Know Thyself: A Philosopher's Guide to AgTech Marketing

“To know thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” – Socrates

Unfortunately, in modern business, marketing has become seen as the thing you do when you don’t have a very good product. It’s an afterthought, some collection of gimmicks and half-truths packaged to make you think the piece of crap I’m giving you is worth your hard-earned money.

I believe that good marketing is the distribution of truth that helps a customer frame a long-suffered problem in their mind, identify a believable solution to that problem and conceptualize the value of their ideal outcome once that problem is solved.

This is quite a bit harder than selling a course on “growth hacking” or some other pile of garbage that promises to help you get rich quickly. That is probably why excellent marketing is scarce.

Know Thyself

To do good marketing, you have to be willing to start with yourself – your company. First, you must get your own house in order…a concept that doesn’t always jive with the 'modern spirit.'

You have to be ruthlessly committed to considering viewpoints that make you uncomfortable and asking difficult questions without bias:

1. What problem are we actually solving?

You should be able to explain this to a five-year-old. Not because everyone else is stupid, but because until you have taught it to a child, you probably haven’t decided or made up your mind about it.

2. What are we going to call our category? How big might it be?

Once we know the problem we are solving, we have to define the name of the category we are going to serve. This is not the product grouping that one analytics company did when mapping your space. Don’t be lazy; you have to define this yourself. Those industry maps have their place and could help you determine the other players who might try to compete in your space and how large it might get.

For those interested, Shane Thomas featured a great AgTech Landscape map created by Aaron Maganheim and Topio Networks in the latest edition of Upstream Ag Insights.

AgTech Landscape Map

3.?Who are we selling this solution to?

There are only certain companies who will be interested in considering your products. Unless, of course, you are a me-too product that stands for nothing but incremental improvement. Then no one will be interested in your products...

Furthermore, it is not enough to have account targets; we need to identify the actual people inside those organizations. There is always a door-opener, a coach, and a contract signer…and there are always challengers working to kill the deal. Get to know each of these people inside your target market accounts, and it will save you money in targeting and will set up the rest of your interactions for success.

4. Why do people buy our stuff?

No, not why YOU WANT people to buy, but why do THEY actually buy. Get outside your four walls, ask your customers questions and be ready to learn. Just don’t allow this to take the place of a future vision. Customer feedback is where you get grounded. This is where you can understand where the puck has been and where it is today – but we all know that the best hockey players skate to where the puck is going. Still, look for the overlap between customer answers; the overlap has incredible value.

5. What does this individual need to hear right now to move them to the next stage in our sales funnel?

This is how you define your content pipeline. See my post “Carried Away by Content” for more on this.

Make something different. Make people care. Make fans, not followers.

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