Advanced Turf Solutions, an Indiana-based distributor of grass seeds, fertilizers and a host of other related needs, is preparing to take a big step forward with its online sales. The company – which makes around $200 million in annual sales, according to Tracie Pruden, its chief information officer – wants to accelerate its customers’ transition to digital sales and, in October, that will mean the launch of a new B2B website .
Pruden spoke on stage at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco in September, along with Pei En Thong, senior project marketing leader, and Venkat Medapati, senior director of product management, both of whom work at Salesforce. In his talk, Pruden shared some high-level details about the Salesforce features that Advanced Turf Solutions will use.
Additionally, Pruden shared an inside look behind the scenes at Digital Commerce 360, explaining what it’s been like over an eight-year journey to take his company from no online sales to one that will soon have direct-to-consumer sales. (DTC, and what Salesforce calls “D2C”) and B2B sites that it will leverage with its unique range of customers.
How Advanced Turf Solutions’ online sales started
“We are a distributor that’s it based in Midwest, and we have he picked up locations in Midwest, Ssoutheast and Northeast”, explained Pruden. “Our customers are mainly B2B customers who grow real grass.”
The company’s B2B customers include sports fields, schools and golf courses. However, it also serves individual homeowners and their lawn care companies.
Notably, the approximately $200 million in business it does each year is “almost entirely” traditional sales, according to Pruden. The distributor operates 26 physical stores, according to its website. It also has a distribution center, enabling this in-person and face-to-face business.
“Our current D2C site only costs about a quarter of $1 million,” she shared.
Yet during Pruden’s time at Advanced Turf Solutions, these online sales grew out of nowhere. Additionally, the company learned and developed its omnichannel capabilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, adjusting and evolving as it began to understand how its customers wanted to shop.
What Advanced Turf Solutions learned during the pandemic
In a story that many retailers and B2B sellers may find familiar, Advanced Turf Solutions rushed to keep up with customer preferences when COVID-19 arrived. Some of the surprises along the way challenged previous assumptions.
“People got used to being able to pay in advance, call ahead, pick up their items, and we thought customers would hate that,” Pruden recalled. “And it turns out they loved it.”
As she tells the story, that period was “realizing that even our B2B customersthey are still buyers.” With these discoveries came new opportunities.
“We need to find them where they are in, and what happened a few years ago was right when we were starting to think about trade of a B2B perspective, thene of our suppliers came to us with the opportunity to sell directly consumerthey sell their grass seeds,” she said. “Wand jumped on it. We had just heard about what onethe time was B2B2C [business-to-business-to-consumer].”
That’s when Advanced Turf Solutions first tested, bringing its initial stock keeping units (SKUs) online in 2021.
DTC Grass Seed Sales
“There were only 12 SKUs — just grass seed for one supplier,” Pruden said of the first iteration of the DTC site. That was out of the 30,000 SKUs that Advanced Turf Solutions sells. “It was an opportunity for us to take the small set of products that already exist in Salesforce and really develop the site quickly — and [we] I literally had it up in six weeks.“
Pruden had experience with Salesforce before coming to Advanced Turf Solutions, so she was already familiar with some of the options she wanted to use. Ultimately, the distributor opted for Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud account engagement “because we’re primarily B2B,” she noted. “We have we acquired Experience Cloud for our customers; we have I have a customer portal – and then, more recently, Therder Management and then both B2B and B2C Commerce.”
Launching a new B2B eCommerce website
Now, Advanced Turf Solutions is bringing the lessons learned into a larger rollout, and Pruden has gained perspective along the way.
“Now this they were getting ready to launch – our B2B website with 5,000 SKUs would be launched in three weeks – this really it wasn’t tbig hat plife,” she said, recalling the DTC site’s debut.
The site will launch during a peak B2B sales period for the company.
“This is the busiest month of the year,” Pruden said.
As the site goes live, inventory of the first 5,000 SKUs will be curated for golf course customers.
“Our first B2B website that launches in a few weeks is actually just golf course accessories,” she explained. “So if you think about anything on a golf course, flags, ball washers, all that kind of stuff.”
Once the site launches, Pruden said there will be another site to follow in 2025.
“We have 30,000 SKUs that are actually selling, so the next step,” she said, anticipating “spring of next year.”
In the meantime, Pruden said his team will still leverage its blog, “our main website that has a lot of really good educational content and posts our events and things like that.”
There, she characterizes their presence as “a fake commerce experience where you can request a quote,” which looks a lot like the traditional business they are evolving from. All of this business still flows through Salesforce.
However, as she looks ahead to October, the pivot to the new B2B site is on her mind, with a golf site launch date set for October 1st, followed by a new D2C site on November 1st.
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