Drones don’t sell on need. They sell on value - opinion

Every sales manual says the same thing: find the pain, sell the cure. In my industry, that advice is half right, and the wrong half is expensive.

A drone produces a dozen different kinds of value. It surveys a highway interchange in an hour, to the centimeter, where a crew once stood in traffic for days. It collects in one day the thermal data on a solar field of 20,000 panels. It patrols a fence at two in the morning without a car, and puts live video in a control room before a guard has found his keys.

Increasingly, it is sold not as hardware but as a service. In drone-as-a-service, the customer buys no aircraft, holds no license, and does not need to know how to fly. The operator installs the station, holds the approvals, trains the dispatchers, maintains the fleet, and carries the responsibility. The customer pays monthly for an outcome: a patrol, a survey, a defect list.

Autonomy is what makes that model work. A drone that lives on site in a weatherproof dock, charges itself, launches on an alarm or a schedule, and lands without anyone beside it turns a drone service from a visit into a utility. Our stations put a drone in the air within 15 seconds of a call; it flies for 54 minutes, recharges in 27, and is directed by a dispatcher who never leaves the control room.

Here is my argument: the urgency of a customer’s need decides how fast he arrives, but only visible value decides whether he signs and whether he stays, and making that value visible, to customers who do not yet feel the need, is the burden of the operators.

One morning near Lod

At about 6:30 a.m. on September 15, 2024, a missile fired from Yemen fell in open ground near Lod, in central Israel. Six weeks earlier, we had installed an autonomous drone at a power station in the area. It was airborne within seconds. The control room had live video of the impact area before anyone had left the gate, and the response teams drove out knowing what was waiting for them.

Nobody in that control room needed to be told afterwards what the drone was for.

That is what need does: it accelerates. But mornings like that are rare. What a customer pays for in every other month is the routine, patrols flown on schedule, alarms verified from the air before anyone is dispatched, every event on video. Need opened the door. Value is the rent.

Now consider a customer with no need at all. This summer, our analysis of an 88-megawatt solar field in the South found dozens of dead strings, rows of panels producing nothing, while the site’s monitoring reported normal operation. The owner felt no pain; the dashboard was green. The loss was invisible, and worth well over $100,000 a year. Need would never have brought that customer to us. Only a number could.

The clearest proof comes from California. Since 2018, police in Chula Vista have sent drones to more than 25,000 emergency calls. The drone arrived first on 17,170 of them, in an average of 97 seconds, and on 4,629 calls, no officer had to be sent at all. A city council does not need to have suffered a slow response to understand that number.

Why the value has outrun the market

None of this is Israeli. In 2016, PwC put the value of business services and labor that drones could replace at more than $127 billion. Nearly a decade later, Drone Industry Insights sizes the entire commercial drone-services market at about $29b. The value was always there. Few customers could see it in their own numbers.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency's figures from November 2025 count 2.5 million registered drone operators across 31 states, and 4,226 operational authorizations, the permits behind serious commercial flying. In the United States, the rule for routine flight beyond visual line of sight, the rule that makes docked autonomy ordinary, was proposed in August 2025 and, as of early October, was still unpublished. Israel has allowed docked flight without a pilot on site since 2022. Regulation is moving; customers are slower.

Who teaches, and who collects

So who makes the value visible? Not the manufacturer, who meets the customer once, at the sale. In a service model, the operator meets him every day. We fly more than 15,000 drone missions a year for more than 200 business customers, and each arrives at a different distance from his own need: defense with the need already sharp, infrastructure security after an event, solar slowly, surveyors on cost. All of them sign for the same reason, a value they can measure. That is why our process starts with the customer’s own baseline, not a demonstration flight: a site visit, a survey, a pilot with metrics agreed in advance, and a decision taken on the data.

It is also why autonomy is the core of our business and the center of its future. A crew-based service sells a day of flying. A stationed drone sells every day. Once the station, the certification, and the control room exist, each additional mission, a patrol, a thermal scan, a check after a storm, costs almost nothing, and each one adds a line to the customer’s baseline. The next step is already visible: control centers running many stations at once under airspace-management systems, and the same network carrying urgent medical supplies and deliveries. We are starting urban delivery work with Israel’s Innovation Authority.

The economic conclusion follows. In drone-as-a-service, value goes to whoever owns the measurement, the company that set the baseline and reports against it every month. Flight hours are already a commodity; the dock is becoming one. The network of stations, and the baseline behind each of them, is not. So the education that builds it has to carry a price: our academy, which trains close to 1,000 commercial operators a year, is a business; dispatcher training is a line on the quote; implementation is a phase with a fee.

What still has to be fixed

Let me name where we got it wrong.

Too often we sold the capability we found impressive rather than the value the customer could measure. A thermal map is beautiful. A site manager wants to know what Monday’s repairs are worth. Every time we led with the technology, the sale got longer.

Early this year, we planned to sell autonomy through security companies, as a back office behind their brands. Within months, we reversed it. A service sold on value needs the operator in the room when the baseline is set. We now sell directly.

And “autonomous” still carries more people than the word suggests. The aircraft flies itself; the service does not run itself. Anyone promising an asset owner a lights-out operation today is selling something.

A customer who needs a drone will eventually find one. A customer who can see what a drone is worth will pay for it every month. The first is a sale. The second is a business, and autonomy is how it scales.

The writer, a colonel in the reserves, is founder and CEO of Propeller Drones Ltd., Israel’s largest drone services provider.