Five Skills for an Ag Sales Rep
When we finished the Freedom Ag skills module, the question wasn't how to package the files. It was which five frameworks to encode in the first place.
A skill is a folder you hand Claude once. After that, it uses those instructions automatically whenever the work calls for it. The technical side is straightforward. The curation decision takes longer: which frameworks actually match how this business runs, and which ones would be noise?
Here's how we landed on each one.
Humanizer
This one isn't optional. A grower who's been buying ag inputs for 30 years can spot a form letter before he reads the second sentence. Anything that comes out of Claude before it goes to a customer needs to sound like it came from the person whose name is on it.
The humanizer strips the tells: the em dashes, the "not just X but Y" construction, the inflated transition words, the three-item lists that AI defaults to. It's the last step on almost everything else in the pack.
SPIN Selling
Neil Rackham's original research had a counterintuitive finding: the closing techniques that work on small consumer sales actively lose you complex B2B sales. The harder you push for commitment before the buyer has fully worked through the problem themselves, the worse your close rate gets.
An ag inputs sale is exactly the scenario where that plays out. A grower making a decision that affects his whole season, one he'll justify to a partner or a landlord, doesn't respond to urgency tactics. He responds to the right questions asked at the right time. The SPIN skill keeps Claude in asking mode instead of pitching mode.
Influence
Cialdini's seven principles: reciprocation, commitment, social proof, liking, authority, scarcity, unity. We included it for two reasons.
First, it sharpens a seasonal push. Prepay messages, early-order campaigns, trial offers. The skill helps structure those so the deadline and the proof points land correctly.
Second, it tells you when you're being worked. Knowing the framework makes you better at reading supplier promotions that are designed to move your behavior, not your customer's.
StoryBrand
Most ag supplier messaging talks about the supplier: our history, our service, our team. Growers don't buy that framing. Donald Miller's framework flips the structure so the customer is the hero and you're the guide.
We included this one because Freedom Ag's website description of what they do was supplier-centered. The skill is the fix for that, and it works on any new marketing copy that goes out.
Price sheets, labels, spec sheets, supplier quotes. They arrive as PDFs. They sit there. The pdf skill pulls the text and tables, merges them, and produces something you can actually compare across suppliers.
The detail that matters: it says plainly when it can't read something instead of inventing a number. In ag, a made-up application rate is a real liability. That behavior was the requirement, not a nice-to-have.
What the Pack Is
Five skills, each encoding one established framework. The actual work was deciding which five: which frameworks map to an ag inputs sales rep's week closely enough to earn a permanent install, and which would become clutter.
That curation decision is repeatable. When we build skills packs for other clients, the structure is the same: start from the actual sales model, find the frameworks that already describe how it works best, and encode those. The AI part follows from the judgment call, not the other way around.