
You’ve manufactured a powerful new crop input. You’re confident that your product can enhance yields or protect crop health. But first, you have to convince retailers to sell it – and get farmers to actually try it.
If you want widespread distribution, you’ll have to both win over retailers and help them overcome growers’ preference for tried-and-true solutions. Luckily, there are proven strategies for doing exactly that. These four will help you get your most innovative products on shelves and in the ground.
1. Start Small and Build Credibility
Maybe your goal is to have your product in stock at every ag retailer in the country. But getting there is more than a matter of perfecting your product’s formulation – you’ll also have to perfect your pitch so your retail partners see the value in carrying your product.
The best way to hone that part of your offering is to start small. Ideally, you’ll first share your pitch with farmers, sellers, and agronomists who can offer feedback on what resonates and what falls flat. They might also ask questions that lead you to reshape your pitch.
You can then take your updated pitch to a couple retailers. Once you land your first deal, do what you can to make it a partnership: help the agronomists on staff understand the nitty-gritty of how your product works. Work with them to shape the pitch their sellers might use to get it into the hands of farmers.
After the first season, get all the feedback you can and continue to refine the pitch you bring to future partners. You may also be able to tap your first customers and partners for referrals, endorsements, and stories you can use as marketing collateral to boost your credibility in future conversations. Which brings us to the second strategy.
2. Tell Compelling Customer Stories
You’ll definitely need fact sheets to share with your retail partners. But consider this: people make 90 to 95 percent of decisions based on emotions. So having a few customer stories on hand can help you overcome reluctance and lead retailers (and farmers) to an ah-ha! moment about the value of your offering.
From there, fact sheets can help growers validate their choice.
So what should these stories look like? The best ones…
- Are concise: People have short attention spans and limited working memory. Keep your story concise to hold your audience’s attention. Agronomists can be a huge asset here: they can help you tighten each story to focus on the benefits of your product most likely to appeal to farmers, whether that’s improved yields or greater sustainability.
- Are relatable: Make a current customer the hero of your story. Explain the challenges they faced, why they chose your product, and how they ultimately achieved success. This framework makes it easier to see how growers benefit.
- Are authentic: Use customer names, titles, and quotes so that each story feels like it’s coming from someone real. If you have the budget, photos and videos can be helpful as well.
- Are conversational: This amps up the relatability factor by creating less distance between your audience and your brand. You can even sprinkle in some humor (just don’t go overboard).
- Use data sparingly. Some data is helpful to appeal to growers’ logical side. But too much can easily overwhelm people. Save the bulk of your data for a fact sheet, report, or white paper that more analytical audiences (including agronomists) can dive into.
Note that you’ll likely need a suite of stories to various audiences on board. Retailers might want to hear about how your product helped another retailer gain wallet share and drive customer loyalty. But their sellers will need stories about farmers seeing great results in the field.
3. Lower the Risk of Trying New Products
Loss aversion is a massive hurdle for ag product adoption, especially among farmers. When it comes to purchase decisions, the fear of a potential loss can outweigh the draw of higher yields or revenue.
This makes sense in context. Growers have a limited number of harvests in their lifetime, so a single crop failure can have a tremendous impact on their livelihood. As a result, some growers are highly averse to trying new products. And for retailers, it’s in their best interest to prioritize selling low-risk products that growers will actually buy.
One way to tackle this problem? Develop a mix of “carrots” and “shields” that make your product incredibly hard to pass up.
Carrots are incentives that motivate growers to try new products. These might include exclusive discounts, promos, or giveaways for early adopters.
Shields, on the other hand, help farmers minimize the risk of trying something new. For instance, you might offer free product samples. Or provide a money-back guarantee if your product doesn’t meet growers’ expectations.
Phosphosolutions, a fertilizer manufacturer, partnered with Growers Edge on the latter approach to drive adoption for its RhizoSorb product.
RhizoSorb had clear potential to optimize phosphorus use and reduce costs. But growers were hesitant to switch from traditional fertilizers. So Phospholutions offered an attractive “shield”: the Growers Edge Crop Plan Warranty.
The warranty covers any yield shortfalls to mitigate the perceived risk of using RhizoSorb. This made it easier for retailers to sell and helped win farmers’ trust. Today, Phosphosolutions has enrolled over 12,000 acres – and that number is continuously growing.
4. Celebrate Failures as Learning Opportunities
It takes a lot of failure to develop and sell a great product. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Each failure can give you insight into what retailers and farmers need and where you might be falling short. You can use this knowledge to continuously improve your product, tweak your positioning, and ultimately secure more partnerships.
It might help to think of this process like a game of tennis. Your first “serve” is to get an MVP to retailers as quickly as possible – perhaps a handful of smaller partners. They’ll send over a “volley” of constructive feedback (e.g., “Growers care more about Benefit A than Benefit B and might need something extra to try out this product.”). You can quickly address this feedback with responsive updates (e.g., positioning that plays up Benefit A, plus a related freebie bundled with a warranty.).
This back-and-forth continues: retailers share more input, you make further improvements, and you inch closer to a truly satisfying product. When retailers are ready to promote your product to growers, you’ll have scored a big win.
This iterative process helps you learn from mistakes to create a more resilient product strategy. With time, you’ll be more aligned with retailers’ and growers’ needs – and ultimately boost adoption.
Pave the Way to Success with the Right Techniques and Tools
Every ag innovation faces adoption hurdles. But with the strategies we’ve discussed, you can accelerate product adoption, boost loyalty, and grow your market share.
Digital tools like Crop Plan Warranty can help you achieve these goals faster. We’ll manage warranty claims and payouts so you can focus on reaching more growers.
Interested in learning more? Get in touch. We’d love to talk you through your options.