In this episode of The Entrepreneur to Author Podcast, your host Scott MacMillan speaks with agricultural sales coach, speaker, and podcaster Georgia Stormont about her new book, Selling in the Paddock: A People-First Framework for Sales in Agriculture. Drawing on years spent working directly with growers across Australia, Georgia wrote the book for sales reps, sales leaders, and national sales managers who spend their days driving up farm driveways and into rural retail stores. She explores what makes ag sales different from other industries—the emotional weight of living where you work, volatile profit cycles, and the often-unspoken grief when seasons of effort are wiped out by weather or markets—and shows readers how to have conversations that truly land, handle objections with confidence, and close sales without sacrificing trust.
Built around her “Selling in the Paddock” blueprint, the book deliberately starts with “know yourself” rather than product knowledge or tactics. Georgia explains that most ag sales professionals are technically strong but underdeveloped in self-awareness, communication, and emotional intelligence—the “power skills” that drive real-world results. Selling in the Paddock helps readers understand their own style, recognize what drives their customers, and adapt to build stronger relationships and better outcomes in the field. Georgia also shares how she collaborated with AI tools to structure her ideas in a way that worked with her dyslexia and neurodivergent thinking while keeping every story and insight authentically hers, resulting in a practical, people-first guide for anyone looking to sell more confidently and compassionately in agriculture.
GUEST BIO
Georgia Stormont is an agricultural sales coach, speaker and podcast host dedicated to helping people sell with confidence in the ag industry. After spending more than 15 years working as a sales representative in horticulture, driving farm tracks and sitting at kitchen tables with growers, Georgia saw first-hand how different selling in agriculture is from most other industries.
Today she works with agribusiness companies across Australia to help sales teams communicate better, build stronger relationships with growers and ultimately sell more effectively. Through coaching, workshops and facilitation, Georgia focuses on practical tools that work in the real world of agriculture — where trust, reputation and long-term relationships matter.
She is the host of the podcast Selling in the Paddock, where she speaks with farmers, sales reps and industry leaders about the conversations that drive agriculture forward. Georgia is also the author of the upcoming book Selling in the Paddock, a people-first framework for selling in agriculture.
Based in Melbourne, Georgia continues to work closely with growers and ag businesses and remains passionate about supporting the next generation of agricultural sales professionals.
CONNECT WITH GEORGIA
Book Website: amazon.com.au/Selling-Paddock-People-First-Confidence-Agriculture/dp/1998528812
Website: curiousgeorgiacoaching.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/georgiastormont
Instagram: @curiousgeorgiacoaching
CONNECT WITH SCOTT
LinkedIn (@scottmacmillan): linkedin.com/in/scottmacmillan
Instagram (@scottamacmillan) instagram.com/scottamacmillan
ABOUT GRAMMAR FACTORY:
Grammar Factory is a Canadian self-publishing company that helps business leaders and entrepreneurs write, publish, and market non-fiction books to boost their credibility and business results. Their expert team guides clients from idea to professionally published book, offering editorial services to ensure high-quality, compelling content. Serving clients globally, Grammar Factory focuses on transforming manuscripts into industry-leading books that attract clients and enhance brands, with a strong commitment to supporting authors throughout the publishing process.
Episode Transcript
Please note: The transcript is produced by a third-party company from an audio recording and may include transcription errors.
Scott MacMillan:
You're listening to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast.
Announcer
Welcome to the Entrepreneur to Author podcast, the podcast that brings you practical strategies for building authority and growing your business. And now, here's your host, Scott MacMillan.
Scott:
My guest today is Georgia Stormont.
Georgia is an agricultural sales coach, speaker, and podcast host who helps people sell with confidence in the ag industry. After more than 15 years working in horticulture, driving farm tracks, and sitting at kitchen tables with growers, she saw firsthand how different selling in agriculture really is. Today, she works with agribusiness teams across Australia to build stronger relationships, communicate more effectively, and drive better results in the field.
She's also the host of the Selling in the Paddock podcast and the author of the new book, Selling in the Paddock, a People-first Framework for Fales in Agriculture. Georgia, welcome to the show.
Georgia Stormont:
Thank you for having me, Scott.
Scott:
Wonderful. Well, listen, I shared a bit about you in the intro, but it would be really helpful for our listeners if you could give a bit more context on your background and how you got into agriculture sales and the work that you do today.
Georgia:
It's a funny story, isn't it? I'm not from a farm. I'm not off of an agricultural background, and I kind of fell into it, Scott, after school.
I loved the outdoors. I had a very close family friend of ours who had a property not far from us, just out of the city. We used to go there on the weekends and slide down haystacks and ride horses, and I just loved that experience.
So then when I finished year 12 and was thinking about what to do at uni, I fell into studying agriculture and natural resource management, which was really cool. And then after that, I worked and got a sales role. My first gig out of uni was a sales role working for a dairy company in Murray-Golbin, so helping dairy farmers with milk quality and delivery and all those kind of things.
And then the love, of course, brought me back to the Burbs in Melbourne. My partner didn't want to come rural, and so he stayed back home, and I came back to the Burbs in Melbourne. I thought, how I really love working in agriculture.
How can I stay working in ag but living in the Burbs? I was lucky enough, I got a job selling vegetable seed for an Australian company, family-owned company, and where I could live in the Burbs in Melbourne, but work on farm during the day. And it was just the best 11 years.
It was a fantastic career. I loved the growth I was able to have there and the amazing memories and connections I made. And then from there, I just needed another challenge, Scott, I hit my ceiling, and it was time to move on from that role.
And so speaking with my partner, Daniel, I said, I think it's time I have a crack and have a crack on my own. I'm going to go into coaching and sales coaching. And so that's what I'm doing today now, Scott.
I am utilizing my 15 years of selling in ag, and I help ag businesses and their sales teams build confidence. That's where I really see the market lacking. A lot of people come in really technically savvy, off-university, they know their stuff, but it's the people side of things, it's the conversation, Scott, it's the connection, where people just are not feeling confident in that space.
So that's where I come in and support.
Scott:
Amazing. And look, you just recently published Selling in the Paddock. And I think you've just alluded to this a little bit, but can you tell us about the book itself, who it's for, and what you're hoping that your readers will walk away with?
Georgia:
Absolutely, Scott. It's so funny because, and I'll get into this in a little bit, but I never thought about, I didn't really think about writing a book at all. It wasn't until I did my coaching, I did a Master's of Life Coaching while I was still working in the corporate space, and kind of then being able to see the trainer facilitator world as it was, and being able to be at the front of the room and really support the people that I connect and care about was just something that took a light world of its own.
It was really, really exciting. And so then when I started working for myself and running my own business, training these amazing ag companies and working with their teams and seeing where their challenges most were in terms of pitching, listening, asking open-ended questions to really understand what's going on for the farmer, where are the challenges, instead of coming in, it's got you have been sold to, this isn't just in ag, but when we've got a KPI or a budget that we've got to hit, and I've got to get up so many driveways, you feel that when you're connecting with someone. And so it's not that we can't get rid of that, because it's important.
We need to remember where we're getting paid from. We need to remember the business and understand why it's important to make profit and margin. But it's about seeing past that and connecting with the customer and understanding what is it about their business that they're needing and what direction are they going into?
And does my solution, do my products, do my service support that? And I think when we can sit behind that and come in with that lens, it really fits the conversation. And so I've kept seeing these challenges of people pitching too early, people struggling with objections, going, you know, Georgie, you're too expensive.
I've already got a supplier, Georgie, I've already got a trainer, why would I need to swap? And I've been burnt before. They're the top three objections that we see, particularly in agriculture, expensive trust and shifting across swapping service providers.
When we can work through those and then confidently close and ask for the sale, I thought there's only so many training sessions I can run in a year, in any given year. I'm a mother of three, running my own business, and I'm pretty good at balancing a life, work life balance, but I want to support more people. And that's where the book came into it.
Fell in the paddock, as you so eloquently said, Scott, is for the sales rep, it's for the sales leader, the national sales manager, anybody in Australian agriculture who is driving up driveways, connecting with a customer, farmer, retail store that needs some support in going, how can I connect better with this customer? That conversation that I had last week didn't land. How can I have it better?
That's what the book's for.
Scott:
That relationship aspect is so critical, as you say, not just in ag sales, sales generally and relationships generally, but you make the case that selling in agriculture is quite a bit different from selling in other industries. And I'm curious, what is it that makes it different? And why does that matter for how sales reps approach sales and ag?
Georgia:
That's a good question. And I get pushed back on this from competitors in the sales space that sales and sales, you know, and I do agree to that to a degree that selling is all about relationships and connection and that goes across any industry. But where I've noticed in the 15 years of working in agriculture, where I've noticed the difference in agriculture is the emotion piece.
When we're selling on a farm to farmers, Scott, often they are living on their property. They're living and breathing the work that they do 24-7 and there's no off switch. So when you're coming into somebody's work, it's also their home.
It's also where their family are. There's a lot of there's a lot more moving parts and pieces than there would be with just a business. And so the emotional side of things is where I see the biggest difference.
And also the long buying cycles, the things that are out of our control when we're farming. We we all have a joke in in agriculture where whenever we catch up with us at a conference, say, and often conferences are at the big, big major cities, the big capital cities, and there's a casino always near both. You're working with a girl, we're going to go into the casino.
They say, why would I go into a casino when I'm gambling every day on my own farm as to whether or not it's going to rain. That's the reason why not. We're going to be able to afford the fertilizer prices this week because of the geopolitical changes that happen and, you know, fuel and diesel prices.
There's so many challenges that a farmer has to face. And it's a 10 year, often a 10 year cycle for growers, farmers to. Analyze their profit, if that makes sense, you can't go into farming assuming you're going to make a profit like one year.
It's a 10 year cycle. And I was just chatting with a team about this yesterday and I think we broke it down to this like two out of ten. There's two years when they're going to have really big profits, huge, really profits that will help bolster them over the 10 years.
You'll have three years where you'll make a lot. And then the other five are kind of break even. We might just win, we might just lose.
And so that kind of five year cycle, a 10 year cycle is something that a lot of other industries are not having to cope with, with people having to go to work and not and not make a profit. So there's a lot of empathy and compassion in the coaching that I lead in how we sell in agriculture. We have to be able to stand beside our customers and to be able to sit in the ship, so to speak, with them during those tough moments.
That's one of the challenges and the differences that I see in our industry.
Scott:
Yeah, that's really well articulated. And, you know, you're right, I don't think a lot of people realize how different it is when you're selling to somebody who's, like you said, they're sort of living where they work, right? It's their business, it's their home, it's where their family is, where they raise their kids.
And, you know, emotionally layering on the, you know, the risk that they have in the business itself, it does create a very, very different dynamic than a lot of other industries.
Georgia:
It does. And there's so much grief, Scott, so in agriculture, grief in terms of standard lifestyle grief that we all have in terms of maybe losing parents, you know, things like that, that happen. Also, then there's that livestock, if people are running livestock, that, you know, if they're dying, et cetera.
But then there's a lot of unspoken grief in agriculture as well. My background predominantly is horticulture, Scott. So there's no animals, there's no moving and breathing heartbeats and eyeballs, which is kind of how we, I think, associate a lot of grief when there's a loss, you know, the heart stops beating, the eyes close.
But in horticulture, say if you've sown a paddock of onions and you tend to that the whole season, you're getting rain, you're watering it, you're fertilizing it, you're weeding it and you're talking with supply chains at the other end saying, you know, this is how many tons we're going to have at the end of the season. You have a huge rain event or a hailstorm that completely shreds everything, it's unusable at the end of the course. And this is where the uncontrollables come in.
They've been lost there in terms of grief, you've lost a whole paddock, we've put a lot of time and effort and money and a lot of farmers, we don't talk about it enough. I think simply because there's no heartbeats and there's no eyeballs. That's a big part of why selling in the paddock is different, because I might need to then go in and sell more onion seed, which from a business perspective on my end is great.
But from the farmer's end of what they've gone through, it's really, really challenging. And so that's a lot of it too.
Scott:
Yeah, that's a fascinating dynamic. Absolutely. You know, you've built the book around your selling in the paddock blueprint.
You're starting with know yourself. And I'm curious, why start there instead of with product knowledge or sales tactics?
Georgia:
I love this. And this is because this is what the market has shown me. Every discovery call I have with a national sales manager, Georgia, I need support with my team.
They are technically spot on. They know their stuff. They know their product.
And if we're waiting on a new product that's coming in from overseas, they're really lacking confidence getting out onto the ground because they don't feel the confidence in knowing the product. So from a sales perspective, there was never really much support needed in terms of supporting with the product knowledge. That's where particularly today's generation are coming in really, really talented.
They know their stuff. It's the people skills, the people side of things where people are really lacking. And that's where knowing yourself comes into it.
And that comes from personal experience to Scott. So through my journey, starting out younger in the agricultural space, being a bit of a fiery head, hot head, saying what I think, putting my foot in my mouth, getting it wrong, stumbling, having children, dealing with some postnatal depression, getting into therapy personally for myself, doing a Masters of Life coaching and really having this self-awareness piece of learning about myself and understanding myself.
When we understand who we are and how we process information and how we prefer to, that might be personality styles, Scott, it could be communication styles. I talk a lot about them in the book. When we know who we are on results driven or on people and energy, I need to know who's using the product before I'm willing to kind of go into it.
When we know that about ourselves, we can then reflect back out into the world, whether it's our family, our team, our customers and going, they're a little bit different. They're not as interested in the people side of things. They're more interested in the results or the why.
And when we can see that difference, that allows us to sell better. Why? Because we can adapt.
Right, Scott, so when we know how we are ourselves and how we prefer to the information that we need, we can then see the difference in our customers.
Scott:
Yeah, that's a fascinating insight and I never really thought of that, but you're absolutely right, because without reflecting on yourself, you just sort of behave as though everybody is driven by the same things that you are. And so that's a really, really strong insight. And I think I think listeners are going to get a lot as they think about their biases and how that might influence how they interact with other people as well.
Georgia:
You can see that, Scott, in terms of starting my career in sales and having training myself. They're all soft skills. People skills are all soft skills.
Deloitte have in the last few years shifted that language to now be power skills because of the drive and the knowledge of having these skills of how to interact with people, how to connect, how to build rapport and trust, that emotional intelligence side of things. I think employers are like 85 percent now more likely to hire on emotional intelligence over IQ. So these are strong skills that are needed in every industry.
Scott:
Yeah, absolutely is. I'd love to shift gears a little bit and talk about the writing process itself. How did you find the process of writing the book?
You mentioned earlier that, you know, you hadn't go back a while. You hadn't considered that you would ultimately write a book. How did you go about translating your years of on the ground experience into something that, you know, is structured and teachable in a book format?
Georgia:
I love this question because I'm hoping that this fits them right and allows people to have a crack themselves. At the start of the journey of this book, I knew that I was never, I was never a great writer. English was my subject at school, very math, science driven, which is why I think I fell into agriculture and loved that agronomy side of things.
Black and white, you know, the correct answer. And so it was quite overwhelming to think, I don't know how I'm going to, I don't know how I'm going to write this book. Thankfully, AI tools now can really help you get out of your comfort zone.
And what I mean by that is, GTP really helped me in terms of structuring this book. And I want to be open about that because I didn't spend hours writing down in my notebook. I struggle to do that.
My brain doesn't process like that. I'm good on a computer and I'm really good speaking. And so the way that I wrote this book was I'd spend afternoons typing down things that I'm going, this is what, this is all that's in my head.
This is all the information that I'm using that I know is working. How can we bring this into a book? And so that was really, that was really the first process of going, great, you're using this four part framework in your trainings every day, Georgia, and it's working.
You're seeing the results, you're getting the testimonials, you're getting repeat business. This is working. We need this into a book format.
And that's where it started to go, OK, we'll structure the book the same way that I structure my coaching sessions and my training days. And then it was once we kind of had that shell, then it was like, great, I've just got to break it apart here. And this is the intro on the first few chapters.
And I'll just get into there. And I knew all the stories that I wanted to tell. And I knew all of the learnings that I wanted people to walk away with.
And chat really just helped me shift all of the huge information that I had into a more structured piece, which I could then give to you guys, the editors, that then helped even polish it further. So interestingly, Scott, as well through this process, I've since found out that I am dyslexic. And also I'm going through ADHD testing as well.
So yes, other things where my brain might work differently and really probably struggle to sit down and write for long periods of time, we can do it. And I think, you know, being super inspired by people like Jamie Oliver, who's on a much more dyslexic scale than I am, but who's one of the most published authors in the world. You know, so I'm hoping that people listen to this podcast and go, jeepers, if someone like Georgia can write a book, I've got a story to tell and I should be writing it too.
Scott:
Georgia, I'm so happy that you shared that because, you know, the AI tools that are available today are so powerful. You know, I feel like for a lot of people, there's, you know, a bit of they feel shame if they're using it or they don't want to admit it. They want to present to the world that, you know, they went to a cabin and sat down with a 1920s typewriter and tapped it out the old fashioned way.
And, you know, certainly there are people who can go away and just kind of, you know, draft their manuscript that way. But there's no need to now. And what you shared, I think, is an important distinction between people who might be tempted to use AI just to abdicate responsibility for their ideas versus the way that you approached it.
And you leaned in and collaborated with AI to make sure that the stories that you were telling, the ideas that you were presenting were authentically yours. And that's a really important distinction in terms of how you can effectively use tools like ChatGPT and Cloud and Gemini to expedite this whole process in a way that, you know, makes the result even better than maybe it would be if, you know, you were working solo.
Georgia:
And faster, I think, particularly if I was trying to write this book prior to ChatGTP being available, I would have just with my dyslexia and ADHD, I think I would have really just gotten stuck and paralysed and going, I don't know where to go now. I've lost my interest and I've gotten bored. Where the AI tools that are available now, it's just it made it so much easier and it helps with the structure.
That's where I really struggled. I didn't understand how to create structure around the book. I knew what I wanted to say.
I knew that the points I wanted to get across in the stories, like I said. And so AI is everywhere now, Scott, isn't it? So it's about embracing it and making sure it's so authentic, because if I had to just put into chat, hey, can you write me a story, you know, that would have come across.
I don't think you would have published, you wouldn't have signed me going, this is not authentic. And it was clear you and I had really honest discussions. You go, Georgia, I can see that chat's helped you write this book.
You know, we need to refine it now. And I said, absolutely. It definitely has, Scott, because if it didn't, I wouldn't be here.
But everything in this book is my own, is my stories. Is my experience and the failings that I've had, you know, and the wins that I've had as well. And I think we need to embrace AI at where we are today because it's going to allow people's stories to be told more easily.
Scott:
That's right, that's right. And it's so funny if we if we go back, you know, 20 years or 30 years, I don't even know how long ago, you know, you can imagine people thinking that using computers was maybe cheating. And, you know, you can't imagine any industry now, you know, where you're not using computers in some fashion.
So, you know, I really I agree with you. I think AI is going to be the same way. And we just have to learn how to use it in a way that accentuates our strengths and our ideas.
And, you know, you've certainly done that with this book. And I appreciate you being candid about it. Georgia, how can people get in touch with you to learn more about the work that you're doing?
Georgia:
Oh, that's a great question. Follow me on LinkedIn, Georgia Stormont, the Ag Sales Coach, or reach out to me, email Georgia @ CuriousGeorgiaCoaching.com. I would love to hear anyone who's thinking about writing a book or anyone in agriculture that needs some support with selling and boosting confidence.
Scott:
Fantastic. And we'll put those links in the show notes so that it's easy for people to access. Georgia, thank you again for being here and for being so generous with your time.
I really found this a helpful conversation. And I'm grateful that you shared your experience and insights with us.
Georgia:
Thank you so much, Scott. Appreciate you having me on.
Scott:
As we wrap up this episode of Entrepreneur to Author, remember this. Now is the time. Time to write, time to publish and time to grow.
I'm Scott MacMillan. Until next time.
