Northpoint Embraces MRAA’s Recalibration Challenge
If you didn’t attend MRAA’s Annual Dealer Week this past December, you missed a tremendous opportunity for personal and professional development. There were multiple educational tracks and topics focused on sales/marketing, service/parts and leadership, featuring several outstanding presenters that focused on the over-arching theme of “Recalibrate: Learn. Adapt. Transform” and its importance to business.
As a backgrounder, our team invests significantly in attending and supporting these conferences and our customers. We send members of our team to attend these conference sessions in hopes that the topics will resonate and create some compelling new insights we can collectively learn from, and then share internally and externally with our customers.
While there were multiple outstanding takeaways we documented, our favorite session was presented by Ryan Estis entitled, “Selling Value and Experience in the New Economy.” After hearing his presentation, we were convinced that “recalibration” was, in fact, a timely and highly relevant concept for our business and one which we needed to hear and act upon.
Here are some of the key highlights we took from Ryan’s session, followed by how we’re applying what we learned to our business at Northpoint.
SESSION HIGHLIGHTS
- Success often brings complacency.
- You must make “recalibration” intentional.
- Take the first step by changing the way you do or think about something … open up and refresh your mindset.
- Recalibration is all about learning, adapting, transforming, and exceeding expectations.
- To drive change, you must be willing to embrace what is next and new.
- Change is no longer an event; it is a process that allows you to adapt and thrive.
- Change is an opportunity: you must be laser-focused on the opportunity and be willing to get outside of your comfort zone.
- An example from Starbucks: customers do not buy based on price; they buy on human experience.
- Leaders are listeners.
- As business leaders, you must make an investment in your customers and build community into your business.
- Turning a transaction into trust is the #1 factor for closing sales.
- Don’t give up; don’t ever give up!
As our team met together and had ensuing conversations about what we’d learned on this topic, the excitement and momentum continued to build. We embraced the “recalibration challenge” and candidly discussed how we could work together to effectuate change, provide greater service to our customers and take better control of our future.
RECALIBRATION AT NORTHPOINT
As you will read elsewhere in this month’s newsletter, we have recalibrated our sales and operations teams for greater alignment in an intentional effort to deliver an improved, full-service, personalized customer experience.
We thoroughly reviewed the working operations and organizational structure of our teams and made meaningful adjustments and improvements across the board. See the attached stories on some of these exciting new developments designed to deliver a better experience for our customers featuring specialized marine teams situated both internally and in the field. We believe this new and improved organizational structure will deliver a higher level of service, trust and confidence among our highly valued marine customers.
In closing, we want to thank the MRAA and Ryan Estis for providing such a dynamic environment for professional development and education. We thoroughly embraced the concept of “recalibration,” and the great news is, we’re already hearing positive feedback from our customers regarding the responsive changes we’ve initiated.
To borrow one of Ryan’s quotes, we’re working to “make it intentional … and to strive to make it better every day for our customers, employees, and friends.”
And yes … that’s all of you!
