Month: March 2026

Weak positioning isn’t just a marketing problem — it shows up in your sales cycle length, your churn rate, and your fundraising conversations. Here’s how to diagnose it.

Positioning is one of those words that gets used a lot in startup circles but rarely defined clearly. For AgTech companies, I think about it simply: positioning is the answer to the question ‘why should this specific farmer, at this specific moment, choose your product over doing nothing?’

The ‘doing nothing’ part matters. In agriculture, the default for most technology adoption decisions is still inaction. Growers are risk-averse by necessity — their margins are thin, their seasons are unforgiving, and a technology failure can have real consequences. Your positioning has to overcome not just competitor alternatives but the deeply rational instinct to wait and see.

Signs your positioning is weak

• Your sales cycle is longer than 6 months for a sub-$5,000 product
• Customers who churn say the product ‘wasn’t the right fit’ or ‘didn’t see the ROI’
• Your team gives different answers when asked ‘who is this for?’
• Your best customers look nothing like the customers you’re actively prospecting
• Investors describe your market opportunity as ‘interesting but unclear’

What strong positioning looks like

Strong positioning names a specific customer, a specific problem, and a specific measurable outcome. ‘We help drip-irrigated vegetable growers in the Southwest reduce water use by 20–30% without compromising yield’ is a positioning statement. ‘We provide AI-powered precision agriculture solutions for modern farmers’ is not.

The specificity that makes positioning feel limiting in a brainstorming session is exactly what makes it effective in a sales conversation. It gives growers a reason to pay attention, gives your team clarity on who to call, and gives investors a market they can size.

The positioning audit worth doing

Pull your last 20 closed deals. What do they have in common — crop type, farm size, geography, trigger event, who bought? If you can find a strong pattern, you already have the raw material for better positioning. If there’s no pattern, that’s the most important thing to fix before investing more in sales and marketing.

The US is the world’s largest agriculture market. It’s also one of the most fragmented, relationship-driven, and regionally diverse. Here’s what a decade of experience on both sides of the Atlantic has taught me.

I’ve spent the better part of a decade working in agricultural technology across the Netherlands, broader Europe, and now the US Southwest. The differences between these markets are real, significant, and underestimated by almost every European company I’ve seen try to make the jump.

Scale is deceptive

The US agriculture market looks enormous from the outside — and it is. But it’s not one market. It’s dozens of regional markets, each shaped by different crops, water regimes, soil types, climate pressures, dealer networks, and regulatory environments. A product validated in the Netherlands — a country roughly the size of West Virginia with one of the world’s most technically sophisticated farming industries — does not have a ready-made market in rural New Mexico or the Texas Panhandle.

This isn’t a reason not to come. It’s a reason to be deliberate about where you start. Pick one region, one crop, one problem. Own that before you expand.

The relationship infrastructure is different

In the Netherlands, you can reach a large proportion of the farming industry through a relatively small number of trade channels, cooperatives, and industry bodies. In the US, no such centralization exists. The cooperative extension system, agronomy dealers, input retailers, and regional grower associations all play roles — but they’re not coordinated, and they vary enormously by state and crop.

This means your US commercial strategy needs to be much more locally grounded than your European one. The companies that succeed here invest early in people with genuine regional relationships — not just sales experience, but community credibility.

What travels well

The good news: European agricultural technology tends to be genuinely world-class. The precision, the data quality, the sustainability focus — these all resonate strongly with the segment of US growers who are actively looking to modernize. The Southwest in particular is home to sophisticated irrigated agriculture operations that are actively seeking water management solutions, and European irrigation and soil sensing technology is directly relevant.

What also travels well is a genuine commitment to understanding the farmer’s operation before trying to sell them something. That approach resonates everywhere.