Choosing the right crop input distributor for you and your product or technology

Agriculture is in a very exciting time with many new innovations. Yield enhancing crop input technologies are more diversified and complex than ever before. Indeed, we live in an exciting time where any one person or a small company can make positive and lasting changes in how we grow and cultivate crops. Consumers and growers are demanding newer and more efficient technologies. Growers have evolved and are also more adoptive of new technology. Finding the right distributor relationship, with good communication and similar goals, will help you take advantage of the opportunities and see great success.

But finding the ideal distributor for your unique crop input technology can be challenging. The big questions:

• Does an ideal distributor already market technologies similar to what you have?
• Do they already market a competing technology?
• Or, ideally, do they not have offerings like what you may bring them?

These questions are important to ask to ensure that your product receives the attention it deserves and the resources needed to allow for commercialization. If the targeted distributor is already marketing a similar product, they may have a conscious or subconscious motivation to keep competing technologies off the market. They may view your new product as a threat to the investment of time, money and resources they’ve already made.

If you are a foreign entity trusting your technology with a new distributor in a new country, the last thing you want is for your technology to be strategically tied up by a group that represents themselves as the ideal distributor of your technology. You can try and overcome this potential pitfall with performance guarantees only to learn a year or two later that this “ideal distributor” never intended to even try and achieve market penetration and meet or exceed the performance guarantees. What you’ve lost in time can be irreplaceable in terms of economic loss. In fact, you may have provided the industry with an opportunity to invent “me too” products. Essentially, if you don’t have a motivated distributor, you’ve spent a lot of money educating your competition.

So, what SHOULD you look for in your ideal crop input distributor?

1. First and foremost, you want a distributor that is hungry for market penetration. The distributor needs to WANT your technology and have a strong appetite to commercialize it.  

2. The right distributor will have industry understanding and use appropriate restraint.

• The distributor should demonstrate a degree of technical appreciation and understanding of what you bring to agriculture. Your “technical language” should be well understood. Your representative should comprehend principles behind your technology and appreciate the mode of action, the uniqueness and the value add it brings to the industry. They should even be able to add to your story to help market to the local grower. A simple indication that you are in good company would be that at the end of your presentation, they should be able to verbalize what they hear from you in a language that makes sense to you.
• Restraint is important because it’s simply not feasible to market to all places at once. The right distributor will focus on specific geographic regions and crops, especially at first. In contrast to smaller agricultural countries, the United States’ scale is so much larger and the ideal distributor understands the amount of work and the nuances involved in each sector. Given that the United States is one of the biggest crop producers in the world, one can appreciate that the market is more complex when compared to a small country. The ideal distributor should not promise to go after all sectors right away.

If they can’t state it back to you, then they don’t understand you. You should hear, “WOW – that’s amazing. We don’t have that here. We know exactly where this product would be a good fit.”

3. Your right distributor has resources available to commercialize your technology.

• Financial: They should have the financial means to undertake U.S. trials and, if needed, product registrations and further research and development of marketing material.
• Manpower: There should be experts to analyze the data and share the message in the marketplace.
• Contacts: Not only should a distributor have a strong base of industry contacts, but they should also be willing to freely share with you the contacts that would help get the word out. This includes but is not limited to agronomists, academics, key growers, retailers, and even possible manufacturers.
• A sense of humility and ability to overcome challenges when things don’t go as planned is important. The ideal distributor will be cautious before making any guarantees of performance while also taking responsibility for the successes and failures related to their marketing efforts.
• For instance, trials in the U.S. may inadvertently show negative or undesirable results only to find that it was due to the seed quality, an unusual weather pattern, a translation mistake or even an accidental spill.
  • EX: a spray herbicide was used and the tank wasn’t washed completely so that when a fertilizer was added to the tank and then used, the crop was killed from the application of the herbicide residue

Don’t be afraid to ask what the budget would be or to give you a business plan that allocates what resources will be used to market your technology and include what they do in case things don’t go as planned. These answers are insightful.

 

 

In general, be wary if a distributor already has similar technology, but don’t refrain from having a discussion. They may not be satisfied with what they already have and appreciate that you may have something that addresses a real need in the marketplace.  They may be willing to entertain marketing your product provided it doesn’t impact any contractual obligations they may have already agreed to.

If they don’t have your technology, they may initially lack minor areas of expertise, but you should see a strong motivation to offer good technology in the marketplace. They will learn by working with and for you.

Kannar has experience in just how difficult it is to fully understand and appreciate a new technology. It takes commitment to learn, and perseverance and follow through to self-educate when needed. We’re fortunate at Kannar that our team has a nearly insatiable demand to learn more and apply what we learn. We are wary of partnering with people – team members and clients – that claim they know it all. It takes vulnerability to admit you don’t know something, but we will be honest with you if we don’t know something and commit to learning more.

If you were to introduce a new technology, you should outline what success looks like.  For instance, there may be agreement that in year one we should have 200,000 acres of treated crops, but in year five it would be one million acres. This discussion should lead to a commitment to evaluate what goes right and what goes wrong. If there is a solid partnership, needed actions will be taken to address areas of concern.

Contact Kannar to start the discussion today. We are excited about the new opportunities in agriculture and want to see if we’re a good fit for your product and maximize your exposure.