How Sabanto runs its 20-person Farmer Advisory Board | Craig Rupp

**Craig Rupp** (0:00)
I guarantee this, nothing you work on for the remainder of your career will compel someone to pull out a phone and take a video of your work. Every time we deploy a system into a farming operation, the very first thing they do is they pull out their camera, and they take a video of this tractor running.

**Brett** (0:25)
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by frontlines.io, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with venture-backed founders and marketers where they talk all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than 80 tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now with all that said, let's jump into today's episode.
Today, our guest is Craig Rupp, founder and CEO and farmer at Sabanto. Craig, welcome back to the show.

**Craig Rupp** (1:05)
Thank you for having me, Brett.

**Brett** (1:07)
Of course, it's been three years or so since the first time we had you on, so it's always fun to have guests back on and talk about everything that's been happening. So let's maybe just do a quick intro to the company. What does the company do?

**Craig Rupp** (1:17)
So we make a retrofit autonomy kit that attaches to off-the-shelf tractors and we convert these manually operated tractors into autonomous tractors. Take the tractor that the farmer already has in his machine shed, and then with our magic, it turns this tractor into autonomous tractor, and we can go out and perform field operations autonomously.

**Brett** (1:41)
What does it take when they apply your kit? Does that require a specialist? Is it something that anyone can do? How does it actually get applied?

**Craig Rupp** (1:48)
So we have a dealer network, 12 dealers throughout the US., Canada, and Australia, and they are tasked with installing the system, and once they install the system, they do training, and then they do support for us.

**Brett** (2:03)
What was that like to build out a network like that? Because it sounds like for the company to be successful, you have that network, right?

**Craig Rupp** (2:10)
You do, and at first, we worked very closely with our dealers. When we first went commercial, every installation, we were there, we were helping them, we were training them to train the end customer. So it was a lot of involvement, and a lot of our dealers, we were exceedingly close with them.
We co-sell with them, we help them with demos, we help them with installations, we help them with training, and we help them with support as well.

**Brett** (2:40)
Is there a go-to-market motion that you've studied that you're following? If I think about a lot of the conversations I have, with enterprise SaaS companies selling cybersecurity software or HR software, and there, I don't want to say it's an exact playbook, but it's somewhat of a playbook there. For you, did you have to pioneer this playbook? Is there a playbook you've been inspired by?

**Craig Rupp** (2:59)
Yeah, we had to pioneer the playbook. I wish I lived in a world where people would just go to our website and order an autonomous system off it. Unfortunately, you can show a farmer a video, and they'll say, oh, that's really neat. You can show them it running at a trade show, and that's really neat. I could use that on my farm. But at the end of the day, they'll say, I want to see it running on my farm. That's where we were back in 2023
It's like everyone was from Missouri, the Show-Me state, and we had to demo. We were on the road, we were at farms throughout the United States, three-quarter ton truck pulling an autonomous tractor, and we would show up, and within two hours, we had it running, and we let them use it for a week or two, and let them get used to it and understand. When you deploy an autonomous tractor into a farming operation, there is what we call change management, meaning that you have to do things differently.
It's logistics of adding this machine and understanding as to how it performs, what it can do and what it cannot do, and then they have to get used to it, get accustomed to it before they'll pull the trigger and make a purchase.

**Brett** (4:16)
And how do you guide them through that change management process? I think that you're not this industry, just all industries. There's so much amazing technology, so much amazing innovation, and if they don't get that change management piece right, it's not going to be successful. What have you done to really master the change management piece?