AI for Boat Dealers: Practical Tools You Can Use Today

Episode Transcript

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Hey, what’s up everybody? Welcome to the Marine Marketing Podcast. I’m your host, Harry Casimir. This podcast is all about marketing your marine business, whether you are a boat dealer, boat builder, boat club, all in between. If you want to get more leads, more sales, and marketing that actually works, you are in the right place.

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And every episode we break down what’s working right now in the marine marketing space. There is no fluff, no generic advice, just real tactics you can take home and grow your business. This podcast is brought to you by Boat Marketing Pros, where we help marine businesses grow through digital marketing. Learn more at boatmarketingpros.com. All right, let’s get into it.

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AI for boat dealers, practical tools you can use today. In this episode, we are going to cut through the AI hype and focus on practical, affordable AI tools that marine business, especially boat dealers, can implement right now to save time, generate more leads, get their team to be more efficient. This is not about replacing people. It is all about making your team more effective. So we’re gonna dive deep into what are ways that you use AI to generate leads and doing marketing, AI for customer relationship, how you can use AI in operations of the business, and where do you get started.

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We gonna do a deep dive for each of those points, and let’s get into it. So you cannot go anywhere nowadays, actually everywhere, everyone is talking about AI, AI, artificial intelligence. But most boat dealers have no idea where to start. And the good news is that you do not need to be a tech expert to benefit and to use AI. Today we are covering some of the real tools that you can use, and those tools don’t really require much, just like you would use a DMS, for your dealer or you would use a basic CRM for your dealer, we are going to cover some of the things that, some of the tools that you can use to do most of the things or to become more efficient of the things that you are already doing or sometimes not even doing, but with the help of AI, you can actually get started and get you going.

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So the first piece we are going to cover is AI for lead generation and marketing. You’ve seen it everywhere. Most websites now have a chatbot on. The chatbot is on and ready to capture leads. And how can you use that to help your dealer take advantage of this new technology?

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A chatbot on your website, you can actually train it or you can use a simple one, Simply. To capture leads 24/7, even after hours. You can help use that tool also to answer basic and commonly asked questions such as, what are the brands you carry? Or obviously it will be very difficult and tricky to get your chatbot to answer specific pricing questions for you, but a chatbot can really solve a lot of things for you. And some of the tools that do this already, and that’s just kind of top of mind, obviously there’s Drift, there’s Intercom, our own CRM, we, Boat Marketing Pros has its own CRM called NautiLead.

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NautiLead is a CRM for and built for boot dealers and boat dealerships. Builders so they can manage the customer journey from leads to loyal customers. Then there are a ton of other platforms that’s available as well. There are some of them that’s actually dedicated, like Connect, that’s dedicated simply to the marine space. You could use AI-powered email campaign.

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An AI-powered email campaign really helps automate the follow-up based on customer behavior. And there’s a lot of different ways you can use this, but the simplest way is to ensure that when someone asks specific questions or submit a specific form on your website, or they meet certain criteria, actually you can automate the campaign so that only specific information go to them. So that helps personalize the content at scale. Let’s say you have a database of customers, you’ve been in business for a long time, you have a database of 3, 4, 5, 10,000 emails. It would be very, very hard for you to personalize individualized email for each one of them.

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But because you have some basic information about the location where they at and what the interests are, and that may not be 100% accurate, but if you can hit the 80-90% mark accuracy on that information. You can personalize a lot of that information. That is the power of AI. And some of that information, even if you don’t have the nitty-gritty detail of it, you can use AI to help filter and help even further enhance some of that information. And what are some of the tools that we have seen that works very, very well?

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Actually, Mailchimp have their productivity tools that really pretty slick. It actually does a pretty good job at those type of campaign. There is HubSpot AI that’s available as well. But even Salesforce does have its own built-in campaign that’s a little bit, can be overkill, but it will do the job. But we also have NautiLead as well that is pretty good at creating personalized campaign at scale.

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And sending specific information based on the customer data. You can actually help create ads at scale as well. You can generate ads imagery and get copy quickly. You can do a lot of A/B testing variation. You can create those ads actually even with Google Gemini, ChatGPT.

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There are some other tools that just upcoming. I don’t want to recommend them at the moment because they’re kind of fairly young. So I don’t want to recommend tools that could be gone tomorrow, but tools that can help you generate very, very well-defined ad campaigns at scale, not only create those images, but also help you build a variation of A/B testing to see what ads creative that works best for you. The other point is you can use AI for customer relationship management, AI for CRM. So what an AI within your CRM does, it helps predict when, it’s not a, sometimes like you’ll be surprised.

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With AI, a lot of information that you will have to go in or someone in your team will have to go in and try to figure it out, an AI can help predict when a customer are due for service. And AI can actually determine, depending on how you set up your workflow and your complete— the level of complexity you want to add to this, follow-up email can be sent automatically to customers, sending to mass customer, let them know when service are due, or what are some of the things that should be doing now to their boat. It can also help you identify buying signals from past customers. So let’s say, for example, you’re a boat dealer that is selling Boston Whaler and Pursuit, all right? These are kind of very strong brand, and if someone is interested in one, sometimes they kind of interchange, but sometimes they are not, right?

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But you have an idea that person is very interested in a Pursuit. But let’s say, for example, you have a lightly used pre-owned Grilly White coming in. You can actually automatically send email because that customer has bought or show interest in Pursuit, and Pursuit is not available at the moment. You can actually show all the inventory that’s available to them based on that signal, and that is the power of AI. And a lot of the follow-up task assignment to your sales team and to even internal or the team members that may not be involved in sales day to day.

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But sales is not a one-person job or just the salespeople team job, it’s the whole company thing. So you can actually assign, automate some of the assignment things that we used to go in, we have to build this crazy workflow manually, but now with AI, you can actually automate a lot of that information. There are tons and tons of different CRM out there that’s ready to do this, including Salesforce. Einstein is very good. I know Pipedrive Smart AI is pretty good at that.

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HubSpot AI is good at this as well. Even Zoho has a CRM called Zia. That actually can do what we’re talking about here, automate some of this. And cannot forget to mention, Naughty Lead actually has most of these already pre-built because it built just for boat dealers. So as a boat dealer, you don’t, many of these things, you don’t really have to think about them.

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You can just plug and play with the Naughty Lead CRM. AI for operations. This is kind of where AI can really help in lots of things. You know very well there’s lots of information, no matter what kind of business you’re running, there’s multiple departments, multiple things to keep up with from phone calls that’s coming in to team members that need to share notes and information to scheduling for the service departments, workload management, part ordering and services reminders. The list can go on for days.

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As operation grows, so is the demand for consistency, efficiency, and most so reliability. So this is where I think AI could really, really help from transcribing phone calls, taking a phone calls that just happened, to take the voice and transcribe it into text. Service notes automatically get distributed among team members and making sure everybody’s in line. And also predictive scheduling and workload management. Think about it.

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As a business owner, operator, manager, general manager, it’s very hard for you, even if you have your nose day in, day out in the operation, you don’t know every Wednesday at 10:00 AM you have an influx of people, June 27th, you wouldn’t know that. You actually would have to do a lot of analytics, a lot of data pushing to get that information out of a system. Whereas AI that’s actually embedded within your operation can help determine all those predictive scheduling and workload for you and really determine what this workload going to be from May to June or from December to January. So that way you can even determine what are the people you would need on the team to stay behind, not taking vacation at that time because the workload will be coming in. And those are just examples of things that you can get AI to do for you.

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And also because AI can predict a lot of things based on repetitiveness of nature of your business. It can also automate a lot of things that can happen, or you can semi-automate some of the things happen in the business. So for example, part ordering. So because of how the AI would look at all the scheduling, all the different services that you offer, and look at when certain parts are ordered the most, what are some of the information they looked at for them? Guess what happened?

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Every time the system looked at, for example, between May 1st to May 15th in the last 3 years, we always have at least 2 engine repairs happening. And these are the parts that needed to be in place when this happened. Now that does not equal, that you will always have that, but that gives you an idea. That information would be very hard for you to pull off. You could, but it’s a little bit harder for you as a person to just go in and dig that information.

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Service reminders, based on the service request, service scheduling for parts and services for a customer, for a boat, those reminders can be going out directly to the customer. But if you don’t want them to go to the customer, actually you can send them to whoever responsible within your company, let them know this boat, that the contact information for that boat need this type of service at this point of time, and then they can send that reminder themselves. But that you don’t even have to do the double work. You can automate part of that. And there are a ton of tools that to do just that, including Salesforce again itself that can do that.

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I know Zoho is pretty good at that, same thing HubSpot as well. You do not really need to go out and rebuild any of these, you just have to implement some of them within your operation. So how do you get started with any of those different tools I just mentioned and different things that you can do? Let’s first recap. One, You can use AI for lead generation and marketing.

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You can use AI for your CRM, inside your CRM to do a better job at customer relationship. You can use AI for day-to-day operation from transcribing notes to sending service reminder to existing customers. But How do you get started? So here are the steps I would suggest and highly recommend that you do. First, identify your biggest pain points at the moment.

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Leads follow-up, not enough qualified leads, or the leads that come in and they’re not qualified enough based on certain information they provide you. Is it scheduling? You have issue with marketing? Or do you have issue with reporting or the ROI information that’s not clear enough?

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Step 2 is start with one tool. Do not try to transform everything at once. It would be a nightmare, too much, and that can overload you very quick. And even if you’re not 100% sure you will keep a tool that you are trying, Try one tool for a little bit and making sure it’s working the way you envision it working. Once that’s working for you, then you can slowly either add additional items to that tool or get other tools to do one thing.

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Number 3, train your team for adoption because Adoption is the biggest barrier in every single business I have seen. Training is very, very crucial, but more important is the buy-in. Get your team to accept and embrace AI because it’s here whether we like it or not. AI is here to stay. It will really forever change how we do business.

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When we do business and what business really looks like in the next 2, 5, 10 years from now. So it’s crucial that you, from a business perspective, to start thinking, to start embracing, and you don’t have to jump all the way in. You can start putting your toes in the water to start testing how things look like and what this could do for you, for your business. And of course, the fourth piece is measure results before you expand. And if the result is right, is good for you, start expanding from there.

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The last thing I would suggest, a word of caution, I would highly recommend that you do not try to make one tool does everything for you. It’s almost impossible. I truly believe in Having one tool that does an extremely good job at one thing versus having one tool that does half job or not much at all for all of your things that you need. So there are a ton of tools out there that says they do everything, but at the end of the day, no one is perfect at everything. That’s included for software.

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Let’s take Microsoft Suite or Google Suite, for example, business suite, for example. That’s why Excel and Word document and PowerPoint, all of the softwares are independently available. And it’s because you wouldn’t be able to do your calculation easily within inside Word, so you have to use Excel. Just like you wouldn’t be able to easily write a full paragraph and multiple paragraphs within an Excel, you use Word for that. So every tool has its purpose.

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I’m saying that is because I have seen over and over one mistake people make in businesses is that they get one tool, they’re trying to fit their business inside that tool. If anything, that tool needs to fit inside your business. When you get the tools, whether it’s a CRM, basically leads management, whether it’s a phone system or an operational piece, you want that system not to conduct your business for you, but you want to dictate how that tool will be used inside your business. And this is crucial. I have seen this over and over.

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So that is it. I hope you guys have fun with this episode. Don’t forget to check us at bootmarketingpros.com/ai to see some of the recommended tools that we have in place. And of course, we’re always here to help. Feel free to reach out and we’ll be more than happy to help you reach your goal this year.

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That’s it for this episode. Please don’t forget to subscribe and share it with anyone in the marine space that needs to hear it. And we would love to hear from you. So drop us your questions or topics you would like us to cover in future episodes. And of course, if you need help implementing any of the tactics we talk about, head on to boatmarketingpros.com.

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We would love to help you grow. I’m Harry Casimir. Thanks for listening. Now let’s get out there and make some waves.