Building a Go-to-Market Strategy in Agriculture

Great products die every day, in agriculture and elsewhere. Often, not because the product isn’t effective, but because the go-to-market efforts and infrastructure lack.

Too frequently founders, and established companies, treat distribution as something they will sort out later, after the product is “ready” or they simply think their current approach is “good enough.” By the time a team realizes, an inferior competitor with a working channel has moved ahead of them, or made their life more complicated.

Last week, I received a question surrounding where to start in Upstream when it comes to thinking about distribution. It occurred to me that I talk about distribution and GTM strategy a lot, but haven’t built out a stand alone article to reference — usually, the concepts are just built into the analysis.

That had me want to share a base overview of the framework I think through to help support thinking through Go-to-Market initiatives, including distribution. I won’t claim to be an expert on it, but I think the below provides a base framework that can be adapted to fit your specific needs, whether at a large entity, or a start-up.

Distribution is the crucial aspect of any business and influenced by many things including your COGS, how well you are capitalized and the long term vision for the business. It dictates margin structure, customer acquisition and experience, defensibility, addressable market, and ultimately whether a business grows or fails.

I tend to use distribution interchangeably with Go-to-Market, but that is incorrect. Distribution is one component of go-to-market.

A go-to-market (GTM) strategy is the plan for how a company brings a product to customers and captures value from it. We will ignore the value capture component for a minute and look specifically at the components surrounding the business model.

My friend Janette Barnard at Prime Future has a fantastic framework which incorporates the components effectively:

1.     Customer acquisition and demand creation. How the prospect becomes aware, qualified, and motivated to buy. This is how you actually get to the customer and is where most marketing strategies live.

2.     Physical (or digital) movement and delivery. How the product or service gets into the customer’s hands at the right time, the right condition, and the right cost. This often requires physical infrastructure (eg: trucks, warehousing), or can be digital infrastructure (eg: email lists, Shopify etc)

3.     Post-sale relationship management. Onboarding, support, retention, expansion, renewal. How does the customer experience with the product get supported?

Each of these needs to be thought through deeply to ensure that the economics, people and product set up actually make sense given the market.

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel states: