Art’s Way Manufacturing’s
First Annual Dealer Day
Navigating the path through tough times in the agriculture industry, Art’s Way has been working very hard at trying to downsize the amount of debt the company has. As the interaction with end users is swiftly changing, the Art’s Way Board of Directors recently decided to change the outreach of our business. Instead of attending the large national farm shows, we will be expanding our presence through smaller shows. On March 11th-12th, 2019, we hosted our First Annual Dealer Day. With hundreds of dealers around the United States and even across the world, we limited our invitation to the dealers who account for about half of our business generated from selling whole goods. To begin our event, we welcomed new dealers as well as ones who have conducted business with us for decades.
The Big News: We introduced four new products over our Dealer Day event. Now featuring: 8215 Grinder Mixer, 7240 Forage Box, X Series Manure Spreaders, & The Hammer Blower!
Our new 8215 Grinder Mixer features the largest capacity on the market! This machine features a 215 bushel tank and the ability to mix ingredients without the mill.
The demand from customer harvesters for forage units lead us to building the 7240 Forage Box. This rugged 40 foot forage box is a semi-mounted trailer than unloads in under one minute.
Our New X Series Manure Spreaders feature more than double the capacity of our previous models! These manure spreaders feature a guillotine style slop gate that allows control of material through the beaters. This gives us the superior spread pattern to our competition.
Our last newly released product is the Hammer Blower. The Hammer Blower is a multifunctional unit that works perfectly for silo feeding and bagging.
During our “Dealer Day” event, the engineers for the four new pieces of equipment each gave a presentation to educate the dealers about our new product lines. Along with the engineers speaking, we were fortunate enough to have a dealer who specialized in each product speak about it as well. It was important for us to have long-time dealers educate the newer dealers to spread the knowledge they gained over the years.
New Dealer Portal: To meet the needs of our dealers and their customers, we have created a new online dealer portal system. This new portal allows dealers to search through inventory, check manuals, obtain pricing, and place orders online. The movement to having all resources readily available online lead us to developing this system for the convenience of our dealers. This new online system also allows for the dealers to check on the status of their order so they can keep track of their customer’s items. Along with the new online ordering system, we have updated our warranty registration and process. Registration and claims can both be filed online as well as tracking a claim once it has been placed.
Internal Investments: With the importance of being completely digital at an all time high, we recently invested about $250,000 into improving the IT department in our facility. Customers now have the option to sign up for automatic invoicing, receive bi-monthly account balance updates, and any open invoices will be available to view.
Advertising: To keep up with the competition, we highly recommend that our dealers create advertisements and run them so customers can learn about what products we have to offer. Co-Op Advertising is a program that we stress dealers use as a resource for these advertisements. Dealers advertising budgets vary as it bases off one percent of their whole goods sales from the previous year. We have two different employees who work on advertisements that are available for the dealers’ utilization whenever they need it.
Concluding Our Successful Event: Our First Annual Dealer Day exceeded our expectations and we cannot wait to host this event again in the future. We believe that connecting with our dealers and getting new product information to them first hand will ultimately bring in more end users and lead to higher revenues for the company overall.
