The adage goes, if you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together. At Hello Tractor, our strategy is to go far and crowd in as many high performers as we can along the way, as we build the largest technology services marketplace for agricultural equipment contracting in the developing world.
Since inception, our mission has been to create a marketplace that unifies stakeholders in a digitally enabled ecosystem. Why is this unification needed for smallholder agriculture? For those unfamiliar with this industry, here’s a quick overview of the challenges:
- Over a half-billion smallholder farmers are without access to mechanization, utilizing more expensive means while wasting time and losing up to 50% of their yield;
- Tractor owners are unable to coordinate their demand across fragmented markets or professionalize their operations in a profitable way;
- Tractor dealers and financial institutions find it difficult to finance new assets into these markets due to lack of demand data and insights.
If you want to go fast, go alone, if you want to go far, go together
At Hello Tractor, we realized very early on that these challenges we are tackling are far greater than anyone of us can resolve individually. Hence, we sought to bring together a diverse marketplace of technology partners, mechanization service providers, manufacturers, input providers, and farmer organizations in a manner that ultimately provides reliable, accessible, and affordable services to farmers and unlocks value across the entire supply chain. We solidified this approach by introducing our Partners Program and a more coordinated digital engagement strategy.
We launched the Partners Program only a few weeks ago and have already started seeing early results of our partners solving core business and operational challenges of farmers, enabled by our technology. We introduced top of the funnel activities directed to select clients, generated hundreds of new leads, launched expanded digital engagement journeys for booking agents, dealers and tractor owners, increased targeted social media engagement on behalf of partners, and provided our top tier partners access to strategic business development opportunities and finance.
These vetted Partners are providing tractor services directly to farmers at the local level, managing their own fleet of tractors or helping others to do so or installing and re-selling our technology within their local markets – or a combination of the three.
What’s next for the Partners program? We will continue to look for opportunities to harden the Partner process for existing and new Partners and streamline our engagement and support. As we expand the marketplace, our Partners will be first in line to pilot new technology and new features and benefit from increased exposure to international markets. Lastly, we will develop and disseminate market-relevant playbooks and collateral to our partners, based on our lessons learned in our current markets.
Want to be a part of a Hello Tractor team with global reach? Want to work smarter and earn more from your farming or tractor operations? Hello Tractor gives you an opportunity to build and monetize your own marketplace, expand your services, and optimize your operations.