Advanced Turf Solutions, an Indiana-based distributor for grass seed, fertilizer and a range of other related needs, is getting ready to take a major step forward with its online sales. The company — which does about $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 launching a new B2B website.

Pruden spoke on stage at Salesforce’s Dreamforce conference in San Francisco in September, along with Pei En Thong, a project marketing senior lead, and Venkat Medapati, a senior director for product management, both of whom work at Salesforce. In her talk, Pruden shared some high-level details about the Salesforce features that Advanced Turf Solutions will use.

In addition, 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 at all to one that will soon have both direct-to-consumer (DTC, and which Salesforce refers to as “D2C”) and B2B sites that it will leverage with its unique range of customers.

How Advanced Turf Solutions online sales began

“We are a distributor that’s headquartered in the Midwest, and we’ve got locations in the Midwest, Southeast and Northeast,” Pruden explained. “Our customers are primarily B2B customers that grow real grass.”

The company’s B2B customers include sports fields, schools and golf courses. However, it also serves individual homeowners and their lawncare companies.

Notably, the approximately $200 million in business that it does each year are “almost entirely” traditional sales, according to Pruden. The distributor operates 26 physical stores, according to its website. It also has a distribution center, enabling that on-site, in-person business.

“Our current D2C site is really only about a quarter of $1 million,” she shared.

Still, during Pruden’s time at Advanced Turf Solutions, those online sales grew from nothing. Moreover, the company learned and built out 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 raced to keep up with customers’ preferences when COVID-19 hit. Some of the surprises along the way challenged previous assumptions.

“People got used to being able to pay ahead, call ahead, pick up their products, and we thought customers would hate it,” Pruden recalled. “And it turns out they loved it.”

As she tells the story, that time period was “realizing even our B2B customers, they’re still shoppers.” With those discoveries came new opportunities.

“We need to meet them where they’re at, and what happened a couple of years ago was right when we were starting to think about commerce from a B2B perspective, one of our vendors came to us with an opportunity 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 first iteration of the DTC site. That was out of 30,000 SKUs that Advanced Turf Solutions sells. “It was an opportunity for us to take the small set of products already in Salesforce and really develop the site 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 familiar with some of the options she wanted to use. Ultimately, the distributor went with Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement “because we are primarily B2B,” she noted. “We’ve got Experience Cloud for our customers; we’ve got a customer portal — and then more recently, Order Management and then both B2B and B2C Commerce.”

Launching a new B2B ecommerce site

Now, Advanced Turf Solutions is bringing its lessons learned to a bigger launch, and Pruden has gained perspective along the way.

“Now that we’re getting ready to launch — our B2B site with 5,000 SKUs was going live in three weeks — that really wasn’t that big of a pivot,” she said, looking back at the DTC site’s debut.

The site will launch during a peak B2B sales period for the company.

“This is our busiest month of the year,” Pruden stated.

As the site goes live, the inventory in the first 5,000 SKUs will be curated for golf course customers.

“Our first B2B site that’s going live in a couple of weeks is really just golf course accessories,” she explained. “So if you think about like anything on a golf course, flags, ball washers, all of that kind of stuff.”

Once that site goes up, Pruden said there will be another site to follow in 2025.

“We have 30,000 SKUs that are actually being sold, so then that’s next,” she said, anticipating “spring of next year.”

In the meantime, Pruden said her team will still be leveraging its blog, “our main website that does have a lot of really good educational content and posts our events and things like that.” 

There, she characterizes their presence as “a faux commerce experience where you can request a quote,” which looks a lot like the traditional business from which they are evolving. All of that business still flows through Salesforce.

As she looks ahead to October, however, the pivot to the new B2B site is top of mind, with a live date for the golf site slated for Oct. 1, followed by a new D2C site on Nov. 1.

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