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!”

Digital retailing is the customer’s ability to go deeper into the boat buying process online. Even if some car marketplaces, like Carvana and Vroom, allow 100 percent online sales, 95 percent of customers still buy their vehicles in a dealership. It’s becoming clear that buyer expectations are changing rapidly, and consumers are increasingly becoming impatient with a disjointed buying experience, both with the technology and the lack of dealership engagement. Digital retailing is the future of selling boats, and it’s ready for you to engage with today.

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:

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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.

And that’s just a normal year. In 2020, all of this has certainly been magnified by an overwhelming number of leads, record sales, factory shutdowns, depleted inventory, work-from-home mandates, appointment-only boat sales, social distancing requirements and more. You focus on keeping one ball in the air, another ball drops. Running a boat dealership demands a balance that is tricky to navigate.

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:

1. Share unique insights that you have about the boat or the brand that they’ve purchased or are considering.
2. Connect them with other boaters or an owners club from your dealership or the brand they purchased.
3. Make sure you use your customer relationship management tool and the FORMAT process that Sam Dantzler teaches in MRAA’s online courses, to help you personalize their experience.
4. Follow-up with boat buyers and ask how they are enjoying their boat, or check in with them after a service appointment. The simple gesture can make a huge difference.
5. Send customers ideas on how they might be able to get more enjoyment out of their boating experience through a new part or accessory, the reassurance of a maintenance package, or a new waterway to explore.
6. Schedule a reminder to text the customer or schedule the text to send automatically, to stay in touch and provide another reminder that you’re available to them.
7. One of the most valuable touch points you could offer is a thank you note. Stand out from the crowd with a hand-written, sincere thank you for their business. I promise you this will have an impact.

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
you since delivery?” hurt CSI scores with a 77.2 percent rating in the quarter.

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.

So, how do sales call scripts fit into that perception?

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:

• Make your points consistently,
• Don’t miss opportunities,
• Build better rapport,
• Seize your calls to action.

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.

You know follow-up is that last, important step in your sales process, but the July holidays have just passed, and you’re still busy and wondering how you could possibly find the time to follow-up yourself or hire someone else to do the job.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the need to follow-up with your ne w boat buyers, and you’re unable to hire someone to lead the effort for you internally, outsourcing these services is a way to get a follow-up program started quickly, as well as to get access to detailed reports on how your dealership is performing.

In a perfect world, we could do everything for our business ourselves, but that’s not always how things work. We all contract with vendors for a variety of things, from shipping to lawn care and from cleaning to human resources. Follow-up could also be contracted out.

Hiring a company to complete phone campaigns for you takes the work off your plate and offers the outreach that your customers need.

To learn more about outsourcing follow-up calls, we reached out to MRAA partner member CSI Inc., which offers dealers calls after delivery, alerts on issues, WOW reports on praise for your staff and monthly reports that track your team’s performance.

Becky Thompson, president of CSI, Inc., said that by following up and addressing issues, dealers can create lifelong customers.

“Everyone knows that happy customers make lifelong customers, and lifelong customers will put a nice profit on anyone’s bottom line,” Thompson said. “We all know it’s more costly to gain new customers, so why not invest to make sure every customer is so impressed with the care and concern they are receiving, that they wouldn’t go anywhere else for service and future sales?”

Follow-up is recommended with returning customers, service customers, and of course, first-time boat buyers.

“First time boat buyers will always have questions, and they need to feel confident they can come to their dealer for answers,” Thompson explained. “Build that trust, share their excitement, quality control check, and you will build lifelong customers.”

Following up with customers and gaining meaningful feedback has a variety of benefits, Thompson said. Those include:

• Fixing problems quickly, thereby saving customers with the customer intelligence obtained during the follow-up call. End result: Added profit to your bottom line!
• Building a stronger relationship with customers because the call clearly sends the customer a signal that the dealer really cares about their experience.
• Praising and recognizing staff for a job well done.
• Identifying broken processes, so they can be corrected, saving issues with the next customer.
• Praising and recognizing staff for a job well done.
• Identifying broken processes, so they can be corrected, saving issues with the next customer.
• Identifying broken staff processes, so retraining can occur.
• Tracking employees’ performance, enabling recognition for the employees who are providing exceptional service.
• Learning what your Net Promoter Score is.
• Learning what your Customer Satisfaction Index rating is.
• Identifying which marketing avenues are driving customers to the dealership.
• Revealing needed improvements that might otherwise be invisible. These are golden nuggets!

Follow-up is so crucial to building up your customer base with loyal, raving fans, and their referrals. So, finding a system that works for you is important. Outsourcing just might be that route, if you’re looking for an efficient program that takes the hard work off your hands.