Too often throughout my career, I’ve witnessed ag start-ups neglect commercial activities until they’re 12-18 months – little more than a season! – away from the planned launch of commercial sales. The truth is, it’s never too early to begin considering the commercialization of an up-and-coming product or service. Commercial strategy development should start as early as the seed stage. Planning for the commercial launch can help influence activities across your organization, including R&D and agronomy.
Are you ready to start planning your commercial strategy? We’re here to help! Based on over 15 years of launching emerging technology in agriculture, we have a proven process for uncovering the necessary customer insights to shape a successful product-market fit. Below are our recommended seed-stage commercial activities to drive long-term success:
Market Research: Qualitative Interviews
You’ve got an idea, or perhaps you’ve developed a product. You know a lot! But you can always learn more; you especially need to learn more about your target audience. Enter: qualitative interviews.
Conducting 1:1 interviews with 8-12 individuals within your target audience is incredibly insightful. Your role in this activity is to listen. Don’t try to sell them on your idea or concept; instead, pay attention to what they identify as pain points with the solutions currently on the market. Listen to their choice of words and the emotions being conveyed so you might better understand your target farmers’ current perceptions and feelings related to your product or solution.
The findings from these interviews may impact your business’s next steps, so it’s best to approach this step with intention. I strongly advise using a third-party research partner to conduct the interviews, especially because respondents tend to be more open and honest when not speaking with a company employee, and you remove any potential bias in the research.
Market Research: Quantitative Concept Study
The qualitative interviews are done, and you’ve developed a top-notch written product/concept. Now it’s time to refine further your product or service features and benefits based on the needs of your target market. A tremendously useful way to do this is to collect information via a market survey.
A best practice is to work with a market research provider to help. In partnership with you, they’ll develop a written, testable product concept outlining your value proposition, differentiation, and key benefits. They’ll then help determine the appropriate sample and execution, often via a web-based survey tool.
Doing a market concept test delivers many insights, including but not limited to the following:
- Product/service relevancy (is this offering relevant to them personally?)
- Product/service believability (do they believe it can/will perform as you outlined?)
- Overall interest levels for your offering (what is the profile of the respondents most interested?)
- Drivers/barriers to adoption (what is holding them back from considering a purchase when available?)
- Prioritization of benefits (what messages should lead your communication efforts?)
- Perception of performance (how will your audience measure this product to determine if it performs?)
Doing this step allows you to ask questions and gain answers in a low-stakes setting and helps refine the features, value proposition, benefits, and more of your product offering. Asking farmers what they think and having the data to back it up enables your agronomic trialing strategies to align with how farmers will measure your product or service on their operations.
Market Sizing
The quantitative concept study has a dual purpose; once you have data from the study participants, you will have built a “profile” of your target audience. This information will help you determine how large that market is.
While you may have some of the data to figure this out, you might not know where to start. Not to worry: some third-party specialists can conduct this analysis for you. Their insights may also deliver additional details (depending on data availability) about your target audience, including demographics, farm size, geography, seed brand, and more.
What you gain from this exercise is knowledge about the size of your market opportunity (acres and farmers) and where your product or service’s most significant market opportunity resides.
These three activities require time and money but will pay dividends down the road. Ensuring your offering is aligned with your target market and that your product offering successfully fits is essential to see sustainable commercial growth.
In the ever-changing world of agriculture, there’s always something new. We know your new product or service’s importance to you, and we’re here to help. At 9N, we have helped many start-ups through the commercialization process successfully. Are you ready to take the next step to bring your product to market? We’d love to hear from you. Let’s connect, and we’ll lead you to success.