Jeff Bowman

The 2018 Dealership Minds Summit, July 24-25 at the Coralville Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, welcomes Jeff Bowman, Chief Experience Officer of Titan Machinery. During his session, “Moving Your Marketing Department from Traditional Marketing to Intelligent Marketing,” Bowman will discuss ways to collect customer information to drive leads through the sales funnel, how to shift marketing dialog from promotions to demand generation and how technology allows automation of lead scoring and better tracking of customers’ behavior.

With 20 years of experience as a leader in driving business technology, Bowman brings inside knowledge of how Intelligence Driven Marketing can change the game for farm equipment dealerships. Bowman spent 7 years at Caterpillar as the director of Customer eBuisness and Global eBusiness Manager, focused on defining and executing the company’s strategy to transform the digital customer experience. In just 3 years, he helped Cat double its digital impact to 25% of company revenues, including 5 times growth in sales through online leads.

Now serving on Titan Machinery’s executive team and leading the marketing efforts for its 89 stores in the U.S. and 20 stores in Europe, Bowman details how Titan Machinery’s ($1.2 billion in sales in 2017) marketing staff of 5 uses digital marketing to improve the customer experience and the sales teams ability to close the sale.

Discussing the increasingly critical importance for intelligence driven marketing strategies in today’s farm equipment dealerships, Bowman says, "Marketing’s job internally is to make sure that the company understands the high stakes that are involved there,” he says. “It’s understanding who is active in the market, engaging with them and then nurturing them all the way down through the funnel to close. There’s a lot of data and analytics about customers and customer behavior that we should be doing in order to drive the right customer to the right content at the right time.”

Bowman contends that the dealership’s very future is in the hands of the marketing department. “Either marketing steps up and does its job, or the dealership fails. Customers loyal to the relationship or brand may hang on longer than others, but everything the Summit is covering is essential to the future success of the dealership. And the dealers that get it and go after it will separate from the competition. Dealers who think that they can just continue to do posters, parties and traditional marketing are already falling behind. And their traditional sales model is beginning to falter.”

To learn more about Bowman’s session and other sessions that will be featured during this 2-day networking and idea-sharing Summit, visit DealershipMindsSummit.com.

Limited seats are available and reservations are now open. A discounted registration rate of $439 is available through 4-30-18, offering a 19% discount off the full rate of $539. Registration can be made online or by calling (262) 432-0388 between 8:00 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., Monday-Friday.

Sponsors of the 2018 Summit include A&I Products, Ag Direct, BigIron Auctions, CLAAS, Fastline Media Group, HBS Systems, Iron Solutions, Machinery Scope, Montag Manufacturing, Team SI, Western Equipment Dealers Association (WEDA), Yanmar, Topcon Agriculture and Yetter Mfg.