When you’re engaged in B2B commerce, the biggest question often is where to focus your sales efforts. As our global food system moves toward a more digitized future, the DLG Group has taken steps to empower its sales and marketing teams with new insights from customer data.
During a breakout session at Sitecore Symposium 2021, Sitecore Platinum Partner Alpha Solutions and data orchestrator RelevantEdge presented this compelling customer success story to attendees.
Owned by Danish farmers, DLG is one of Europe’s largest agribusiness companies and plays a critical role in livestock feed, crop production, and sustainability. The company operates within a highly digitized industry and has a longstanding relationship with Sitecore.
DLG’s ongoing digital transformation began with a simple web shop in 2011 and has evolved into a full-scale e-commerce platform that drives $400 million USD annually.
Cutting through the digital noise
In 2020, DLG wanted to leverage years of data gathering to get a clearer picture of customer needs, then put this information into the hands of people working beyond the digital team. DLG turned to Alpha Solutions, and ultimately, a composable and headless solution from RelevantEdge using Microsoft’s Power BI business intelligence tools.
“DLG’s farmer/owners wanted to know, who is the next best customer to talk to, what should we discuss, and how do we get insight into current trends and interests?” said Klaus Peterson, Partner and Global CTO for Alpha Solutions.
The problem was too much data – from transactions and observing customer behavior, as well as from CRM and other enterprise systems – yet not enough insight to optimize moment-to-moment sales decisions.
RelevantEdge helped develop a strategy that would deliver self-service analytics across the organization. The resulting solution features collaborative dashboards that allow DLG to choose among different tools, while also orchestrating numerous data sources into a single overview.
According to Chris Nash, co-founder and Chief Customer Officer for RelevantEdge, the solution pulls in data from DLG’s entire commerce stack, including Microsoft Azure IoT, Microsoft Dynamics 365, SAP, and Sitecore XP.
New insights for sales and marketing
During their breakout session, Peterson and Nash shared four use-case examples from the project:
- Sales insights: Now, DLG sales personnel have an overview dashboard that reveals attributions by revenue, by customer, or by product category. “By tying this information into the outcome in Sitecore, we can see which products are selling best – and when,” Nash said.
- Content performance insights: By integrating DLG’s product information management (PIM) data from InRiver, teams can better understand how and when content drives revenue.
- Customer insights: Information such as a specific farm’s purchase history and content/email interactions helps to move customers along the journey.
- Sales segmentation: When their CRM syncs with the BI solution, sales teams are able to identify characteristics that groups of customers have in common. “You can drill down into what they purchase, recency/frequency monitoring, and filter by type of farm, types of animals, types of crops, or number of logins,” Nash explained.
At DLG, where the farmer is both owner and customer, people are preparing for a future that’s defined by digital agriculture and driven by data. Both the sales and marketing functions rely on this composable BI solution to optimize all kinds of decisions.
By working with Alpha Solutions and RelevantEdge, DLG has extended its Sitecore investment and taken the platform to the next level, and the initiative has become a driver for the next wave of digital transformation in agriculture.
Sung Cho is the Product Marketing Director, Commerce at Sitecore. Connect with her on LinkedIn