The agriculture industry is facing significant disruption, driven by macroeconomic, grower, and competitive pressures. Feeding an expected global population of 9 billion people in 2050 will require the industry to grow significantly while balancing resource pressure and increasing price volatility. We help clients address these pressing issues by identifying growth opportunities and working with them to achieve commercial excellence through go-to-market strategy, pricing optimization, and sales execution.
Achieve commercial excellence through go-to-market strategy, pricing optimization, and sales execution.
What We Do
Help agriculture clients achieve commercial excellence by finding sources of organic growth and achieving above-market returns.
Ensure consistent sales execution with compelling performance evaluation, incentive programs, and rigorous performance management.
Identify growth opportunities based on macrotrends, micromarkets, and data-driven segmentation of customers.
Optimize margins with the right price strategy and architecture, and superior price execution and contract management.
Pinpoint sales growth opportunities throughout the customer lifecycle, through customer acquisition, account management, up-sell and cross-sell, value selling, and retention.
Reinvent the end-to-end customer journey with a streamlined and omni-channel experience.
Set the go-to-market architecture and omnichannel strategy, supported by efficient and effective marketing, retailer selection and enablement, and sales coverage.
Upgrade sales talent and accelerate sales capability building.
Examples of our work
Maximizing growth opportunities
Identified $500 million in growth headroom for a US crop protection producer.
Optimizing pricing through advanced analytics
Enhanced profit margin by more than 350 basis points through pricing discipline and advanced analytics-enabled dynamic price recommendations for a global ingredients player.
Guiding market entry
Identified $80 million in revenue potential for a seed producer entering the Indian market.
Optimizing marketing and distribution
Developed a marketing and distribution plan for specialty products, resulting in a 30 percent increase in projected return on investment for a European input player.
Featured Capabilities
Periscope by McKinsey
The Periscope platform combines world-class intellectual property, prescriptive analytics and cloud-based tools with expert support and training to drive revenue growth now and into the future.
ACRE
ACRE combines proprietary market outlooks, pricing data, and expert insights to help food companies, governments, investors, and agriculture players make better pricing, crop selection, and sales and marketing decisions.
Featured Experts
Daniel Aminetzah
Senior Partner
Advises global agricultural and specialty chemicals companies—along with investors in the sector—on corporate strategy, M&A, and commercial excellence
David Fiocco
Senior Partner
Advises global agricultural companies across developed and emerging markets, working across the value chain from field to fork, particularly focused on creating value through strategic planning, digital and advanced analytics innovation and commercial transformations.
Soenke Lehmitz
Senior Partner
Uses his expertise in B2B marketing and sales to support clients across the chemicals industry
Kun Lueck
Partner
Brings marketing and sales expertise to agricultural, chemical, and oil-field services and equipment companies in North America and Europe, guiding clients on merger and acquisition issues
Ryan McCullough
Partner
Leads ACRE—McKinsey’s agriculture and environmental advanced analytics center—and is a thought leader in best practices for use of analytics in crop yield forecasting, climate risk, geospatial analytics, and smallholder farmer solutions
Chandrika Rajagopalan
Partner
Helps leaders across the agricultural value chain drive growth and improve performance enabled by digital and advanced analytics; core lead of McKinsey’s Agriculture and Chemicals practices in EMEA
Featured Insights
Article
Unlocking the online retail opportunity with European farmers
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What can digital retailers in the agriculture sector do to encourage what could be a €10 billion market?
Video
Brazilian farmers’ approach to digital: Embracing digital
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McKinsey recently interviewed more than 750 Brazilian farmers in 11 states about their views on the use of digital technologies in agriculture and to better understand the farmer decision journey.
Article
A hard row to hoe—what’s in store for agricultural-input suppliers this year?
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US farmers are under increasing economic pressure. A recent McKinsey survey explores how this will affect their spending on agricultural inputs.
Article
Cultivating the omnichannel farmer
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Smart agriculture suppliers are giving farmers what every consumer wants: a digital interface for speed and convenience and human interaction when they need it. Here’s how they’re doing it.
Article
How to unlock growth in the largest accounts
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Large companies have become increasingly sophisticated negotiators. In response, smart selling organizations are upgrading how they manage their largest accounts.