Are You Crowd Sourcing Ideas [Academy]

Are You Crowd Sourcing Your Ideas?

Over the years crowd sourcing has been an effective way of helping individuals or businesses raise money to help them meet financial needs. The strategy involves asking people all over the world for monetary donations so those in need can get back on their feet after a big loss. 

But crowd sourcing isn’t new. It’s been a popular and effective strategy for the past 50 years in the seed business too, but not just for financial reasons. The crowd sourcing I’m talking about is centered around obtaining marketing ideas from the crowd of other companies in the industry, including competitors on how to sell more seed. Virtually every company would keep their eyes on competitors to see how they marketed their seed.

If a competitor’s strategy was successful, they would then plan to use that same marketing strategy the next year. These investigations went all the way from marketing programs to how much other companies were going to charge farmers for their seed. 

Crowd sourcing to get new ideas helped a lot of seed companies stay in business over the years, and not just the ones that didn’t have their own marketing departments. As a seed company prepared for a new sales year, it would look at what other companies were doing and borrow their ideas. There were years, for example, when virtually every company was offering free trips to customers if they bought a certain amount of seed. In other years almost every company offered a unit of seed free for every unit they purchased.

Companies used tools, household appliances, pickup trucks, farm tractors, grain bins and more to get farmers to buy their seed. Borrowing ideas from competitors, which today would have been called, “pilfering” or stealing, was the primary way many companies came up with their marketing strategies. Very few had their own unique ways of going to market.

Unfortunately, crowd sourcing ideas has not stopped or even slowed within the seed industry. Companies continue to do it, in fact, they’re recycling old ideas, many of which no longer work. It’s as if they’ve run out of ideas so they reuse old ones. But farmers have caught on and decided to create their own incentives for buying. They’ve decided that since all companies look, act, and sound the same, they must all be the same. The only difference has to be the price their asking for their products. As a result farmers are turning seed buying into a commodity transaction based only on who has the cheapest price. 

But my ideas for increasing seed sales over the past 30 years weren’t crowd sourced at all. I developed them myself through the school of hard knocks and from years of face-to-face contact with farmers. I quickly recognized what farmers needed and wanted and it wasn’t a program or a cheap price. They wanted someone to help them raise yields. If they raised more yield they could buy their own trips and their own tractors with the extra profit. My idea was simple, teach farmers how to follow new, innovative ways of raising a top crop so they can increase production and profit and will want to buy more seed from your company the next year. 

Do you hear a lot of companies talking about the Top 5 Factors to Producing a Top crop, the 1000 Variables, the one variety per field concept or stop using test plots? Of course you don’t because they either don’t know about those concepts or don’t care to execute them because it would require changing how both their salesforce and their customers think and that would require effort. 

The one idea farmers are searching for every year is how to increase yields so they can increase profit, but they’re having a hard time finding it? It should be available from a crowd of companies offering those kinds of values, but no one is using that strategy. So if you’re looking to get new ideas on how to sell more seed in the future, crowd sourcing won’t help you. The crowd is out of ideas.  

But if you’re willing to try an old idea I developed 30 years ago that works year after year and never wears out, teach your growers how to achieve the highest yields. Show them it’s not about products, prices, or programs, but only about their own expertise in getting the most out of every variety they plant. They need to learn the only way to make more money is to produce more yield and to do that they need to change how they farm. 

Just so you know, you may find one or two companies using my ideas on how to help farmers increase yields and profit. But don’t depend on them sharing those ideas with you. They’re having too much fun selling seed.

Happy Selling,

Rod