Stacy Anthony, CEO of 7-store AGCO dealership AgRevolution, believes a strong digital storefront and effective marketing are key tools dealers can use to boost their absorption. He personally implemented both these tools to boost AgRevolution’s absorption in the first 9 months of its existence from 46% to 66% with single-digit market share. With AgRevolution now just over 1.5 years old, Anthony believes they’ll have the dealership at over 90% by the end of the year.
Marketing & Scorecards
Anthony advocates for aggressively integrating marketing into the parts and service departments and outlines a few ways AgRevolution does that.
“We’re starting to do more video messaging from our department manager and through our PSRs, and we’re tethering that to a 12-month marketing plan,” he says. “This plan is focused on absorption and customer solution services and is also tethered to our budget.
“We do this forecast once a year, and it does more than just live inside a drawer. It comes out every month, and we put it in front of our employees. We measure it through a scorecard that ties to a KPI.”
AgRevolution takes a three-pronged approach to its scorecards, focusing on achievement, recognition and accountability.
“We think the achievement part has to attach specific measurements to those responsibilities and establish the attainable targets of performance,” he says. “Recognition is not just a compliment. It’s being transparent with the numbers and posting the results. And anytime you can do that more publicly, the better for positive recognition. And then accountability increases the responsibility of parts people, and technicians for areas they directly control or have influence over.”
E-Commerce User Experience
AgRevolution is also focused on streamlining the e-commerce experience for their customers, says Anthony.
“We realize the importance of making e-commerce easy to use,” he says. “There are tools like Hotjar that let you watch your customers use the platform and watch the struggle or the ease that a customer has when navigating through your platform. We’re doing that to make sure we’ve created a path that’s really simple and easy for them.”
Anthony believes in thinking of the digital storefront as its own location that should have performance requirements.
“Think of your digital storefront as another location, place requirement of performance upon it to produce an extra $10, $12 or $15 million or whatever your number should be,” he says. “We’re doing that to ours right now. We really believe our digital storefront is going to be an experience that gives lift to each of our departments.”
