Segways in AgTech | Saturday Snapshot - May 13th
This Week's Snapshot: Segways in AgTech; Living in the Future; The One Thing
This week:
1. Free Upcoming Webinar:
Join me on May 24th as I team up with my friends at The Combine to host a training session on how AgTech startups can turn their marketing activities into revenue programs.
2. Segways in AgTech
Today, agtech is full of Segways.
Products that are so cool, reporters can’t help but fawn over them and VC’s can’t help but give them money.
“This is the future!”
We all “know” it.
Then sales fall woefully short. Why?
It turns out we’ve seen this movie before.
Around the turn of the century, some of the smartest people in the world believed that the Segway was the future of transportation.
This included people like John Doerr, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs.
These are individuals who are beyond thought leaders…I think we’re required to genuflect whenever they speak.
But they got this one wrong in a big way.
When the Segway hit the market in December of 2001, the company forecasted sales of 100k units in the first 13 months.
But in 2020, Fast Company reported that only around 140k Segways were EVER sold. That’s over almost 20 years!
What Segway missed, and what we often forget in #agtech is that our ability to define our customer’s problem is directly proportional to the demand we’re able to create for our solution.
Segway’s demise is multifaceted, as most failures are, but the company’s primary struggle was best articulated by Judy Cai, Segway’s former President, “With what you pay for a scooter versus a Segway PT to accomplish what you want to do, you see the huge difference right there.”
Segway never identified the problem that it solved better than anyone else.
You want to cruise around at 10 MPH instead of walking? Take a scooter or an e-bike…there’s no reason to buy a Segway.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what business guru’s say about your product. Winning is not defined by your ability to woo venture capital. The success of your business will entirely depend on what your customer believes about the problem you solve.
Agtech is full of Segway-like products today because agriculture already has well-defined scooters and e-bike equivalents in this space and walking (or the status quo) is firmly entrenched.
The technologies that succeed in agtech will be those who can say with confidence:
“Our customers believe that this technology is the key to fulfilling a core desire they have and is only attainable through using our system or working with us.”
Anything less than that is comparative gymnastics and will have you selling your business for spare parts in the near future.
Stop selling on features and functions, start selling on beliefs.
Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.
3. Living in the Future
Other folks in agriculture tell me all the time that #agtech companies “are living too much in the future.” I think that’s wrong.
I think that the bigger problem for startups in #agricultureandfarming today is that they‘ve never come close to living in anything resembling the future that their customers might experience.
They don’t know what to build because they aren’t “living in the future and looking around to see what’s missing,” as Mike Maples, Jr. says.
When we anchor our stories to technical capability, we tend to lose.
- “Nobody wants this technology.”
- “We have terrible UI.”
- “The market isn’t ready for us.”
But companies that can anchor their story to something that is missing in the future lives of their customers have a much better chance at winning.
- “We believed even when we had no reason to.”
- “It wasn’t pretty, but customers loved it.”
- “It was time for this technology.”
Our job as marketers and leaders is to make it time for the technology we’re selling, not for the sake of some arbitrary technical march forward across the pages of history, but for the sake of our customers and the lives we can enable them to lead.
It’s not about you, it’s not about your tech, it’s about what you and the tech can do for your customer.
4. The One Thing
Most companies in #agtech are trying to convince customers of too many things.
Here’s an example of what one company in the space is asking their customers to believe on just one page of their website:
- You need more accurate field data.
- You need 100% aerial coverage.
- You need real-time monitoring.
- You need plant-level measurements.
- You need it 50% faster.
- You need 10x the data points.
Most of us sell the very same way.
“We can do so many things, look at all of these possible hooks.”
But this is the wrong approach.
A few years ago, some of the most prominent leaders in direct response advertising did a study and found that when they asked their customers to believe more than one thing in their advertising, the conversion rates dropped in half.
If the customer needed to believe three things, then their conversion rates were almost non-existent.
Ever wonder why your marketing isn’t converting or getting through to your target market? You might be trying to make them accept too many disparate beliefs.
Instead, find the one thing you need them to believe so that all other concerns or objections become irrelevant.