The story behind Verkaufsoptimierer — the Landwirt.com and Mashed software solution

The Challenge

As part of Landwirt.com’s ongoing commitment to improve user experience and functionality, Austria’s leading agricultural marketplace identified an opportunity to further advance its customer interaction and sales processes. To bring its vision to life, Landwirt.com partnered with us to develop a sales-optimization platform named Verkaufsoptimierer.

We very much appreciate the trust Landwirt.com placed in us by choosing to collaborate on this innovative project. We’d like to openly share our journey with you — the lessons learned from developing the platform and the obstacles we had to overcome. This detailed overview explains 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:

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 them effectively handle customer interactions. The idea 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.

In realizing this vision, Thomas Mühlbacher and Ludwig Schwarzmayr, CEOs of Landwirt.com, approached Miriam Derler — Mashed’s COO, project manager, and UI/UX designer — and Manuel Penaloza, Mashed’s CEO. Together, they created the Verkaufsoptimierer concept, setting 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 to 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, our experienced developer, started bringing the design to life, one line of code at a time.

The Problem — Lost Opportunities and Fragmented Communication

Dealers on Landwirt.com — selling tractors, farm equipment and other machinery — faced significant challenges due to disorganized and fragmented communication channels. Customer inquiries came through various sources: phone calls, emails, marketplace chats, in-store visits. Managing these channels proved difficult and time-consuming for sales teams.

The lack of a unified system led to several issues. Sales teams needed help tracking potential customers, resulting in missed opportunities and lower sales figures. Disorganization negatively impacted customer satisfaction, as clients experienced slow response times and inadequate follow-up. In turn, this strained the dealers’ reputation and hindered their ability to grow.

The Solution — Unified, Organized, Measurable

Verkaufsoptimierer offers comprehensive features designed to streamline customer acquisition, enhance communication, and improve sales efficiency. It’s specifically designed to meet the needs of machine dealers, making it the ideal solution tailored to this specialized field.

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 and enhances sales efficiency. The direct integration of Landwirt.com chat enables salespeople to engage potential customers without leaving the platform — every new message triggers the creation of a new ticket on the board, so every inquiry gets noticed.

Ticket system — centralized 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 ensures that no inquiry goes unnoticed and enables quick processing, improving response times and customer satisfaction.

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

Key features

A · Calculation of potential sales and total profit

Verkaufsoptimierer leverages its integration with the 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. In the meantime, a turnover proposal is also given based on the Landwirt.com advertisement price of a machine.

C · Progress and deal stages

Verkaufsoptimierer lets sales teams monitor the progress of deals and the stages of closing them, by organizing tickets in columns that represent the stage of the deal.

D · Assigning responsibilities

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

E · Activity and document history

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

F · Scheduling future activities

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

G · Role hierarchy — boss, supervisor, salesperson

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

H · Fully responsive

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

The Way We Work

Our collaboration with Landwirt.com followed a two-phase approach.

Phase 1 — MVP and launch. Running from August to December 2022, this phase led to the initial release of Verkaufsoptimierer. The MVP was designed with essential features that offered a solution to the fragmentation of customer interactions, demonstrating the potential and viability of a unified sales-optimization platform for agricultural dealers.

Phase 2 — iteration. Beginning in January 2023, this phase involved improving the software based on feedback from dealers using the platform. We implemented more customizable permissions with a new “Supervisor” role, an option for editing activities, automatic activity-history logging, warnings for ticket duplicates, price proposals for machines, and other smaller features to improve overall UX.

Methodology. A blend of waterfall and agile management, offering the flexibility needed for evolving project needs. Feature development followed a sprint model with deployments scoped to the feature. Regular status presentations kept both sides aligned; new features were always presented and tested on a staging server before production.

Combined expertise. Our role extended beyond software development — we also provided UX design, product development, project management, and sales support (live software demos in webinars, detailed release notes for smooth adoption).

Selected Tech Stack

We selected a tech stack that’s standard, widely recognized and rooted in open source. This ensures the project can be transferred and managed by other competent software-development companies if the need ever arises.

At the heart of the stack are Nuxt.js and Vue.js — a specific requirement from Landwirt.com, chosen for 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 — a comprehensive suite of UI components that helped us quickly build a polished, interactive, accessible interface.
• Tailwind CSS — a highly customizable, low-level CSS framework that allowed us to design unique, responsive layouts.
• PostgreSQL + Prisma — an efficient, type-safe approach to data, initially.
• MySQL + Prisma — per Landwirt.com’s requirement, we transitioned from PostgreSQL to MySQL. Smooth thanks to Prisma’s ORM flexibility.
• Vue Draggable — instrumental in implementing the drag-and-drop ticket board.
• Vue I18n — easy multi-language support.
• Pinia — simple, intuitive state management shared across components.
• Vue Datepicker — an intuitive 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.

Results — More Efficiency, Higher Sales, Happier Customers

Verkaufsoptimierer delivers 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.

A short success story from Christian Kaderbek on 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’ve observed 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 would not have been possible without the hard work of key team members. Miriam Derler, project manager and designer, and Jakub Pojsl, lead developer, played crucial roles in bringing the Verkaufsoptimierer platform to life.

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 — higher sales, increased customer satisfaction, and a more organized, 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 reach out — call +43 681 105 26 513 or email [email protected]. We look forward to discussing your needs and exploring opportunities together.