All this talk about the customer experience feels great. We can all nod, smile and agree that the steps we’ve shared over the last few weeks are great tactics for delivering for our customers. But how do you pull it all together in a customer experience strategy?   This is exactly where MRAATraining.com comes into […]

In any summer selling season, you feel rushed.   There are leads to nurture, customer questions to answer, trade-ins to evaluate, and deals to finalize. There are boats to prep, parts to order, deliveries to make, and customer-mandated deadlines to launch boats. You don’t even know how it will all get done.   Leads accumulate, […]

There’s lots to celebrate related to industry momentum when it comes to interest, sales and participation in boating and fishing. But there’s also a dark side to this story: the customer experience.   As sales leads have increased in some cases by 300 and 400 percent, and sales continue to hit record levels, the normal […]

As long-time boating enthusiasts and professionals, it’s easy for us to forget how much first-time boat buyers don’t know about boating.   Last week, for example, I watched as a new boat owner tried more than a dozen times to back his trailer down the ramp to retrieve his boat. He gave up and asked […]

Every year the market place throws a mix of new challenges at you and your business. Whether they’re personnel changes, technological obstacles, product line updates or evolving customer or partner preferences, they change the dynamics of how you approach selling and servicing boats.   With little-to-no warning, the boating industry changed forever with the health […]

Well, we got our wish. For the last decade, or maybe longer, we’ve been gasping at how the average age of our boat buyers has increased by about 8 or 9 months every single year. The same people who were leading the boat-buying parade in the 80s are still the ones buying boats today.   […]

If you’re not one of the many marine industry disciples who actually wore their life jacket to work last Friday — affectionately known as Wear Your Life Jacket to Work Day — you should be aware that the week prior to Memorial Day here in the States is always honored as National Safe Boating Week.   […]

With the memory of the significant toll that the Great Recession had on our industry still somewhat fresh in our minds, I think it’s important to note that this downturn is different in a number of ways.   Between the crash in 2008 and the middle of 2010, nearly 2,000 boat dealerships were forced out […]

As businesses across our industry fight to navigate the landscape of federal stimulus packages, there’s an untold story you should be aware of.   That is that the organizations the government designates to support their respective industries — which in this case means almost every single one of the marine trade associations you know today […]

When we turn on the news these days, there is a lot of data being thrown at us. And for good reason. With all the speculation about what might happen in the COVID-19 economy, data is needed to help us sensibly navigate our current reality. It also grabs our attention, and the media knows it. […]