Preparing Your Sales Team for the Biologicals Battlefield
28 September 2026 The global biologicals industry has developed remarkable scientific and technical capabilities. Translating those capabilities into scalable, consistent commercial success remains a challenge. The issue is not a lack of funding or expertise. Rather, the industry was built to advance the science first, with the supporting systems for distribution, adoption, and scale evolving later.
Grower Knowledge is Part of the Product
Knowledge matters more in biologicals than in almost any other input category. A chemical herbicide does not demand depth of knowledge from the grower — expectations are known, proof is immediate, and the information for decision-making is already embedded in routine management.
Biologicals are still a category in development. Results are probabilistic, often indirect, and depend on a product’s management, application window, soil, and tank mix. Without an understanding of how the product behaves in the planting system, the grower cannot even interpret his own result.
Building Out the Sales Pitch
Marketing receives data from research and focuses mainly on three things: training material for its own team and the channel, demonstration plots, and communication.
The problem is not who executes it but how the function was designed. In most companies, marketing grew as an extension of the technical area and was never built as a discipline of its own.
Training
In training, there is often a technical overload. The sales representatives leave knowing how to explain a mode of action and colony-forming units, but they do not understand how to give a 15-second answer on why the product costs more than the one beside it. What is missing is not the content, but the content built from the logic of the objection rather than of R&D.
Demos
Demonstration plots are a scientific showcase. The industry’s strongest demand-generation asset — local proof on the neighbor’s land — is too often run as a research protocol, measuring what interests the researcher rather than what decides the sale.
Communication
In communication, by-the-book campaigns are dense technical language or messages so generic that swapping the logo would change nothing.
That is the costliest gap. The buyer cannot verify performance because results can only be confirmed seasons later. The brand carries the trust that a technical explanation cannot prove.
The sector treats the company’s brand as a visual identity. When a company’s communication and reputation do not differentiate it, neither can the distributor — so the conversation collapses into price.
Additional Challenges
The person in front of the grower usually works for a distributor, cooperative, or dealer. This person is not your employee, not dedicated to biologicals, and is carrying hundreds of products that are easier to sell and quicker to prove. That salesperson is often not only underinformed. He is contested.
It is not enough that he was trained; he has to choose to use it. Training without buy-in produces someone who can explain your product but will not defend it. The effort of defending a new product in a developing category takes time, repetition, and patience to withstand several “nos” before the first “yes.” The easier sale wins by default.
Products get sold when the product becomes the rational choice of someone who does not work for your company.
For instance, the large chemical and seed companies hold the best distribution in agriculture and have declared major ambitions in biologicals, increasingly licensing the biological asset from outside. Even so, the market leaders in several relevant geographies — Brazil among them — are pure players. Channel presence is not access here. Recommendation is won through local demonstration, technical support, and repeated results.
Four Practices for Better Sales
Rethink how your company creates educational materials, how you prepare your sales team, and how you leave your products in the hands of distributors. Here are four points to consider.
- Contested proof: Make sure your R&D strategy includes generating the evidence in the crops, regions, and management systems where you want to sell your product.
- Return on investment: Marketing has to stop translating product features and start converting science into a defensible economic case.
- Ready for battle: Sales needs to be able to handle objections, win customers, and grow a share of wallet. Keep training, demonstrations, and communication calibrated to the conversations happening in the field.
- Working together: None of this works in isolation. Company culture — what gets demanded, what gets rewarded, how fast decisions are made — converts that power into movement. Without it, each function excels by its own standard.
So, the question for the next board meeting is not only how much we invest in R&D, but how much we are building the sales and demand-generation machine — with the same rigor we apply to research.
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