Most sales situations involve selling to more than the immediate buyer. There’s the person who pays, and then there are people who are affected by the buying decision and influence it.
Different people in the same organisation
Brian Bett, founder of Illuminum Greenhouses in Kenya, started with a new idea for a service to help farmers time their watering activities according to soil conditions and tracking the levels of water tanks.
“We saw big potential for a system We used to go to a farm and they say how much water the plant needs a day. You need to know the height of the tank, how much is in it. We knew how long it took to water the plant at each level of the tank.” - Brain Bett
The farm owners loved the idea, but the Illuiminum Greenhouses team learned there was another step they needed to succeed:
"If you tell farmers to do this and that, they will, but they can’t keep all that at the top of their list of things to do. So 2 weeks later you’ll see there’s too much or too littler water. "
Then they realised there was an influencer they hadn’t considered:
“The problem is that the greenhouse owners have paid $3000 for the greenhouse, and you have a farmhand employed to take care of it.”
The farmhands, even though not the buyers, played a critical role. If the system didn’t work for them, then it didn’t work. The farmhands were forgetting to do the watering, not the farm owners. So Brain and his team addressed the farmhands’ needs as well.
“We’ve been prototyping with farmers, testing, seeing the SMS platform work on a feature phone so anyone can use it anywhere.”
Which organisations gain value from you, and why?
Werner Swart, out of South Africa, invented the Drylo Bag, 60-menter long grain-drying bags for the drying and preservation of wet grain and oil seeds. For small-scale farmers, his technology is much more cost-effective than typical grain silos, and gives farmers more flexibility in selling - so they make more money.
"The important thing is to really see who your client is… Is it the farmer or is it the coop? Is it the grain
accumulator who is your client? Who is going to buy it? Will the government buy it for the farmers? Is it the main tribe leader who will buy it?
Once you know that you must ask how you reach him, how does he know about my product, what is the advantage my product bring for him? Can he relate to the advantage of your product so there’s no way he won’t want it?"
Werner was open-minded about these questions, and quickly saw the best buyer for Drylo Bags:
“Commercial farmers know I can save them money, they can mitigate their risk, the cost of my unit compared to the gains are huge.”
It was clear who was buying, and why - and from there it was clear where to reach them: tradeshows.
And after Werner figured out how to sell at tradeshows in South Africa, he started to try internationally, where he opened Canadian and Australian markets.