Challenges are a part of life and they’re definitely a part of business. Finding ways to clear each hurdle, no matter how high, is key to setting a company up for long-term success.
I can give you an example. Agronomix met with a significant challenge when the technology underlying our software hit its end-of-life. After much discussion, we decided the best move to ensure the future of our company would be to view this challenge as an opportunity to rebuild our software from scratch. It was a huge risk. I’ve been told by several industry sources that companies who try this often don’t survive.
Typically, a product like Microsoft Excel receives small, incremental changes across many years that slowly add up to a massive change. If you compare Microsoft Excel circa 2002 to its current iteration, you’ll discover that the program is strikingly different.
We were asking our customers to make that leap all at once. As you can imagine, this presented us with a daunting marketing challenge. The old AGROBASE Generation II software was solid, stable and popular. It was a relief when uptake of the new software quickly climbed to 75 per cent. Convincing the final 25 per cent to switch over was a bit more of a challenge and roughly 15 per cent of our customers remained on the old software five years after Genovix was introduced.
When this kind of reluctance persists, it’s important to understand why. For us, it was a combination of factors: Some users simply didn’t want to learn new software. Others were hampered by internal policies. Still others feared that data spanning many years, multiple locations and/or crops would be lost.
To be successful, our marketing needed to address these concerns, demonstrating to the reluctant that Genovix not only builds on the features that made AGROBASE so popular, it delivers a leaner, faster, more centralized software package, the learning curve is manageable, and even complex data can be migrated without loss.
While there is no question that the decision to rebuild our plant breeding software from scratch handed us a huge marketing challenge, embracing that challenge as an opportunity to better serve our customers turned a potential negative into a strong positive. It’s hard to see that as a bad thing.
What challenges have you overcome and how have they impacted your outlook and your company’s long-term success?
