The story behind Verkaufsoptimierer: The Landwirt.com and MASHED Software Solutions Project Breakdown

The Challenge

As part of Landwirt.com ongoing commitment to improve user experience and functionality, Landwirt.com, Austria's leading agricultural marketplace, has identified an opportunity to further advance its customer interaction and sales processes. To bring its vision to life, Landwirt.com decided to partner with us in order to develop the sales optimization platform named Verkaufsoptimier. We very much appreciate the trust Landwirt.com has placed in us by choosing to collaborate on this innovative project. We would like to openly share our journey with you, the lessons learned from the development of the platform and also the obstacles we had to overcome. This detailed overview will explain the key phases of the project, the specific challenges we encountered, the solutions we proposed, and the benefits Verkaufsoptimierer brings to Landwirt.com's user experience and sales processes.

Thomas Mühlbacher, CEO of Landwirt.com, perfectly captured the spirit of our collaboration when he noted: "We are constantly rethinking Landwirt.com. With the newly developed Verkaufsoptimierer, we want to further support our customers. It is designed to help agricultural machinery dealers with the sale and ongoing servicing of agricultural machinery."

The origin of the idea

Landwirt.com is dedicated to continuously improving its services and recognized the potential to offer its dealers an integrated tool that helps dealers effectively handle customer interactions. The idea for this tool came from a desire to make communication between dealers smoother and enhance their sales activities.  Landwirt.com collaborates closely with its merchants and encourages cooperation, creating an environment where new ideas can thrive. This helps them stay ahead and consistently provide innovative solutions through their products and services.

In realizing this vision, Thomas Mühlbacher and Ludwig Schwarzmayr, CEOs of Landwirt.com, approached Miriam Derler, Mashed´s COO, project manager, and UIX designer, and Manuel Penaloza, Mashed´s CEO. Together, they created the Verkaufsoptimierer concept, which has set the foundation for a new chapter in effective customer interaction management.

With her expert design skills, Miriam began to create a visual roadmap for the platform, incorporating feedback gathered during our visits to dealers organized together with Landwirt.com. It was important to us and Landwirt.com to engage with dealers to understand their needs and gather valuable feedback, ensuring that our product development process remained customer-centric. Meanwhile, @Jakub Pojsl, our experienced developer, started bringing the design to life, one line of code at a time. This collaborative approach, driven by Landwirt.com and Mashed, reflects our commitment to finding and creating tailored solutions in partnership with our customers rather than relying on pre-packaged solutions.

The Problem: Lost Opportunities and Fragmented Communication

Dealers on Landwirt.com, who sell tractors, farm equipment, and other products, faced significant challenges due to disorganized and fragmented communication channels. Customer inquiries came through various sources, such as phone calls, e-mails, marketplace chats, and in-store visits. Managing these different channels proved to be difficult and time-consuming for sales teams.

The lack of a unified system for managing customer inquiries led to several issues for dealers on Landwirt.com. Sales teams needed help tracking potential customers, resulting in missed opportunities and lower sales figures. Additionally, this disorganization negatively impacted customer satisfaction, as clients experienced slow response times and inadequate follow-up from sales representatives. In turn, this strained the dealers' reputation and hindered their ability to grow their business.

The Solution: Unified, Organized, and Measurable Customer Acquisition

Verkaufsoptimierer offers comprehensive features designed to streamline customer acquisition, enhance communication, and improve sales efficiency. Verkaufsoptimierer is specifically designed to meet the unique needs of machine dealers, making it the ideal solution tailored to this specialized field. As mentioned above, we engaged with Landwirt.com customers and dealers before developing the tool to ensure we created a tailored solution that aligns with their sales processes. By consolidating multiple communication channels into a single platform, Verkaufsoptimierer simplifies customer acquisition, improves communication, and enhances sales efficiency for machinery dealers. Additionally, the direct integration of Landwirt.com chat enables salespeople to engage in conversations with potential customers directly from Verkaufsoptimierer seamlessly.  Every new message triggers the creation of a new ticket in the board, so every inquiry gets noticed.

Ticket system and how it helps centralize customer inquiries

The ticket system in Verkaufsoptimierer allows sales teams to create, manage, and organize customer inquiries from various channels into a centralized board. This system ensures that no customer inquiry goes unnoticed and enables quick processing of each request, ultimately improving response times and customer satisfaction.

Verkaufsoptimierer is designed with user-friendliness, making it easy to learn and use for sales teams of any size. Its intuitive interface and adaptable features make it suitable for businesses ranging from small local dealerships to large multinational corporations.

Key Features of Verkaufsoptimierer

A. Calculation of potential sales and total profit

Furthermore, Verkaufsoptimierer leverages its integration with Landwirt.com Marketplace to provide users with real-time price information for machines based on their advertisements on the platform.

B. Drag and drop ticketing board

The drag-and-drop ticketing board allows sales teams to easily manage and prioritize customer inquiries, ensuring all requests are handled efficiently and effectively.

In the meantime, a turnover proposal is also given based on the Landwirt.com advertisement price of a machine

C. Progress and stages of closing deals with customers

Verkaufsoptimierer allows sales teams to monitor the progress of deals and the various stages of closing them by organizing tickets in columns representing the stage of the deal.

D. Assignment of responsibilities and tasks to individual salespeople

The platform enables managers to assign responsibilities and tasks to individual salespeople, ensuring clear delegation and accountability.

E. Easy recording of activities and documents related to customer communication

Additionally, Verkaufsoptimierer offers automated activity tracking for certain tasks, such as changing ticket details or customer information. This feature saves users time and effort by automatically logging and updating relevant details, ensuring that all customer interactions and administrative tasks are accurately recorded.

F. Scheduling future activities with possible prioritization

The platform includes a scheduling feature that enables users to plan and prioritize future activities, ensuring important tasks are not overlooked.

G. Three main levels of roles: boss, supervisor, and salesperson

Verkaufsoptimierer features role management capabilities, with three main levels of roles: boss, supervisor, and salesperson. This structure ensures a clear hierarchy and enables better management of tasks and responsibilities within the sales team.

H. Fully responsive application for a seamless user experience

Verkaufsoptimierer is a fully responsive application that provides a seamless user experience across various devices, such as desktops, tablets, and mobile phones.

The Way We Work

Our collaboration with Landwirt.com followed a two-phase approach. First, we focused on the definition of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and product launch. This phase ran from August to December 2022 and led to the initial release of Verkaufsoptimierer.

The MVP was designed with essential features that offered a solution to the fragmentation of customer interactions. Its primary purpose was to demonstrate the potential and viability of a unified sales optimization platform for agricultural dealers.

The second phase, which began in January 2023, involved improving the software based on feedback from the dealers using the platform. We gathered valuable feedback and implemented changes to enhance user experience and efficiency. It included more customizable permissions with a new role, “Supervisor,” an option for editing activities, automatically adding activities to the history, warnings for ticket duplicates, price proposals for machines, and other smaller features for improving overall UX.

The management methodology

The methodology adopted for this project was a blend of waterfall and agile management, offering the flexibility needed for evolving project needs. Feature development followed a sprint model, with deployments being done based on the scope of the feature. Regular status presentations were held to keep both parties abreast of progress. All the new features were presented and tested on the test server before final deployment to production.

Throughout the process, we remained highly flexible to the changing requirements, demonstrating our commitment to delivering a product that best met the needs of Landwirt.com and its users.

The combined set of expertise

Our role in this collaboration extended beyond software development. We also provided UX-Design, Product Development, Project Management, and Sales support services like conducting live demonstrations of the software in webinars and preparing detailed release notes for smooth adaptation and simple usage.

Selected Tech Stack

We selected a tech stack that is standard, widely recognized, and originates from the open-source area. This selection ensures that the project can be transferred and managed by other competent software development companies if the need arises.

At the heart of our tech stack for this project are Nuxt.js and Vue.js. This was a specific requirement from Landwirt.com and was chosen for its versatility, adaptability, and long-term support. Nuxt.js is a progressive framework based on Vue.js, offering great flexibility and performance for web applications.

We also utilized a range of other technologies and open-source libraries to ensure optimal functionality and user experience:

• Vuetify 3: This library provided us with a comprehensive suite of UI components, helping us to quickly build a polished, interactive, and accessible user interface.
• Tailwind CSS: Tailwind CSS was used to style the application, providing a highly customizable, low-level CSS framework that allowed us to design unique and responsive layouts.
• PostgreSQL and Prisma: Initially, we used a PostgreSQL database and Prisma, an open-source database toolkit. This combination facilitated an efficient, type-safe approach to handling data.
• MySQL and Prisma: Based on Landwirt.com's requirement, we have been transitioning from PostgreSQL to MySQL. This shift has been manageable and smooth thanks to Prisma, underscoring the advantages of using a flexible, adaptable ORM tool like Prisma.
• Vue Draggable: This library was instrumental in implementing the drag-and-drop ticketing board functionality, offering a user-friendly way to manage customer inquiries.
• Vue I18n: This internationalization plugin for Vue.js allowed us to integrate multiple language support into the platform easily.
• Pinia: Used for state management in the application, Pinia offers a simple and intuitive way to manage and share states across components.
• Vue Datepicker: This library helped us implement an intuitive, user-friendly date-picking feature for scheduling future activities.

These choices were made with a clear focus on ensuring smooth operation, convenient maintenance, leveraging an established community with long-term support, and delivering the best user experience possible. As a result, Verkaufsoptimierer is not just a powerful sales optimization tool but also a demonstration of the potential of these technologies when they come together.

Results: More Efficiency, Higher Sales, and Happier Customers

Verkaufsoptimierer offers numerous benefits to dealers on Landwirt.com, including streamlined customer acquisition, improved communication, increased sales efficiency, and higher customer satisfaction. The platform helps sales teams stay organized, track leads, and close deals more effectively, leading to more successful sales and better customer experiences.

We want to share a short success story from Christian Kaderbek about his VOP experience: “We were excited to begin using Verkaufsoptimierer at Eichmann Landtechnik, and we are happy to report that it has fully met our expectations. One of the key advantages we have observed in using “VOP” is its ability to facilitate activity planning and provide a comprehensive history of interactions with individual customers. Having the integrated Landwirt.com chat and notifications has also been extremely valuable.”

The successful collaboration between Landwirt.com and MASHED Software Solutions would not have been possible without key team members' hard work and dedication. Miriam Derler, the project manager and designer, and Jakub Pojsl, the lead developer, played crucial roles in bringing the Verkaufsoptimierer platform to life.

In conclusion, the future goal of Verkaufsoptimierer is to revolutionize how dealers on Landwirt.com manage customer interactions and sales processes. The platform unifies communication channels, streamlines customer acquisition, and improves overall sales efficiency. The result is higher sales, increased customer satisfaction, and a more organized and effective sales process for agricultural dealers.

If you have a project or something similar in mind and would like to collaborate with Mashed, please don't hesitate to contact us. You can contact us directly by calling (@Manuel Penaloza +4368110526513) or at contact@mashed.dev. We look forward to discussing your needs and exploring potential opportunities together.