Saturday Snapshot - May 6th
This Week's Snapshot: Nobody Wants Every App; Why Are You Wrong?; Pizzazz Pizza
This week:
1. Nobody Wants Every App
“...there is an app for everything, but nobody wants every app.” - Bill McDermott on the ServiceNow earnings call on April 26th
This sounds incredibly familiar to the conversations I have had over the last six months with agtech CEOs and VCs.
I believe that McDermott’s analysis hits the nail right on the head for some of the adoption challenges in #agtech.
Companies selling tech into #agricultureandfarming largely assumed that they were selling into a technical development environment with more fragmented developer-owned budgets because that mirrored the way successful firms like Twilio, Calendly, etc. were going to market (a strategy that has been in vogue since at least 2008), but my experience tells me that agriculture companies are set up to adopt technology across their entire enterprise.
On his call, McDermott said, “[Customers are] looking for a single platform that can orchestrate the entire technology value chain...”
That sounds to me like the “agronomic tech stack” that Ehsan Soltan and Soiltech Wireless, Inc. have been promoting over the last year, SwarmFarm Robotics' concept of “integrated autonomy,” and Tim Hyde and his team at SWAN Systems enabling “irrigation technology optimization.”
I work with these founders and share many of their visions for the future, so I’m interested in hearing other perspectives. Do others in the agtech space agree with this analysis? Why or why not?
2. Why Are You Wrong?
Why are you wrong?
No, not in the vague, mystical sense.
What would have to be true for you to be completely wrong about the solution you deliver?
What belief does a segment of your market hold that makes them right in resisting your solution?
We all talk about things like positioning, messaging, vision, and competitive analysis all day. But one thing we don't discuss nearly enough is the belief system or framework our customers are using to evaluate our solution.
And we never begin by considering that maybe...just maybe...those who choose not to work with us aren't actually backwards losers who just hate technology.
Maybe they're right, maybe we’d even think the same if we saw the world the way they see it.
Perhaps we should stop demonizing populations of people who “don’t get it,” and begin considering what they believe about themselves or the world which gave them their position on your solution.
Your detractor is not the enemy, their framework for evaluating your solution is. If you believe that your solution is better for them, give them a new lens to view their problems with.
Stop telling us how stupid everyone else is, start telling better stories that make them smarter.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.
3. Pizzazz Pizza
“It's a DIFFERENT kind of pizza only Taco Bell has.”
And with the creation and advertisement of “Pizzazz Pizza,” Taco Bell grew from $900M in sales in 1984 to $1.4B in 1986.
The vision behind this “different kind of pizza” came from the company’s new, Hawaiian shirt-clad CEO, John Martin, who wanted to take the Mexican fast food giant mainstream; they didn't want to own the Mexican fast food space (~$1B in 1985), they wanted a piece of the $37B fast food market.
Taco Bell’s ability to re-frame their customers problem of where to eat from “do you like Mexican food?” to “a cure for the common meal” with their story of familiar, yet distinctly different, is what allowed the chain to attract new customers and create categorical growth for Mexican fast food and, of course, Taco Bell, who was able to raise its profits by 25 percent annually throughout the late 1980s.
The success of this framing still lasts to this day as Mexican fast food now accounts for 7% of the sales in a now $331B fast food market, most of which still flows to the folks at Taco Bell who raked in $13.2B in 2021.
Like Ries & Trout told us all those years ago, it pays to be first in the customer’s mind.
For agtech companies and my friends in the agriculture space, you can like Taco Bell, or you can hate them, but it would sure be smart to learn how to frame the world for your customer like them.