Line\5 COO Brenda Cline-Kereakes: Insights on Elevating Profitability, Customer Experience and Retention
Shrunken margins hit harder when placed alongside your other pain points. New boat buyers arrive with greater expectations. Affordability concerns and borrowing constraints only add to those headwinds. We get it. Managing your revenue streams is vital for your dealership’s success. From service and parts to storage to finance and insurance, there are avenues for creating your own tailwinds.
A refined approach to F&I, and the processes, attitude and tactics, can help both you and your customers. Recently, Brenda Cline-Kereakes, COO of Line\5 — an MRAA Platinum Partner — provided valuable best practices for boosting F&I sales in an interview with Automotive News. Often, the automotive and RV industries serve as early gauges of what’s to come in marine retail. Understanding that, we dissected Cline-Kereakes’ interview to highlight her thought leadership.
Here are five takeaways we can borrow from that meaningful conversation.
1. F&I Builds Relationships — Go Beyond the Transaction
To create the customer experience new shoppers demand, and help your dealership in the process, treat F&I as a key step in the relationship-building process. Boat owners often have a longer lifecycle than car owners, so make this touchpoint significant in their purchasing journey. Your goal is to generate repeat revenue through service, protection products and upgrades while guiding owners to a successful first-year.
2. Use Early Sales Conversations to Introduce Protection
Customers can worry about cost and deal complexities. Protection products can feel like add-ons, when they should be normalized by your team. Introducing them in early conversations softens anxieties about total cost and clearly explains that protection is about boat ownership and boat care.
3. Your Service Department is a Revenue Driver, Not a Cost Center
For marine retailers, service departments provide you with a second chance to educate new owners, protect their investment and gain their trust and loyalty.
4. Transparency and Process Build Trust (and Close Rates)
Automotive, RV and marine dealers who have a clear, consistent and repeatable F&I process in place can greatly reduce new-owner confusion about what F&I is and how it helps them. Your entire team’s knowledge of this process and its importance helps to reduce friction and buyer hesitation.
5. Partner Value — Efficiency and Clarity
When you have tighter margins and buyers going through an experience for the first time, efficiency and clarity are critical for F&I success. Focus on partners who offer speed, flexibility and dealer support along with product offerings.
Turning Insight Into Action
A disciplined, customer-focused F&I approach turns everyday interactions into lasting revenue opportunities, even in uncertain markets. Brenda Cline-Kereakes shares expert insights across multiple retail industries. This recent conversation was focused on automotive retail, but the themes relate to marine dealerships navigating margin pressure, evolving customer expectations and long-term growth.
Read the full interview to explore these insights in depth.
[Editor’s note: Line\5 is an MRAA Platinum Partner.]
