folks—like, if you're staring at the deck right now as well—tell folks what the first, you know, five to 10 minutes looks and feels like. Clearly, you're gonna introduce yourself and ask the farm what their goals are and different things like that so you know how to gear the conversation and the store setup, and even the recommendations custom to them.
Briana Kupelian: So, making sure that we're always on the same page as the farmer here. The first thing that we'll roll through is what onboarding is all about. And what onboarding is all about, really, is getting your store set up so that you can start taking orders—sometimes as quickly as the first meeting or the second meeting, depending on what we call "what homework is done." Making sure that the farmer will know that they're gonna be totally comfortable with the platform by the time they leave onboarding. I like to tell people that onboarding is really about software systems, settings, and making sure that we have everything exactly how it needs to be set up for each individual farm. And then I take them through the resources that are available, which surprises a lot of people. We've got a lot of unique resources. The first of which that I love is office hours, which is live help that we offer Monday through Friday, twice a day. So, two times a day outside of these onboarding meetings when farmers are working on their homework or if they just have a question about whatever. And even farms outside of onboarding—they have two times a day that they can get into a meeting and talk with somebody live from the success team, which is really unique and very helpful for new farmers.
Janelle Maiocco: I think office hours is one of my, actually, most favorite things that we offer to farmers because it's humans helping humans, right? It's like, no, you can literally any day of the week, Monday to Friday, pop into one of the office hours and be with a real human team member from Barn2Door to help, to answer questions. And we've had that now, I wanna say for close to two years, but it's just something we keep promoting so that all of our farms know, "Hey, yes, anytime I get to talk to a human who knows about farming, who can go into my account, who knows data from working with thousands of farms all across the country in every state." Like, we have the information to help them be successful, which is unique, right? We're not just generic e-commerce. We literally know their business, and we make ourselves available. I just—it's a passion place for me to be useful and helpful to farmers on a daily basis. And even our support team—if a farmer chats in or submits a support ticket, if they need to get in front of somebody, they can join, like, that same day if it's like a more complicated, "Oh, I need to update my inventory. I can't remember how. Can you show me how?" Then they can pop into that office hour. So, to your point, really powerful. And not just for onboarding, not just for folks that are in the first two months learning initially how to use this system. I love that because you might have a farm who's been with Barn2Door for, you know, two or three years already, but then they're like, "Oh, wait a minute. I'm gonna start using a POS," or, "I wanna start offering subscriptions. How do I do that again?" And then they can just go right into office hours and be trained and get help set up, and they're off to the races.
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. I just got out of an office hours, actually, and neither of the two farms in there were in orientation. They were existing farms, had been with us for years, just trying to do new things, which is really cool.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. It's great to have the examples. Appreciate that.
Briana Kupelian: The other resource that's really cool and totally different than office hours is the Learn Center, and that is basically an online encyclopedia where there are hundreds and hundreds of articles that our support teams and other different teams have put together on how to do just about anything that you can think of within Barn2Door. So, I always tell my folks, "If you do better with written direction or if you like to work on things at 3:00 in the morning," which a lot of farmers are, "or very late at night when everything is done for the day, just leave that open in another tab. That should be your go-to." There is very little that you can't figure out with the help of the Learn Center, if anything at all. There are screenshots and videos. It's just such a good tool.
Janelle Maiocco: Actually, that just reminded me because isn't there a dropdown right inside—like, I'm sure you show farmers this probably even on day one when you're talking about these things. There's a dropdown Help Center right in their account. And what are their options there? Literally a click away.
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. So, it is a link to book into office hours. It is a link to take you directly into the Learn Center, and then it's a link to contact our support team. And our support team, like you said, has crazy fast response times. They always get back to you pretty much immediately. So there's always somebody, some way to get help.
Janelle Maiocco: That's really awesome. Thank you for sharing that. And then what is the timeline? I think we have sort of a standard timeline, but then it changes depending on the farmer's needs.
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. So, pretty standard is to be in onboarding between one to two months. It depends on the size of the farm, the information we're moving over, a lot of different factors, but you know, somewhere between one to two months. And again, during that time, it is getting the store set up, teaching the farmer how to do everything, and making sure that they're really set up for success. And then once we are done with onboarding, we what we call "graduate" the farmer into account management, where they meet with their account manager then for more long-term support. So that's where they leave the setup process and go into, "Okay, what is our brand gonna look like? What's our website gonna look like? Who are our target customers, and how do we reach those customers?" Just kind of realigning on your goals and, again, figuring out what the best way is to hit all of those.
Janelle Maiocco: It's like getting started is truly all the setup and comfort with the system, and then you start... I mean, when you're a farmer, you're farming, but you're also running a business, right? And so it's really getting used to running the business with your new tools, but then also to reach your goals in a meaningful way and to keep informed on all the new things and features and capabilities coming out of Barn2Door, right? I think we introduced the point of sale for in-person transactions three and a half, four years ago; and so anybody who signed up before that, it's like they need to learn about it, right? So it's a chance to do all that. And same thing, delivery as a service. That's just been in the water; we work with delivery partners across the country now to offer farms that as an option. A lot of farms do their own delivery, but if they want to start doing delivery—or they want to not be the delivery person and have somebody do it for them or deliver their items to their customers—we can get that sorted. But that takes, you know, a handful of calls and getting it set up and helping them with marketing, and that's to their own customers, of course. And that's where those account managers are a great point of contact—office hours and account managers.
So, what if I am a farm and I literally show up and I'm like, "It's Monday, and on Saturday I have a farmer's market and I want things set up so I can start selling." What happens then, Briana? That's like fast. How do I fast-track?
Briana Kupelian: Yeah, exactly. And that is not abnormal. I've heard that a handful of times. So the game plan there is—one resource I didn't mention before is the onboarding checklist. This will list out very clearly steps that a farmer needs to do in order to start going live and selling. There's a couple of key things that need to happen, but for that farmer, we're using that first meeting to get as much of that done as possible, and I'm scheduling you into as many office hours as possible too. Again, it's really just a couple of key things that need to be done in order to start selling. We've had farms go live super fast.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. And then what if I'm a farm who sells quarter and half-wholes? We often work with a lot of farms who bring their cows to the sale barn, but they want the optionality to also have a sales channel where they're selling direct because they can make so much more per head and also set their own pricing—especially if the sale barn might not be in a good spot. So it gives them that flexibility to maintain profit in a year when they might especially want to be increasing their profits. So in that case, say I'm doing quarter and half-wholes, but my butcher dates aren't until the fall and—let's say—that's six months out. Then what? What does that look like?
Briana Kupelian: So that looks a little bit different because, in that instance, we've got a bonus six months to start taking pre-orders and reaching new customers and really building the brand out. So we still get the store up and running as soon as we can. We get you to a place where you can start taking pre-orders and securing those processing dates, and get you moved through to your account manager where you can really start focusing on the branding side of things and reaching more customers. But nonetheless, the store still gets set up super fast to start taking pre-orders.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that you said that because pre-orders, I think, in some cases is maybe a new concept. I feel like a lot of the farms that come to us, it's like the butcher date feels like it's tomorrow and I don't know who's gonna buy the quarter or half-whole, or some people said they wanted to and then I can't get ahold of them. So what does it look like? How are you helping those farmers secure pre-orders? What is that experience so that when the butcher date does roll around, everything's already sold?
Briana Kupelian: So typically what we do with operations like that is we figure out what the processing schedule is, right? Are you processing every month? Are you processing quarterly? And we get what we call "fulfillment schedules" built out accordingly so that customers know, "Okay, I can place an order for September, October, or November," for example. At that point, when you have people available, you're actually taking a deposit from them to secure that processing date. So, for example, the deposit for a whole beef might be $1,000, a half might be $500, etc. But that gets the customer to commit, and that is peace of mind for the farmer too, right? Knowing, "Okay, if I'm sending this whole beef to the processor, I know that I have a customer for it; and in the instance they do back out for whatever reason, I've got processing fees covered and I still have my $1,000 for that animal."
Janelle Maiocco: That's amazing. I love that you can line it up for September, October, and November. And I'm assuming then those farmers have not just the peace of mind, but they actually know exactly what they've sold for each of those particular butcher dates. So if they need to change it from five to seven or eight cows or whatever else, they know going in. That's amazing. Very cool. Okay. So we've kind of covered getting comfortable and getting set up. Can we talk a little bit about what store setup is? Getting their store set up is a big one, right? Because you have to have your online store in place. You've gotta connect the dots with your bank so that it's just automatic—you're automatically paid out. And then inventory setup—that's what you're doing on the back end? So what is just the store setup experience? What's sort of the general best practice as you're helping farmers get set up? And I know that it's different if I'm selling chickens versus flowers, but maybe you can speak to that.
Briana Kupelian: Yeah. There's a few hard-fast rules that are gonna apply to any farmer. The first that we know is our most successful farms have less than 50 items in their storefront, and this all ties back to what's gonna make it easiest for the customer—ultimately the farmer too. But if you have a storefront that's full of 180 items and you're only selling two or three different proteins, that's a lot of decisions for the customers to make; and ultimately, every time I click that next-page button, conversion is dropping down. A great way to keep your store under 50 items is creating bundle boxes, which we talk a lot about. Bundle boxes are essentially bundles of products, right, that people would already be buying together. So, for example, a beef bundle box might be a few pounds of ground beef, a couple of steaks, and a roast. A chicken bundle box might be a whole bird, a couple of different pieces, so on and so forth. So that is really the biggest thing with store setup: keeping it as concise as possible. We also know that about 60% of sales will come from your top five pinned items, so making sure that your best sellers are at the top of your stores and that your assortment is really curated to what your customers want to see.
Janelle Maiocco: Love it. I appreciate that. So you get their bank connected, and you start adding items to the store, and then that's where the best practices are, right? You're saying, "Hey, people, if you have 400 items, they will never scroll to the end," right? Like, you wanna make sure your best sellers are at the top and that you can consolidate where possible. And of course, we have all this data because we watch the numbers behind the scenes. We're like, "Wow, if a farmer does this, they have better outcomes," right? "They have more sales." And so we're gonna pass that knowledge on during the setup process. Explain a little bit about schedules and fulfillments because this is a really neat part of the store that I love. Because as an online shopper—which I think the majority of people can say about themselves—I'm an online shopper. You know that many people—literally, this is how people shop today—want that option. And it does ensure sales for people that find your website. You need that store right in front of them. But what's unique about the part of what we've built at Barn2Door for farmers is when their customers go to do their self-serve shopping so they can drop things in a cart, make the payment, and it's done. Like, that's going right into the farmer's bank. What's unique about the "I'm choosing how I'm gonna get that food" part?
Briana Kupelian: Yeah. So from the customer's standpoint, it's what's expected, right? As a shopper, I need to be able to log in, place an order, and figure out exactly when and where I'm gonna get it, which is part of what we set up with the farmer. What's unique about Barn2Door and e-commerce specifically for farms is that you can have different inventory items available in different ways. So, for example, not everything might be available at the farmer's market location, but it is available at the on-farm store or whatever variety of ways people are getting products from you. So being able to customize by inventory item how people are getting products from you is huge and cuts back on all of that communication between the farmer and the customer. We know that before Barn2Door, it takes on average like seven touches for somebody to complete an order with a farm.
Janelle Maiocco: You can't see what they have for sale, how much it costs, and how I'm gonna get it—now all of a sudden you're emailing, texting, or Facebook messaging back and forth with the farm. And this is where—if you're a farm and it's seven touches on average—if you don't have a system in place and you have 400 customers, do the math. How many hours a week now are you, quote-unquote, "managing orders" and the order process and payments? Like hours every week because you don't have a system in place where I can go see all the information, throw in my credit card, complete the purchase, choose my pickup or delivery location on whatever day you've provided, and check out. And the buyer doesn't have to talk to anybody, and the farmer's provided all that information in one useful place. So the time savings alone is just huge for farmers who don't have a system in place; and this is when you can really start to run your business efficiently and potentially then have the opportunity to grow. So, really, really powerful. Actually, it reminds me: We just wrote the Grassroots Marketing eBook that's coming out—I think it's next month—but we talk a lot about no friction for the buyers, right? If the buyers have to call, text, or Facebook message you, while you might have some that are willing to do that, the majority of people will not bother because it's friction—versus like, "No, I can complete the purchase in one sitting in less than a few seconds."
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. And let alone going to meet a stranger like in a parking lot with a wad of cash. There's a lot of people that just won't do that.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, I appreciate that. So we're talking through setting up online, right, with inventory and schedules, making it easy then for the buyers to buy. Of course, they have options on payments too. What does that look like?
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. So like every other online order you've ever placed, right, your buyers can check out with a card, which is preferred by like 97-point-something percent of buyers at this point. I'd be surprised if it wasn't higher. If there are loyal customers that you trust or that are a little more old-school and wanna pay with cash or check, we can certainly set that up also. And also ACH for bigger purchases like bulk beef and things like that. So all of that will be covered within Barn2Door.
Janelle Maiocco: This is the other thing we love is, like, we think about farmers having more control and optionality in their business as they're becoming more efficient. And so in the case of payments, they can literally choose, you know, if they want to offer check or cash for particular people versus not others, if they want to only have credit cards, if they want ACH yes or no, and even by wholesale versus retail.
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. Tons of different levers you can pull. You can actually have up to three different pricing lists. So you can do your public retail list, which is for your everyday customers. Like you said, you can have wholesale, which often has lower pricing or even different unit sizes that people are buying in. And then you can also have just, like, a private storefront, which some people will use for family and friends. Some farmers will use that as a dedicated storefront for just their subscribers, for example. I know a lot of our farms—we've got some pork producers that will make their bacon only available in the private storefront to people that are subscribed to their bundle boxes. So there's a lot of really cool things you can do and different levers you can pull to customize it.
Janelle Maiocco: I love it. No wonder. That makes a ton of sense then for onboarding to walk through that initial setup, essentially for success, right? But say a little more about that, because if I'm a farmer and I'm coming in, you're saying I can have anybody who buys a CSA box or a meat bundle box—a monthly subscription—that will then basically unlock their access to the goodies.
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. So we'll talk a lot in onboarding about add-ons, right, and driving up your average order size as much as possible. Add-ons are a great way to do that. So when somebody is buying a weekly produce box or a monthly meat box, once they make that purchase, like you said, they'll unlock a private store where, for example, there could be all of these other add-ons. Eggs, dairy, microgreens, honey, a flower subscription—I've seen tons of different options there. That helps your customers feel special, like they have access to something that other people don't have; and they are special, and they should. It also kind of drives a sense of FOMO, which we talk about a lot, and it makes other people want what this special group of people is getting.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, I appreciate that. It's neat for them to be able to just automatically reward their loyal customers and not have to go do that manually. It just will unlock that store for those folks. That's really neat. And so what happens if I am selling eggs to both retail and wholesale? How do you handle that?
Briana Kupelian: Yeah. So we set the inventory item up on two different pricing sheets, which is very easy to do. Retail will get assigned one set of pricing. Wholesale will get assigned a separate set of pricing. And you'll be able to identify who your wholesale buyers are so you don't run the risk of any crossover there, right? Some farmers don't want their retail customers to see their wholesale pricing, and in this instance, they won't.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. Again, farmer controls. That's a really important piece. I love putting them in the driver's seat. I always wanna be cheeky and say we put them in the tractor seat. So now I can basically do what I need to do to service both consumers and wholesale, and give special pricing either to friends and family or to my most loyal customers in that private section of my store. That's really nifty. And then I've set up—do I offer pickup or do I offer delivery? But what do you do in an instance where you have consumer pickup locations potentially, and I can also offer delivery just to wholesale?
Briana Kupelian: Also easy to set up. Again, because we're built specifically for farmers, there's all of these different unique combinations you can have with your fulfillment. So we call them "schedules," but it's essentially just unique ways that customers are shopping from you. You can get very granular with locations, dates, and times, and again, link each individual item, if necessary, back to one specific way that somebody can get it from you. So I've been with farms where we've set up 15 different schedules, 20 different schedules, and some farms that just will have one or two and everything in between.
Janelle Maiocco: I think it's just partly what is the business of the farmer, right? That's what sort of enlists you to set things up in a particular way. However, it's also, "Hey, these are the best practices, so let's make sure it's as easy as possible for both your buyer and for the farmer to be happy with how easy it is to shop if I'm a buyer, and then how easy it is to obviously manage my recurring deliveries or products, etc., as a farmer." You're basically trying to make it as easy as possible for both.
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. And again, we have a ton of data behind that too. So we know 80% of buyers will drive up to five miles for local pickup, so we talk a lot about the "local loop" and establishing drop locations where your customers already are. So whether that is a parking lot of a big store in town, whether that is a church, or whether that's a book club that meets during the week—figuring out who your customers are and making sure that you can meet them there is a big part of that. So we'll help farmers brainstorm and think of ideas that might fit into their life there. And also, when farmers are open to doing delivery, we'll always explore that more with them too, because we know that farms that offer delivery can see as much as twice the volume of farms that don't. So if there is even one day a month that the farmer might wanna do delivery, great. We're pulling up a map. We're looking at zip codes. We're looking at populations around them. You don't need to be in a huge metro area, right? Towns with 20,000 people that are close by is plenty for most farms to sell out.
Janelle Maiocco: That's a great call-out. I always go back to: what if I'm worried that the chef is trying to order at 11:00 PM and delivery's the next day, or we have some farms that do consumer pickups throughout a whole weekend? How do I deal with that?
Briana Kupelian: We do what we call "order cutoffs," right? So an "order by" date to make sure, again, that you're not getting an order at midnight for something that needs to be filled at 6:00 in the morning. All of that is customizable and we'll walk through it as we're setting something up. And again, all of that can be applied back to individual inventory items too. So we'll often have things that you keep in stock regularly. You might be able to allow customers to order the day before for pickup the next day. But for things that are either grown-to-order or are not available yet, those you can specify different lead times for.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, that is really neat. When you're on Amazon, if you show up, it's available, right? That sort of thing. Versus you might start selling turkeys in June, but the delivery date is clearly gonna be all the way out near Thanksgiving, which is pretty neat. Okay. Let's talk through—there's one more, I'm kind of thinking through their account as you're giving people a tour of, "Here's the different systems to be thinking about." And we've talked about setup, inventory, and order management and making sure they have the various fulfillments in place. Two other things we haven't chatted about in terms of just general setup, and then there's more to go into. One is POS, and then the other one is just customer management. So, choose which one you wanna talk about next.
Briana Kupelian: I'll start with point of sale. Our point-of-sale device is great. Think of it as just another piece of the puzzle for all of these great business tools that you're getting. For farms that are doing official in-person sales, like farmers markets, they're amazing because it is a fast way for your customers to check out when you're face to face. It will record the sale and deduct from inventory, so whether you're selling online or in person, your inventory is being kept up to date. And it's gonna collect customer information for you that syncs back to your Barn2Door account, which is huge. We know this. It will help grow your email list. Growing your email list grows your sales. Even for our farms that aren't doing official in-person sales—like festivals or farmers markets—it is a great tool to have. It's just a way to ensure that you are never missing another sale ever again. I know all of our farmers are running their kids around to cheer, baseball, whatever it is—you're with your community all the time and people are asking for products all the time. Having the point of sale in your purse or in your truck, when someone says, "Hey, do you have any meat birds?" you can say "yes," take the sale, and bring it for them next week.
Janelle Maiocco: Love it. Yes. Take a sale anytime, anywhere. That's a great way to keep making money. I love it. And then, customers. Obviously, in order to sell, you need to have customers.
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. So, one of the first things that we'll encourage a farm to do—we've talked about emailing a little bit. Once our farms create their MailChimp account—that's who we use for our email marketing—we'll create them an email sign-up form, which is just a way to continue to collect emails from farmers outside of the point-of-sale device. And we'll encourage our farms to share that with their friends and family, and to share it on their Facebook page. Even if you don't have a business page for the farm yet, share it on your personal page. The more people's emails that you have, the more you're able to communicate with people. The more sales you will see. The newsletters are really powerful. It's something that you work on more with your account manager. But growing that email list out is one of the first steps in doing that.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. We've done some analysis on how the number of emails a farmer has will literally equal how much money they make in a given year, which is incredibly powerful. So, email collection is just essentially customer collection, right, which is so critical. When farmers are first getting set up, we... I think you show them how to add emails. You can add them manually, but then they'll also be added automatically. Can you speak to that a little bit?
Briana Kupelian: Yes. So any farm coming in that has an existing customer list, it's very easy to import directly into Barn2Door. There's a form that we have, and it takes just a couple of seconds to do it. So, making sure that there's no gaps between your customers today and your customers tomorrow will always be our priority. So we'll get those moved over for you. And then, again, as for new customers: as they're placing orders and as you're collecting them, they'll automatically be saved in your account to continue to build your list out.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, that's awesome. And we even have it set up where most customers will create an account with a saved credit card. Some people really love to shop as a guest, so that is something that we offer at Barn2Door to make sure that a farmer's not missing out on any sales. People can literally be a guest shopper and make a purchase. But we just actually debuted the ability for those guests even to opt-in to marketing from you as a farmer. So even if they don't create an account, you actually get to send marketing emails to them, which is just cool and crazy. So that's really important. But then, yeah, manually adding emails as you collect them and then automatically, we make sure that farmers are capturing emails as they're making purchases—whether that's on their POS in-person at the market (they're able to submit their email) or online (whether they're making purchases, etc.). I'm just gonna call this out: We have an integration with MailChimp, which is a lovely tool. Your farm can brand really beautiful newsletters because you wanna look really professional. And then, because it's a full integration, farmers can then readily—like, literally while you're putting your newsletter together—be grabbing items right from your store to insert into your newsletter. So it's a very custom, beautiful branding experience for farmers and it's directly integrated. Now, most farms will use that service. But you can still send emails if I don't have MailChimp, correct?
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. You can still send order reminders just through Barn2Door. And that's something that we'll get set up if you're bringing existing customers over. You won't leave onboarding without having us set this up for you. But the weekly order reminders are, again, super powerful just for staying top-of-mind with all of your customers. Our farms that have order reminders set up, we know, do about 30% more in volume than our farms that don't. So, an email will go out to your customers at the same time every week. You just set it up one time and say, "Hey, don't forget to get your orders in on Thursday for pickup on Saturday," or whatever it might be. And people do it. People are shopping from their emails.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah, it can be a lifesaver. We've had farmers say, "You know, when it gets really busy, knowing that my people are still getting reminded to place their orders that week is literally a godsend." Because things do get busy; and what if you don't have time for that monthly or twice-a-month newsletter? You can sleep better at night knowing that they're getting those reminders to place those orders. Because that's a big deal, right? Marketing for the sake of sales. What I love about that is it's "set it and forget it," right? You set it up one time, and now you have a marketing engine essentially in place, right? You've got basic marketing going—it's just powered by Barn2Door on the farmer's behalf. Can you explain why we hook it up even to make sure that the email it comes from is branded? It's really interesting; people kind of miss that detail.
Briana Kupelian: Yeah, exactly. So the email will come from the farmer's website, essentially. Even if the farmer doesn't have hosted email, it's great for brand consistency, and we know that that is ultimately what helps build trust with customers. And when customers trust the brand that they're shopping from, they end up spending more money with that brand. So being able to send automated reminders from an email that looks super professional just ups the ante even more for the farmer.
Janelle Maiocco: Even though Barn2Door is powering the email sends, we actually brand the email to the farmer's farm or brand, which is really neat, right? Same thing—again, we're just trying to be under the hood powering farmer success, but powering their brand because it's about them. It's about their customers. It's about their brand—all the way through, right? It's about their profits. We just, again, wanna give them control.
Awesome. Okay. I think we've covered some pretty good basics on setup, what that entails, and why it's important. Let's dig in a little bit then to... we have sort of three tenets at Barn2Door that we emphasize. And one is "make more money." Like, we're here to help farmers make more money, so we go dig in on that. The second one is to "ditch the office work." We sometimes say "ditch the boring office work." And we wanna make sure that farmers are getting processes in place to literally save hours and hours of time every single week. And so, like, Briana, as the onboarding manager, will take the farmer through all the ways that they can potentially set up systems to not be doing sort of the same thing on repeat and can actually automate things. And then the third is "look like a pro," and that just has to do with the professionalism that builds trust with buyers, because we know if a farmer develops loyal buyers, they're going to make more money, right? So it's this beautiful circle of, "Hey, this is like taking your business up a notch; be really good at business for your farm so you can be farming successfully."
So let's talk a little bit about making more money. Like, what is top-of-mind for you when you're talking to a farm? And if it's helpful for you to be like, "I'm gonna pretend I'm talking to a dairy."
Briana Kupelian: Sure. The first thing that I think of when a farm comes in and the goal is to make more money is really making it as easy as possible for people to shop. That's often the gap there, right? Because we know farmers have good products. We know that they have products available. Oftentimes the barrier to entry is just being available in the way that they need to. So that ties back again to the store setup, so making sure that you have options for the customers that you're looking to serve and that you have an easy way for them to order from you—where I'm able to, in the one minute that I have available in my day to place an order, figure out who you are and what you have, and I can check out with an easy way to get the product. That in a nutshell is what we'll try to convey to the farmer when it comes to making more money.
Janelle Maiocco: So, removing buyer friction. So if I'm a dairy coming to you, for example, like, what would you recommend for how I set up my store to optimize for sales? And then is there anything that you think of like removing friction from the buyers to make it super simple if I'm a dairy? What could some of those items be?
Briana Kupelian: Yeah. For a dairy in particular, subscriptions are gonna be the number-one driver. This is milk that we're talking about. I know exactly how much milk me and my husband drink every week. People with kids—forget it—gallons a week in some instances. Making it easy for people to just say, "Hey, you are my farmer. I love your product. I wanna be locked in as a consumer. I wanna know that I'm getting my milk from you every week." And then on the farmer side, knowing that you're selling x amount of product each week on a subscription is a win-win. So with a dairy farm, the first thing we're looking at is setting up weekly subscriptions for a gallon, two gallons, three gallons, whatever it needs to be.
Janelle Maiocco: And then talk a little bit about that, because you actually are like, "Hey, there's a couple, and then there's a big family." How does that information, Briana, help you help the farmer make more money?
Briana Kupelian: Yeah. So because of all the different farms we work with and the different customers they serve, we know a third of Americans live alone, a third are households with couples (like two to three people), and the balance is families of four or more. So, making sure that all of our farmers have something to fit into each of those households is gonna be key. So a gallon of milk is probably perfect for a couple. Families that have multiple children that are all drinking milk at the same time—they might need four or five gallons a week, depending on the size of their family. So making sure that you have a small, a medium, and a large subscription across—no matter what type of product you have—is always gonna be our recommendation.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that, because now you're reaching all sizes of families as potential customers. Because if you only have a subscription for four gallons of milk, now all of a sudden anybody who's a single or a couple isn't gonna be able to buy that subscription, right? And so you miss out on customers. You literally miss out on sales if you shrink who can buy from you, right? So it's the balance of enough options but not so many that there's fatigue; the buyer's fatigue is real. And so when you're talking to an onboarding manager at Barn2Door, they know this and can help direct your firms to maximize the opportunity for the variety of customers that you might serve in your area, including retail or wholesale, and different sizes and types of customers. And then with it in mind not to have 400 items in your store, but to consolidate in the most meaningful way to optimize for sales—which is just kind of cool, actually. You're like, "My goal for you, farmer, is to make sure that you are maximizing your opportunity to make money, to make profit, and to reach as many customers as possible where you are." And that's just, you know, it's what we do. It's why you're on the phone with eight to 12 farmers every day, right? To do exactly that: help them make more money. I love it. Okay.
Talk to me then a little bit about "ditch the office work." What does that conversation look like? Maybe you could choose—I don't know if you wanna choose a beef farmer, maybe even like produce, right? How does a produce farmer... "I have vegetables coming out my ears, literally, in the middle of the summer; how are you gonna save me time? I don't wanna be in the back office doing repeat tasks."
Briana Kupelian: Yeah, exactly. I think where I usually see produce farmers' eyes light up more than any other time is when I walk them through our pick-and-pack list. Especially for produce farmers, where there are lots of different things available at any given time. It's not as simple as, you know, perhaps like a steak or ground beef. The pick-and-pack list is where we'll walk you through where you'll go to figure out all of your orders for the day, right? So you can look at your orders for an individual day or an individual fulfillment method—like delivery day, for example. So you'll go into your store's back end, you'll look at your orders, and you'll be able to see exactly who has placed an order for what and exactly where it needs to go. It'll spit out labels for you to print out. It'll spit out invoices. That too also ups the ante when it comes to branding and professionalism, too. Like, when I'm getting a delivery from the farm and it's coming with an invoice that has a farm's logo on it and it's coming from a real delivery service—like, that's pretty impressive.
And then other ways that farms are saving time is automating all of the boring admin that they're doing now. So again, once a customer places an order, they are automatically gonna get a receipt sent to them. The farmer's notified that they have an order. So the farmer isn't having to do any of that back and forth with the customer. Everything is crystal clear from the time a customer places the order. And inventory's deducted in real time—which I know I mentioned earlier, but it's important because farmers aren't having to run around and take inventory after they're done with a market or after they're done with a weekend of sales at the farm store. And then additionally, we've talked a lot about bundle boxes and the sort of next step to that is subscriptions, which end up saving farmers a ton of time too—whether it's a dairy or whether it's a protein farmer. Getting people on subscriptions is easy for the customer because I can "set it and forget it," and it can drive up to 80% recurring revenue month over month—which is huge and leaves the farmer in a place where they're not having to chase orders every month.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. Chase orders or checks, right? Who wants to be tracking down customers for payment? Like, that's just not a good experience for either party. So the payment's already occurred. You're paid even before you're delivering, which is huge, right? And I loved your, "I don't have to go count after the market" part. It's already been in real time. My inventory's gonna be accurate on the back end, which is just really... those are fun save-time things because who wants to go around doing that? Like, take away the gross chores.
Briana Kupelian: Exactly. And it gives you more time to spend with the customers in a lot of instances, or with your own family. So it's meaningful time that people are getting back into their day.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. I appreciate that. And then what about... all farms come to us saying, "Hey, I want help with marketing," because you have to do that in order to accomplish sales, right? You have to have customers, and you have to do some sort of marketing—which should be focused on both new buyers and existing buyers. New buyers, you always wanna be growing your email list because there's gonna be natural attrition. But you also need to focus on existing buyers with regular kind of engagement touches to make sure that they're loyal to you, remember you, and are ordering from you regularly. So, how can you help me, Briana?
Briana Kupelian: So, order reminders is a great way to do that. Again, we'll get these set up. You just have to set it up one time for these to go out to your customers every single week forever. The other really cool thing that we offer is the marketing toolkit. This is a marketing add-on that we offer our farms, and it is pre-made content. It is graphics that the same designers who build all of our websites create specifically for each month for all different farms that we're working with, and it is the most turnkey solution to have very up-to-date, effortless social media. We've got an office hours also that's dedicated to how to use the marketing toolkit—scheduling posts out, figuring out what captions are the best. There's a whole team here, really, to help get all of that set up so it's just flowing automatically for you.
Janelle Maiocco: Awesome. I love it. Yeah, automated emails: amazing. We also help with automated email collection, which is really neat. Whether your people are shopping online or in person, we make sure that you're collecting emails through your Facebook, through your newsletters, etc. So, and then let's talk a little bit about "look like a pro." That's sort of the third thing that we focus on, and why does that matter? What does that look like, and why does it matter?
Briana Kupelian: Yeah. So when we say "look like a pro," really what we mean is making sure that your brand is reflective of the quality of the product that you have and that it's consistent across all of the different platforms where customers are potentially encountering your brand. Because that's really the expectation, right? Anybody that we're shopping from—whether we're seeing them on social media or whether we're seeing them in person—again, it ties back to building trust with your customers. And they need that consistency in order to feel like you're a brand that they want to be shopping from. So really, some of the earliest pieces where I'll see this on the branding side is that once your farms start to post a little bit more, you can see some really early results from posting on Facebook. Because one of the big things is just, "Okay, I see you on Facebook, but now what?" And when you have Barn2Door, when a farm is posting something on Facebook, they're posting it with a link that's taking their customer directly back into their store to actually make the purchase. So, yes, looking like you're a really professional, polished brand is one thing; but also giving customers the same really polished experience that every other brand is offering them is key.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah. And a lot of people think "brand" is just a visual thing, and it's really not. It's actually a customer experience, right? Like, are you emailing me beautiful newsletters? Is it easy to buy from you? What is my shopping experience? What's my fulfillment experience? We all know once they taste the food, they're gonna just be gold, right? But then you do need to keep reaching out and engaging those customers, right, to keep them. And that's where automated order reminders can be great, and various things like that. So yeah, buyer expectations and experience are a really key part of looking like a pro and ensuring sales. Let's just say that.
So three more quick little things before we wrap—and then I wanna give you a chance if there's anything top-of-mind that we've missed. But one is a trial run, two is their store URL, and then three, we'll wrap with a store audit. But talk to me a little bit: What is a trial run, and why do you do it?
Briana Kupelian: Yeah. So a trial run—we also call that a "soft launch" in some instances. We want you to get the store in front of trusted buyers, friends, and family—people who are gonna be able to give you real feedback, right? Because this is your store. There's a lot of hard work and detail that has gone into building it. We wanna make sure, before you're blasting it out to the world and sending it to your email list, that it's exactly how you want it to be set up. So we'll share our screens in these meetings that we have throughout onboarding and we'll comb through everything. But getting it in the hands of real people who are actually gonna be using it is oftentimes the best feedback that you're gonna get. Product availability, unit sizes—did you have what they were looking for? All of those little things you want feedback on on the front end while we can still make tweaks very easily.
Janelle Maiocco: That's a great point. You know what? Anything worthwhile takes effort, and it also takes adjustment, right? You have to evolve, which is really important to be your best. And then the second one is a URL.
Briana Kupelian: Yes. So before the website is up and running, if it's a farm that is coming to us without an existing website, the e-commerce is live pretty much as soon as we start getting inventory items added. And you have the store URL that you can start sharing out with your friends, with your family, and with your customers on social media. There is an existing storefront. So making sure that our farmers know exactly where to find the store URL, that they know how to text it, how to email it, and how to DM it out to people. This storefront exists, and it's where all of your current customers should be shopping because these are for the people who already know you, they already love you, and they want your product. It's ultimately just making it easier for them to get it from you.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that. It makes me so happy when we get quotes back from farmers that are like, "Wow, all these people started just poking me—text, Facebook message, email—asking about what I had." And I just, instead of really saying anything, say: "Here's the store link. Go check out all the information you need to place an order." And a lot of farms will be like, "I collect emails to then send people there because then they have the habit of knowing exactly where... bookmark the store, go order anytime you want from my farm." It's a very powerful tool. And then just to wrap up, I wanted to talk about a store audit because there's a lot that we talked about today in terms of setting up and being successful, and that's the beauty of office hours—you can keep coming back to learn again. Or account managers, if you wanna touch base that way. There's just... there's ways for you to continue to learn and be successful. But there's also: is my store set up for sales, right? If I was a farmer, I'd be like, "I wanna make sure it's always set up for the most sales." So, what is a store audit?
Briana Kupelian: Yeah. A store audit is basically a Barn2Door team member combing through all of the aspects of your store, right? So we're looking at your inventory. Are things labeled correctly? Are things live? Are things as they should be, right? We're looking for any red flags. We're also looking to see how they're available to your customers. Are dates current? Is everything attached to a fulfillment method? Basically, again, any barriers, right? Just making sure that there is no barrier between how things are set up and your customer actually ordering from you.
Janelle Maiocco: Yeah—easy shopping, bundle boxes if you don't have them, you know, or maybe bundle boxes are one-time purchase boxes but you don't have a subscription. It's just these best practices that can be offered. What items are pinned to the top? What does your store banner say? And I think many farms get pretty good at looking at that themselves. But if they ever need help, we certainly provide that service. Briana, any final bits of advice or anything we didn't touch on, or even just your favorite part of being an onboarding manager before we sign off?
Briana Kupelian: We talked about so much. I would just reiterate how much support there is available to our farms. No matter what size you are or what products you have, I will never stop being surprised at how unique each individual operation is, and it's what makes my job really fun and challenging. And it's just incredible, everything that we get to do for our farmers. So, certainly a favorite part of my job—and there's always something new around the corner.
Janelle Maiocco: I love that it's called the "Success Department" because your job is literally to help set farmers up for success—and then again, and again, and again, right? I love it. Well, thank you. I wanna extend my thanks, Briana, to you today for joining. It was so fun to walk through what it looks like on the other side once a farm's signed up and how we do literally set them up for success. We are humbled at Barn2Door to support thousands of independent farmers across the country. We're delighted to offer services and tools—many of which you've heard about today—to make more money, ditch the office work, and look like a pro. If you're an independent farmer who is just getting started or transitioning to selling direct—or if you've been at it a while and want to simplify your business management—visit www.barn2door.com/learn-more Thank you for tuning in today. We look forward to joining you next time on the Independent Farmer podcast.
Thank you for joining us on the Independent Farmer Podcast. At Barn2Door, we are passionate about empowering independent farmers to build a thriving business. To all the farmers out there: thank you for all you do to grow amazing food, care for the soil, and serve your local communities. You are the backbone of our country. For free farm resources or to listen to prior podcasts, go to www.barn2door.com/resources We hope you join us again and subscribe to the Independent Farmer Podcast wherever you stream your podcasts. Until next time.