Worms, Strawberries, and Strategy
What should we sell – what customers want or what they need?
Dale Carnegie said many years ago:
“Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I didn’t think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted.”
Does this idea work in business? Yes, it works perfectly, but that can be bad news.
What do your customers want?
My friend Andre is from Portugal. Once, he fell in love with a foreign girl and moved to her home country. As his family and he himself were in the precision farming business, he decided to study the industry landscape in the country.
And he found out that the market was untapped. Local farmers, die-hard traditionalists, employed outdated technologies and obsolete approaches. Most of them had never heard of the precision farming.
It made him feel happy. As many business gurus advise, he saw a lot of opportunities there. He became very enthusiastic – but not for long.
He arranged dozens of meetings …