Advanced Turf Solutions, an Indiana-based distributor for grass seed, fertilizer and a variety of other related needs, is on the brink of take a significant step forward with its online sales. The corporate — which does about $200 million in annual sales, based on Tracie Pruden, its chief information officer — desires to speed up its customers’ transition to digital sales, and in October, that may mean launching a brand new B2B website.
Pruden spoke on stage at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco in September, together with Pei En Thong, a project marketing senior lead, and Venkat Medapati, a senior director for product management, each of whom work at Salesforce. In her talk, Pruden shared some high-level details in regards to the Salesforce features that Advanced Turf Solutions will use.
As well as, Pruden shared an inside look behind the scenes with Digital Commerce 360, explaining what it has been like over an eight-year journey to take her company from no online sales in any respect to at least one that may soon have each direct-to-consumer (DTC, and which Salesforce refers to as “D2C”) and B2B sites that it would leverage with its unique range of shoppers.
How Advanced Turf Solutions online sales began
“We’re a distributor that’s headquartered within the Midwest, and we’ve got locations within the Midwest, Southeast and Northeast,” Pruden explained. “Our customers are primarily B2B customers that grow real grass.”
The corporate’s B2B customers include sports fields, schools and golf courses. Nonetheless, it also serves individual homeowners and their lawncare corporations.
Notably, the roughly $200 million in business that it does every year are “almost entirely” traditional sales, based on Pruden. The distributor operates 26 physical stores, based on its website. It also has a distribution center, enabling that on-site, in-person business.
“Our current D2C site is admittedly only a couple of quarter of $1 million,” she shared.
Still, during Pruden’s time at Advanced Turf Solutions, those online sales grew from nothing. Furthermore, the corporate learned and built out its omnichannel capabilities throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, adjusting and evolving because it began to grasp how its customers desired to shop.
What Advanced Turf Solutions learned throughout the pandemic
In a story that many retailers and B2B sellers may find familiar, Advanced Turf Solutions raced to maintain up with customers’ preferences when COVID-19 hit. A few of the surprises along the best way challenged previous assumptions.
“People got used to with the ability to pay ahead, call ahead, pick up their products, and we thought customers would hate it,” Pruden recalled. “And it seems they loved it.”
As she tells the story, that point period was “realizing even our B2B customers, they’re still shoppers.” With those discoveries got here recent opportunities.
“We want to fulfill them where they’re at, and what happened a few years ago was right once we were beginning to take into consideration commerce from a B2B perspective, one of our vendors got here to us with a possibility to sell to direct consumer, sell their grass seed,” she said. “We jumped on it. We had just heard about what at the time was B2B2C [business-to-business-to-consumer].”
That was when Advanced Turf Solutions first tested the waters, putting its initial stock keeping units (SKUs) online in 2021.
DTC grass seed sales
“It was only 12 SKUs — just grass seed for one vendor,” Pruden said of the primary iteration of the DTC site. That was out of 30,000 SKUs that Advanced Turf Solutions sells. “It was a possibility for us to take the small set of products already in Salesforce and really develop the location quickly — and [we] literally got it live in six weeks.“
Pruden had experience with Salesforce before arriving at Advanced Turf Solutions, so she was already conversant in among the options she wanted to make use of. Ultimately, the distributor went with Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement “because we’re primarily B2B,” she noted. “We’ve got Experience Cloud for our customers; we’ve got a customer portal — after which more recently, Order Management after which each B2B and B2C Commerce.”
Launching a brand new B2B ecommerce site
Now, Advanced Turf Solutions is bringing its lessons learned to a much bigger launch, and Pruden has gained perspective along the best way.
“Now that we’re on the brink of launch — our B2B site with 5,000 SKUs was going live in three weeks — that actually wasn’t that big of a pivot,” she said, looking back on the DTC site’s debut.
The positioning will launch during a peak B2B sales period for the corporate.
“That is our busiest month of the yr,” Pruden stated.
As the location goes live, the inventory in the primary 5,000 SKUs will likely be curated for golf course customers.
“Our first B2B site that’s going live in a few weeks is admittedly just golf course accessories,” she explained. “So if you happen to take into consideration like anything on a golf course, flags, ball washers, all of that form of stuff.”
Once that site goes up, Pruden said there will likely be one other site to follow in 2025.
“Now we have 30,000 SKUs which can be actually being sold, so then that’s next,” she said, anticipating “spring of next yr.”
Within the meantime, Pruden said her team will still be leveraging its blog, “our principal website that does have a number of really good educational content and posts our events and things like that.”
There, she characterizes their presence as “a pretend commerce experience where you possibly can request a quote,” which looks rather a lot like the standard business from which they’re evolving. All of that business still flows through Salesforce.
As she looks ahead to October, nonetheless, the pivot to the brand new B2B site is top of mind, with a live date for the golf site slated for Oct. 1, followed by a brand new D2C site on Nov. 1.
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