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Marine selling is a lot different from other types of selling. For starters, most people who are buying a boat are buying it for recreational purposes, or in other words they do not necessarily need a boat – therefore marine salesman have to pitch them on buying something that they will only use for fun. This makes it more difficult to seal the deal than if you were selling something more utilitarian, as the customer’s budget is more or less discretionary. On top of that, so much of boating is predicated on uncontrollable conditions – when a boat salesman takes a prospective customer out on a test drive the weather could be bad, or the lake could be crowded. With cars a salesman can take a customer out on a test drive right away, but with boats the process is more complicated as obviously they need to be in the water. A lot must go right in the sale before the customer can set sail.

 

Thankfully, technology can help steer marine sales reps away from the rocks. (Metaphorically speaking, of course, although marine GPS systems have come a long way.) By logging customer interactions in a CRM, they can highlight what has gone right during past sales and identify what exactly went wrong. In addition, as for marine sales managers, with CRM they can analyze how their team is doing overall, how their reps are performing on an individual basis, and also assign leads/territories to individual reps.

 

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This goes for other industries, not just marine: when everyone on a sales team works with the same system, things run much more smoothly. Accounts can be passed off much more easily, data analysis reports can be produced much more accurately/quickly, and there is a significantly smaller chance of customer information being lost.

 

Besides CRM, there are other technologies that can make life easier for marine sales representatives. Virtual reality, for example, can enable them to give customers an accurate sense of the size of a boat and the spaciousness of its cabin without seeing it in person, aerial footage shot by drones can make presentations more compelling, and artificial intelligence can help find/qualify leads. Even something as simple as a reminder app can make things go smoother in day-to-day marine sales. The technology exists, marine sales reps just have to utilize it.