MINNEAPOLIS — July 23, 2020 — The Marine Retailers Association of the Americas announces that Ocoee, Florida-based Boat Outfitters has joint the organization as a Partner Member.
Boat Outfitters specializes in the sale of accessories, replacement parts and custom-engineered projects within the marine industry. Through its parent company, Teak Isle Mfg., it has also transitioned into making personal protective equipment (PPE) — in the form of plexiglass-based barriers and face shields The equipment allows retailers in multiple industry’s to keep their employees and customers safe. These protective panels are availabe for quick delivery and customizing.
“Boat Outfitters is delighted to join the MRAA as a partner member,” says Andrew Brown, Managing Director. “We continue to be committed to manufacturing high-quality marine accessories, replacement parts and custom solutions while maintaining affordable pricing. Partnering with the MRAA provides expertise and business solutions to enhance our operations as well as allowing us the opportunity to educate members on how we can help them better serve their customers and thus grow profits. We look forward to this beneficial relationship.”
Partner Membership lets marine manufacturers, suppliers and service providers align their brands with the MRAA programs, including training, education and other opportunities, and reach the dealer body fueling the success of the industry. Support from Partners allows the Association to expand its offerings and create a positive, long-term impact in the business of MRAA members.
“We’re pleased to welcome Boat Outfitters as new Partner Member,” says Allison Gruhn, MRAA Director of Business Development. “Whether its parts, accessories, custom work or their new line of PPE items, Boat Outfitters has an astute understanding and innovative methods to meet of the needs of marine dealers nationwide.”
There are, however, a few key fundamentals that customers expect from your business, and all of them can be found in MRAA’s Marine Industry Consumer Commitment, a one-page pledge created as part of the Grow Boating program at its inception. Drafted by both dealers and manufacturers, the Consumer Commitment is a staple of the Dealership Certification program and is a requirement to be publicly posted both in-store and online at Certified Dealerships. If you’re looking for what customers expect of you, the Consumer Commitment is a great place to start. It outlines 18 key deliverables your dealership and your team should ensure are present at all times. Broken down into sales, service and operations, this document could be a great guide for your business to start with. In fact, I would suggest it’s really the foundation of any great dealership. A few of the key elements of this include items like: There’s nothing about this Consumer Commitment that’s outside of what you would expect, and it’s designed that way. These are the basic fundamentals of running a dealership, but the power in this commitment is your pledge to make it happen. If you want to demonstrate to your customers that they can expect a higher standard of professionalism when working with your business, Dealership Certification’s Consumer Commitment is the place to start. 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 play. MRAATraining.com is an online educational portal where you and your team can access well over 100 courses on just about every topic in marine dealership management, including, of course, the customer experience. It’s a good time to note here that some of the courses I outline below are FREE for anyone to access, while others can be accessed at no charge if you are an MRAA Silver Member or Gold Member. If you are not a Silver or Gold member, you can purchase courses a la carte. The cornerstones of our customer experience content include two courses by renowned expert Theresa Syer: Make Customer Service Your Competitive Advantage and a workshop called Supercharge Your Customer Experience. These courses will help you really think about how to focus you energies on delivering a powerful, rewarding customer experience. They are great for your team to watch together and to inspire the team to build customer-focused steps into all of your processes. Make Customer Service Your Competitive Advantage promises to deliver a clear understanding the difference between good service and experiential service, fresh insights and techniques to provide a more emotional approach to customer engagement, and tips on how to make your customers feel valued and appreciated. In Supercharge Your Customer Experience, which was recorded at the 2019 Dealer Week, you will learn how to improve further upon the customer experience, with insights on defining the customers’ emotional motivators (what drives them to buy), identifying key emotional drivers that can shift conversations in your direction, and understanding the consistent actions required to elicit a positive emotional response from your customers. Any strategy on customer experience should start with these courses as the foundation. Any great customer experience must begin in the sales process. MRAA’s course Buyer Motivation: The Key to Building Value offers incredible sales insights, but most importantly it has been designed to help dealers respond to changes in customer behavior and ultimately close more deals. It teaches sales team members how to customize sales presentations to buying motivation and will help any dealership drive more business at a higher profit while increasing customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. This course is free for anyone to take at MRAATraining.com and is made available by MRAA’s Dealership Certification Program. Another set of free courses that will help you set the tone for a world-class customer experience is MRAA’s Grow Your Business With First-Time Boat Buyers three-part series. There’s no need to even login or visit a different website with these courses, and these courses will help you understand and guide first-time boat shoppers and sell to first-time buyer motivations, while providing you with a bunch of tools that will help you convert first-time shoppers into buyers. While those courses offer great foundational concepts to build a customer experience strategy around, others found at MRAATraining.com can help you create solid tactics for enhancing that strategy: Service CSI & Upselling: Not an Either/Or Proposition, by Valerie Ziebron, can help you build long-term customer loyalty and dealership profitability one interaction at a time. CSI: Outside the Box, by Steve Pizzolato (formerly of Avala Marketing, which was acquired by Rollick), will provide insights into consumer satisfaction during the consideration phase, the initial purchase phase and the post-purchase phase. MRAA also published a Guide to Defining The Customer Experience with Pizzolato and his team, which provides a deeper understanding of the basics of delivering a more rewarding customer experience. You can learn more about first-time boat buyers through research conducted and shared by Discover Boating. Valerie Ziebron offers a great course on how to Turn Upset Customers Into Loyal Ones, which shares positive conflict resolution techniques that you can use to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. At the MRAA, we seek to provide resources that you and your dealership need to help you make decisions and run your business with confidence. We know the challenges you face in adjusting your business to meet changing customer demands. That’s why we create powerful resources like those above, but please know that’s not all we have to offer you. The MRAA runs the marine industry’s only program focused on helping dealers deliver a world-class customer experience: Dealership Certification. Not only can our expert consultants help you put the processes in place to ensure a great customer experience, but the continuing education that is built exclusively for Certified Dealers helps you and your team stay up to speed on the latest methods for developing a competitive advantage through the customer experience. These include two in-depth courses by Theresa Syer on building a customer experience strategy; a course titled Take Your Dealership From Good to Great with CRM, by Sam Dantzler; Align Your Dealership with Today’s Customer, with MRAA’s Liz Walz; and more. These courses are packed with great insights, downloadable resources and dealer discussions. If you’re not ready to get Certified just yet, each year, MRAA’s Dealer Week conference and expo provides the latest insights, trends and strategies your business needs to thrive in any market conditions. This year, with all of the chaos in the marketplace and the uncertainty that plagued the economy, you can’t afford to miss Dealer Week. As the industry’s only dealer-focused event, it’s your one opportunity to access the leading experts, the top industry partners and like-minded dealers who are all vested in your success. Finally, if there’s a resource you need or are looking for, please reach out and let us know. If we don’t have it for you already, we’ll help you find it. To those of us who have been boating for decades, operation of a boat may come easy, and knowledge of boating etiquette and laws are common knowledge. But the same is not the case for the first-time boat buyers you’ve sold to this year. In fact, boating can be downright scary and intimidating to the amateur or novice. There are a lot of complexities: how to trailer the boat, how to launch from a ramp, how to drive the boat, how to use all the features of the boat, how to navigate the waterways, how to pull into a dock. I could go on and on with a list of things that new buyers are scared of and need to be trained on. Last week, we talked about the importance of the demo at delivery. But, we should also be arming our customers with additional resources and information. The great thing is that many of these resources already exist. You just have to curate the ones that work for your area and your customers. Or, you can make a few of your own to really personalize the message. Here are several places you can find resources to share with your first-time boat buyers: BoatUS: Drawing from the BoatUS Magazine, the BoatUS website has a slew of articles that could be helpful to your customers. The content includes information on: boats and tow vehicles, how to do it yourself, safety and prevention, technology, lifestyle and seamanship. Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation: RBFF provides resources on where to fish and boat, how to obtain a fishing license, resources for young anglers and much, much more. Sea Tow: While many of Sea Tow’s blogs focus on the organization and membership, there are also plenty that non-Sea Tow members may find useful, including those on safety, maintenance and other boating tips. Water Sports Industry Association: If your customers will be participating in water sports aboard their boat, WSIA has resources you can share with them, including materials from the Wake Responsibly campaign. U.S. Coast Guard: The Coast Guard offers recreational boaters a number of resources with a focus on safety. Boating Magazines: Keep an eye out for helpful articles that your customers may appreciate. Or search a boating magazine’s website for any specific topic you’d like to touch on. Magazines, like Boating magazine and Salt Water Sportsman, for example, are constantly producing new content for consumers, much of which is informational. Rely on these resources to keep your customers in the know. Local Resources: While much of what’s listed above pertains to a wide variety of boaters, a few local resources would also be helpful for your customers. Again, you should be able to seek out some resources that are already available. Check with your area marine trades association, Department of Natural Resources, lake associations, boat clubs, marinas and more for materials. You may want to provide your customers with information about fishing and boating regulations, maps of area waterways, details on area boat ramps and/or marinas and more. Build Your Own Resources: Personalizing the resources will take time, but it will also position your dealership as an expert. As you have time, create videos, blogs, emails, social media posts, brochures, handouts, and/or letters to help your customers navigate their boating lifestyle. You can create general boating operation resources, information on common boating lifestyle themes, or be extra helpful by filling in the holes of the resources you don’t have. For example, if there isn’t a resource already available about the waterway you’re on, you can create that. Make the resources engaging, insightful and helpful. One of the best ways to do this, as taught by long-time MRAA subject matter expert Marcus Sheridan, is to log all the questions you get from customers and then create resources — he recommends videos and short articles — that answer those questions. This simple task will solidify your position as the expert. (He also has a book on the topic titled, “They Ask, You Answer,” and we highly recommend it.) The key with all of these resources is to comb through them, find the ones that will most apply to your customers and share them. Curate a package of information (physical or digital) that you give to all customers after their boat purchase, maybe even while they’re waiting for delivery. And follow up with all of your customers with some of these resources year-round. Sharing this information with your customers will make for happier, safer, more knowledgeable boaters. And it will position your dealership as an expert, an organization that cares enough to share non-sales information, creating loyalty and a level of trust for the next time they’re ready to buy a boat or refer a friend to boating. As a boat dealer your goal should always be to discover new and effective ways of making people aware of the boats you are offering to sell, but without spending too much money. Advertising and promoting the boats through videos is probably the most cost-effective way of reaching a huge customer base. Video isn’t exactly the next big thing, and although it’s a huge part of any good marketing strategy, we’re not going to try to pretend that digital retailing is just a new buzzword for video marketing. So, I figured we’d gather some of the best tactics we’ve seen and heard about and share them. Dealers know that the boat business is all about standing out. These video marketing tactics will help you do that. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.handy guide and action plan to effectively shoot boat walkthroughs. 7. Use video for quicker service authorizations. For service writers, the dreaded voicemail can really hold up the service schedule when trying to get an OK from a customer to do the work. Instead of leaving a voicemail, record a video showing the problem while explaining the repair and the price and then text it to the customer. Remember, 98% of all text messages are opened and 95% are read within 3 minutes of receiving them! 8.Check out this webinar MRAA hosted with Kenect. 9. Video is a great way to engage customers and just maybe, get them excited enough about the boat to want to come in for a sea trial or help the seasonal boater to get back on the water quickly. It’s helpful to have a mixture of content, but video can tell a story in greater depth than text alone. Using these suggestions, your dealership can stand out in the sea of fiberglass and aluminum using video marketing. Boat dealers are feeling the digital pressure from all sides as the marine industry rapidly evolves under the pressure of the COVID-19 pandemic and most recently the significant influx of new boat buyers that have entered the market. As an industry, we’ve been touting digital marketing for years — since at least the time I came on the scene in 1999 calling it e-business. Those who have been sharpening their digital tools over the years were prepared when the market place changed dramatically in March. In reality, though, it shouldn’t have taken a pandemic to get dealers to look more closely at digital retailing. The systems, processes and tactics included in defining that engagement and full-fledged digital retailing remain fuzzy, at best, for most dealers. So, let me start by telling you what it’s NOT. Digital retailing is not digital marketing. It’s not your Facebook page, or your online inventory, email campaigning, chat bot or online payment calculator. It’s also not a button, “Get a Quote!” For boat dealers, digital retail requires a hybrid of online and offline boat-buying experiences. It gives boat buyers the ability to start the buying process online and then complete the purchase in-dealership — or vice versa. It’s giving consumers a complete set of shopping tools across both a dealer’s digital and physical showrooms and delivering a convenient, faster shopping experience. A digital retailing experience should allow boat shoppers to build a deal online that reflects a realistic buying scenario. That includes mapping out standard and optional equipment with applicable destination and rigging fees, taxes, trade-in values and add-on protection plans. Digital retailing platforms also transfer most ― if not all — physical paperwork online. Customers can complete paperwork on a tablet in the store, or log-in and finish the process from the their home. Whether at the dealership or at home, digital retailing streamlines the boat-buying journey while giving customers the flexibility and control they desire. Outflanked by tech-savvy retailers with deep wallets, boat dealerships everywhere are faced with a choice: Adapt to this new reality or become irrelevant. Here’s some real-world context: 1.2.3. It’s time for boat dealers to embrace digital retailing as the new standard for the dealership experience. Fortunately, a handful of new tools are helping boat dealers get into the fight. Digital retail platforms make it easy for them to upgrade the customer experience to keep pace with automotive, the larger marine dealer groups and the evolving expectations of the online marketplace. As some boat dealers remain wary of moving more of the boat-buying process online, it’s important to note that digital retailing doesn’t replace the showroom; it extends the experience to a powerful new channel for reaching more customers. Digital retail is a major opportunity for boat dealers that will have long-term benefits for early adopters.
Personalizing the buying experience Executed thoroughly, dealers in the digital landscape capture more customer intelligence up front, giving them a greater chance of closing the deal later. So digital-focused dealers are more informed and empowered when relating with a customer through the insights learned from digital retailing technology. Sales conversations can now include unique buyer information gathered well before a customer walks onto the dealership showroom floor. Providing the right digital retailing experience means leveraging detailed shopper information to transform the customer relationship. The online workflow should remember boats browsed by a consumer and serve up other relevant options. Their searches and budget parameters should be saved and reapplied when returning to the site and used to market to them. For instance, I’m a 24-foot center console kind of guy. When manufacturers and dealers know this information, sending me ads by email or in my social media feed featuring their new 65’ yacht is a complete waste of effort that leads to me opting out of future campaigns. It’s difficult for me to write this today — because I remember having to twist boat dealers’ arms to display their inventory online — but a static website today with boat listings doesn’t offer the detailed, personalized experience that today’s consumers want. Personalized buying experiences are, quite simply, the expectation, and today’s digital-first marketplace gives dealers more powerful tools to deliver on that. The marine industry is going digital. Are you? A strong digital retailing experience seamlessly integrates your dealership and online presence, and that gives you a new way to leverage customer data, build trust, generate leads, and increase your closing ratio. The best part is that when you do it right, you can close more deals and service more boats with less effort. Boat dealers stand at a crossroads. As retail changes around them, every owner and GM must make a choice: Do we change with the times, or stick to “business as usual?” Regardless of the road you choose, the digital retail evolution is not stopping for anyone. No one can imagine a future where boat dealers aren’t required to adopt digital marketing tools. Here’s the good news: it’s not too late to evolve. Every dealer in business today can still adapt to the modern boat-buying experience. Not only will digital retail help you keep up with fast-moving competitors, but it will give you an early-mover advantage over other boat dealerships. Thanks to modern digital retail platforms, any dealership can offer a top-notch customer experience. We can’t control where the marine industry is going, but we can control how we respond to it. 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, showroom traffic grows, and your sales team tries to hand the baton to service to take care of your customers. You feel the tug of competing priorities: Taking care of your boat buyers vs. moving on to selling the next boat. Meanwhile, boaters everywhere are hitting the water, service requests are piling up, parts and accessory orders are on the rise, and staff frantically tries to meet every demand. How do you keep up? The pressure of a summer selling season at a boat dealership resembles a juggling act amidst a frantic race to the end, as priorities shift between sales momentum, service efficiency, customer demands and inventory management, not to even mention staff workloads, overtime, summer vacations and the need for more help. I have two words for you: Slow down. It may seem contrary to how we’ve needed to react to this crisis, but there’s great value in simply slowing down and refocusing your attention on what matters most. At this moment, it’s the customer experience that matters most. With such an incredible influx of new boat buyers, it’s our job to help ensure their ownership experience keeps them in their boat and encourages them to upgrade that boat in the weeks, months and years ahead. How important is it? Well, if you put any value on customer service, you’ll see that as boat sales have risen dramatically, customer satisfaction scores have been heading the opposite direction — a decline driven mostly by a lack of follow-up by the dealer or its sales person. And that shortcoming is a result of not slowing down and taking care of the customer. It’s time to slow down and refocus our attention on those customers. Offering them just a little bit more effort on their experience and satisfaction can pay big dividends on your business. And there’s never been a better time than now to try it, when inventory levels are low and you won’t be able to spend as much time on sales. Here are a few quick ideas on what you could to enhance the customer experience: There are plenty of options for you to explore with this. The important thing is you take care of the customer. The key to taking care of the customer the best way possible is to slow down and give them the attention they deserve. This will give you and your team the opportunity to take a breath and provide significant value to the ownership experience. And it just may create a customer for life. Give yourself and your team permission to slow it down and focus on what matters most: The customer. 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 metrics we chart our success by continue to climb. But the bar charts related to the customer experience are on the decline, almost at an inverse rate. According to MRAA partner Customer Service Intelligence, Inc., which charts customer satisfaction indices on sales delivery and service for 30 to 50 marine dealers, CSI scores for this group has declined by more than 6 full percentage points since April. In the first month of the quarter, those dealers scored a 96.65 CSI score related to sales delivery; in the second month, it dropped to 94.39; and in June, the third month, it hit a low of 90.45. Q2 CSI Ratings Follow-up, worded on the surveys as “Has your salesperson contacted In a normal year, the peak season always sees a slight dip, according to Customer Service Intelligence, but that dip typically represents only a 0.5- or 1-point drop, not a 6-point drop. It’s worth noting here, as well, that any dealer who engages a company like Customer Service Intelligence and pays for additional CSI monitoring (above and beyond the manufacturer CSI program) is a dealership that you can expect to be focused intently on driving quality customer experiences. And if those dealers are close to dipping below the 90-percent CSI threshold, it’s scary to think what’s happening to those dealers that don’t put as much emphasis on CSI. Those dealers’ net promoter scores, a measurement of loyalty with the dealership, dropped from scores in the mid 90s back in March to less than 75 in June. These are still solid NPS scores, but a 15-point decline is notable. Comparably, the 12-month Net Promoter Score in the second quarter of 2019 was 83.1 vs. 2020’s second quarter, which was 76.88, “a substantial decline,” according to Becky Thompson, president of Customer Service Intelligence, Inc. “Dealers need to focus on correcting customer issues to bring this NPS number up. A quick look at individual questions on the CSI surveys shows the culprit leading to poor customer satisfaction: Follow up, or a lack thereof. Questions like “were you satisfied with the explanation of features, etc.?” and “were you pleased with the overall condition of the boat?” and “did your sales person treat you with courtesy and concern?” all garnered great scores: 95.5, 91.5, and 99.3 respectively. But the question of “Has your sales person contacted you since delivery?” received a rating of 77.17, dragging the customer experience index down significantly. “It’s scary to think what dealers’ ratings are when they don’t have a follow-up program in place,” explains Thompson. “How many first-time buyers are never returning because of a mistake that was made just because the dealer is too busy to follow up and ask how things are going?” There’s no doubt that with how busy dealers have been over the last quarter that mistakes are being made. CSI programs like this give you the ability to correct issues and save the customer. But they also require that you adjust your tactics in order to positively influence the results, and in this case, the numbers, as well as Thompson’s expertise, suggest a need to improve follow-up to create loyal customers. “The customer can be saved when you are aware of the issues they are having and you take the opportunity to make it right by the customer,” Thompson explains. “And that in return brings you customer loyalty.” We all have what feels like one million things going on at all times, at work, at home. It’s hard to remember everything we need to do. Heck, sometimes I can’t even remember why I opened the refrigerator. That’s why process maps are so important. They keep our business tasks on track, assuring that, if followed, no step will be missed. Post-Sale Follow-Up is one of those key areas where a process map can help immensely. With a Post-Sale Follow-Up process map, you can put in place schedules, checks and balances to make sure each customer gets the same follow-up, from handwritten cards to the 5-day thank you call and more. Luckily, you don’t have to start from scratch. MRAA’s Certification Team has developed two resources that will help you create your Post-Sale Follow-Up process map and execute on that map. The first is an Example Post-Sale Follow-Up process map, which you can adopt completely or adapt to your dealership’s specific needs. The second is a Post-Sale Follow-Up Worksheet. Pulled from Certification’s new Guide to Improving Your Sales Process Map, developed alongside the 2020 Continuous Certification course “Fill the Gaps in Your Dealership’s Sales Process,” this worksheet gives you tips for your Post-Sale Follow-Up, along with a Standard Operating Procedure Checklist. I’ve been telling dealers for years to move their sales conversations to the phone because tone of voice is a big, damn deal. It has a major effect on how prospects perceive you.
We believe that there are three core elements in effective face-to-face communication, and tone is a big one: Experts suggest it accounts for 38 percent of how your message is perceived — 38!
Believe it or not, scripts can help you with tone. Here’s why: As a sales rep, you should know what you are going to say during a call before you pick up the phone. Maybe not word-for-word but at least know the talking points, so that you can make good use of both your time and the customer’s time. Maybe you can wing it and do that, but most of us need a little help.
If you have a powerful script, you’ll know what to say and how to say it every time and increase your chances of a totally successful phone conversation. A well-tuned script will help you avoid mental hiccups that can result in time wasted and missed opportunities.
Personalize your script (to avoid the robot effect) Over the years, you’ve developed certain key responses or phrases that are always ready to go when you’re talking to people — that’s a script.
A common misconception about sales scripts is that they’re robotic and rigid. Word to the wise: They will only be that way if you make ’em that way. You will want to tailor and personalize a script for different settings and conversations without steering away from your core message.
Martial arts legend Bruce Lee has a great quote about training that applies here: “Absorb what is useful, discard what is not and add what is uniquely yours.” So, when it comes to a script, it’s about adding your own flavor without eliminating the things that have to be said.
The first step to personalizing is actually knowing the script well. That way, you can put your own spin on it and not completely go off-message. When you follow and personalize a script, you:
People who don’t like scripts say things like, “I’m a natural. Scripts just hold me back from connecting with people.”
We developed this phone script for you to use to make it easier for you to connect with people. The power of using a script is that it helps remind you of talking points that will help make a better connection with the customer by focusing on the fun of boating vs. the pain of the problems.
Personalize the script, so you can provide value within a short period of time. That’s what people want. That’s what I think scripts are powerful for — you know what to say, without thinking about it.
Final thoughts: You have to guide (not control) a conversation. You know where you’re going already — lean on your script to help you guide your customers to where you want to go. Stick to the script and start using it to your advantage.
About the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas
At the Marine Retailers Association of the Americas, we believe that for the marine industry to thrive, the retail organizations that interact with the boaters in their community must thrive. With that in mind, MRAA works to create a strong and healthy boating industry by uniting those retailers, providing them with opportunities for improvement and growth, and representing them with a powerful voice. For more information, visit
Make the Commitment to Your Customers
Build Your Customer Experience Strategy
Arm Your Customers with the Resources They Need
Video is King
Boat Dealers: It’s Time to Embrace Digital Retail
Slow Down and Create Customers for Life
2020: CSI Dropped as Sales Climbed
you since delivery?” hurt CSI scores with a 77.2 percent rating in the quarter.Create a Post-Sale Follow-Up Process Map to Assure Nothing’s Missed
On the Fence About Scripts? Winging It Is a No-Go
So, how do sales call scripts fit into that perception?
