Blain’s Farm & Fleet Partners with CB4 to Uncover Sales Opportunities in Stores

By AIT News Desk On Jun 28, 2021

Blain’s Farm & Fleet has grown to dominate the Midwest by maintaining the feel of a humble general store, built to serve hard-working communities, while also carrying over 150,000 items in modernized buildings. Blain’s Farm & Fleet describes themselves as “The Modern General Store,” which might not be where you’d expect to see advanced machine learning at work. However, when their leadership team came across CB4, they saw something very familiar – a simple, well-made tool.

They hoped CB4 could help them with a critical task: making it just as easy for Blain’s Farm & Fleet shoppers to find what they need today as it was 66 years ago in their first 1,000 square foot location in Janesville, WI.

“CB4 uses powerful algorithms to identify item-specific sales opportunities at the store level. These opportunities aren’t obvious to the naked eye and we quite possibly have walked past them many times over,” said Mark Hasting, Chief Store Officer of Blain’s Farm & Fleet. “While this is an incredibly sophisticated tool, the interface is easy to use and brilliantly laid out.”

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Many retailers have reporting tools that try to find opportunities to sell more in their stores. These tools require a great deal of manual labor and have a poor track record of giving store teams relevant insights as quickly as they need them. CB4’s sophisticated algorithms use simple POS data to tell store teams what they can do right this second to sell more units of a product.

Once they get an alert, store managers take a few minutes to make simple in-store adjustments that boost sales of specific products. This includes replenishing products left in the stock room, resolving out-of-stocks, correcting ticketing and pricing errors, and anything else that makes it difficult for shoppers to find and purchase what they want easily.

“People love Blain’s Farm & Fleet because they can get everything they need in one trip. But with over a hundred thousand items, it takes a lot of work for store teams to make sure shoppers can easily find what they need,” said Yoni Benshaul, CEO of CB4, “This is a great use case for CB4, so we’re thrilled to see the amount of time this is saving for Blain’s store teams and the impact on sales as well.”