Crossroads Lawn and Garden started as a father-and-son team, Ian and Rich Boyan, and twelve years later it is still a single, family-owned location with a full-service department and a reputation for trust and transparent pricing.
In May 2026, Sammy Nance joined as marketing director on contract, bringing a background in public relations and advertising and years of familiarity with the business through her husband, the sales manager. She had never worked inside a dealer management system, but she knew the customers, and she was about to find out they were more online than anyone assumed.
The customers everyone assumed weren’t online
OPE dealers went into 2026 holding 13.37% more units than the year before, according to The State of the Dealer: 2026. In a business with a hard January-to-spring selling window, that means inventory aging on the lot.
Crossroads already had a Dealer Spike website, with inventory and pricing feeding in automatically from its DMS. But the assumption on the floor was that a retirement-age, rural customer base wasn’t researching mowers online. So nobody pushed the site, and it stayed a place to check hours and look up a part.
We were assuming that most of our customers didn’t use these online platforms, especially with the age demographic we have and being in a rural area. That’s not the case.“
— Sammy Nance, Marketing Director, Crossroads Lawn and Garden
Sammy asked the longest-tenured salespeople what they were seeing. They described customers arriving already informed, and not just the younger ones. The website was reaching shoppers. It just wasn’t giving them much to do once they arrived.
The dealer brought the questions. Dealer Spike built the answers.
Marketing at a small dealership is rarely anyone’s whole job. As Sammy puts it, it’s the first line item to get cut, and when it survives, it usually lands on a salesperson’s week. The owners had ideas for the website. What they lacked was the time and the vocabulary to ask for them.
A lot of times people just don’t have the vocabulary to look at the SEO reports, look at the invoices, and see what we’re using and what we’re not using.”
— Sammy Nance, Marketing Director, Crossroads Lawn and Garden
Sammy sat down with the SEO reports and invoices, worked through them with the Dealer Spike team, and found the gap: shoppers had no easy way to browse used units or deals. So she asked whether Dealer Spike could build a used inventory page and a discounted inventory page.
Dealer Spike built both using what was already in place:
- Used inventory populates automatically from a flag in the DMS, so it stays current with no manual work.
- Discounted inventory gives Sammy unit-by-unit control over what appears, with each listing showing MSRP struck through against the sale price.
- Both pages sit in the inventory dropdown alongside new models, so shoppers find them where they already look.
Because the DMS integration keeps every price current, Crossroads could carry its in-store price transparency onto every unit online. That puts it in line with the highest-turning dealers in the industry, where 83.30% of listed units include a price.
A used page and a discounted page aren’t cosmetic. They give search engines two more things to index and shoppers two more ways in. Most dealers never think to ask for them. When someone like Sammy does, we’re all in, because a dealer’s success is the whole point of our partnership.”
— Tim Kearney, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Dealer Spike
Getting shoppers to the pages
New pages only matter if people find them. Dealer Spike’s search team focused organic optimization on the used inventory page one month and the discounted page the next, while paid and social campaigns promoted specific units and brand messaging. Featured Inventory Emails go out weekly, putting live units from the DMS in front of past and prospective customers and giving the used and discounted pages a second way in.
Organic visitors are up 343.7% over 2025, and total visitors are up 157.7%.
Support that keeps the pages accurate
These pages depend on accurate inventory. When units that had already sold stayed visible, Sammy flagged it, and Dealer Spike traced and fixed the DMS sync issue [within X hours]. The fast answer became a reason to keep asking.
Most of the sale happens before they reach the counter
Shoppers now arrive having done their research on Crossroads’ own site. The job on the floor has moved from selling to confirming, and occasionally redirecting when someone’s acreage or terrain calls for a different machine.
Leads are up 166.7% and units sold are up 61.8%. Aged inventory is moving too. Crossroads has sold multiple units directly off the discounted page to customers who walked in naming the unit.
They come into the dealership with the screenshot on their phone saying, ‘I want this unit.’ They know the model number, they know the deck size, they know everything they want. We’ve signed and it’s done.”
— Sammy Nance, Marketing Director, Crossroads Lawn and Garden
Ask, and keep asking
The platform could always do more. What changed was that Crossroads started asking, and Dealer Spike kept delivering. Sammy now tells other dealers in her network the same thing:
Don’t be afraid to ask Dealer Spike for help. I think a lot of people don’t realize that they can. We’re paying for them to help us — they want to help us. So don’t be afraid to ask the question, or dream it up: is this possible?”
— Sammy Nance, Marketing Director, Crossroads Lawn and Garden