APRIL 30TH, 2009
A guarantee for success
If I take in all the news that surrounds us on a daily basis, from the Internet, television, magazines, etc., the last word that comes to my mind is confidence. Oddly, this is one of the most important words that we should be focused on. Our industry is built on enjoyment. It’s even in our industry name, powersports. It is hard to imagine customer enjoyment with industry faces filled with doubt and questioning. As business leaders, general managers, owners and more, we are challenged to take out the fear, doubt and worry from our teams and provide a sense of confidence necessary to ensure enjoyment for the powersports customer. Read more >>
Did you know that NASCAR fans are 82 percent more likely to buy a motorcycle than a person who’s not an auto racing fan? Did you know the No. 1 pastime for snowmobilers when they’re not riding is camping? Since a lot of my job consists of talking to experts in the powersports industry, I run across many random facts. While some of them are just that – fun, useless facts – the stats I just mentioned can make or break your marketing plan. 
Most dealer principals are in the motorcycle business because they’re passionate about motorcycles, not because they love to compile and analyze financial data. While being an enthusiast is certainly an important part of being successful in this industry, passion and enthusiasm alone won’t drive traffic to your dealership, improve your closing ratio, increase your value per customer or multiply their frequency of visits. In order to recession-proof your dealership you must put first things first and realize that everybody in the dealership works in sales. For this blog, let’s just focus on parts and service department staff members. After all, they don’t usually view themselves as salespeople. But you know as well as I do that if they’re not selling, they’re only order takers, and merely taking orders won’t cut it in our current economical conditions. They must take every opportunity to not only come out from behind the counter and make a sale, but to upsell every chance they get and increase the average value of each customer. 
Remember when you were a kid and built model cars or airplanes? You spent hours carefully assembling your models, but then placed them on a shelf and didn’t pay much attention to them afterward. Building the models was the fun part. Now consider an important ingredient to Harley-Davidson’s survival 30 years ago: If you wanted to ride a Harley back then, you also had to regularly repair it, or even better, replace parts prone to failure with better aftermarket parts. The point is that owning a Harley involved a “relationship” with the motorcycle, rather than just a vehicle parked in the garage. Harley and their dealers astutely nurtured this relationship even when the motorcycles no longer had reliability problems, by providing thousands of choices of accessories to bolt onto a customer’s bike. Like building models as a kid, owning a Harley-Davidson was an involving experience – a relationship – rather than just something to occasionally ride. 
In many non-motorsports businesses we find the sale of an operating business often involves selling what is called “personal goodwill.” This is a fairly new idea that doesn’t seem to have taken hold in the motorcycle world yet. Personal goodwill is an intangible asset that may involve the reputation, contacts, knowledge and skills of an individual. Think of a motorcycle dealership called John Brown’s Motorsports Center where John handles a variety of new and used products, and where he has established a reputation over many years of being knowledgeable, reliable and easy to work with. 
With the current economy and the severe effects it has had on our industry, it wouldn’t be surprising to me to see fewer OEMs have dealer shows this summer and fall. For us here at Powersports Business, that would be a huge letdown, not only because we love the glitz and glamour of these shows as much as you do, but more importantly, it’s our time to reconnect with our readership. 