Competing on Price: Stop Playing a Losing Game

• Customer Experience – A Winning Strategy in a Softening Market
Liz Walz, MRAA VP of Education, has found a lot of value — just look at those Post-It Notes — within “The Experience Maker” book from Dan Gingiss, the Dealer Week 2022 Opening Keynote Speaker.

By Liz Walz

“Competing on price is a loser’s game … Competing on product has also become really difficult.”

So writes customer experience expert and Dealer Week 2022 Opening Keynote speaker Dan Gingiss in the introduction to his book, “The Experience Maker.”

So how does your business compete and win? The answer, according to Gingiss, is a focus on customer experience, an investment that multiple studies have found offers a tremendous return and is “a winning strategy in a recession.”

But this is not where the author starts to pitch you on buying an expensive consulting package or investing in an 18-month training series or marketing scheme.

Rather, he spends the rest of the book explaining how businesses like yours can gain an advantage in a softening market with simple, practical and inexpensive strategies that have proven to move the customer experience (CX) needle.

If you were in Austin with us at Dealer Week, this may sound familiar. Several of those strategies were sprinkled throughout his presentation, which was a highlight of the event for many attendees. And they were followed in the Leadership, Sales & Marketing, and Service & Parts Pathways with sessions that dove deep into specific areas of the dealership that are ripe for CX improvement.

Author and Dealer Week 2022 Opening Keynote Speaker Dan Gingiss spoke on the importance of creating a remarkable customer experience to win over customers.

But you didn’t have to be in Austin to gain insight into how to compete on customer experience in 2023. You can tap into Dealer Week Online, which includes a “Keynote Conversations” interview with Dan by Marcus Sheridan and a free electronic version of Dan’s book. And you can access three areas of the MRAA website packed with opportunities for improvement:

  • Win with Existing Customers: This area of the MRAA website is packed with resources on increasing your customer retention. As Gingiss writes in his book: “Retaining an existing customer is easier and cheaper than acquiring a new one.”
  • Adapt to Changing Customer Expectations: Gain tips, tools and expert tactics to coincide with each step in the customer journey. 

  • Improve Your Repair Event Cycle Times: Learn simple and practical tweaks you can make to your service processes to move boats through the service department faster and create a better customer experience.

Of course, you also can tap into the MRAA team to help you and your team compete and win amidst the uncertainty and unique challenges of 2023. Email me at liz@mraa.com or reach out to any of our knowledgeable, passionate MRAA team members to brainstorm ways to overcome the obstacles in your path. If we don’t have a solution to share, we’ll go out and find one. That’s our commitment to you.