Smart Yacht Marketing 101: The secrets to sourcing, winning and retaining the world's richest clientele

By Mark Duncan

"A MASSIVE EYE OPENER FOR THE YACHT INDUSTRY!"

Are these the issues holding back your yachting business right now?

• A lack of quality leads generated by your marketing
• No standout for your CA yachts (or your company or YOU) to catch the eye of the growing

• Language: English
• Publisher: Smart Yacht Marketing
• Release date: Nov 29, 2018
• ISBN: 9781912615513

Mark Duncan

For more on the author, the book and reader feedback go to www.smartyachtmarketing.com. Mark Duncan has been working with UHNWI for most of his professional life - as a trainee lawyer in London, the co-founder of one of the most successful and longest-running luxury events management company in the South of France and, for 15 years, as the Sales and Marketing Director for Riviera Radio in Monaco. For 10 years he headed up the marketing division of Yachting Partners International (YPI), one of the world's first ever full-service brokerage companies, and is a regular speaker at industry events including the MYBA broker training seminars. Now Director of Marketing & Business Development at Fraser Yachts, his views and insight on the business of yachting have been shared on CNBC, Bloomberg, Daily Telegraph, Times, Wealth Scene and City Wealth amongst others.

Book preview

AUTHOR PREFACE

A message to YOU!

Having spent 18 months of my life working on this project, it now gives me great pleasure to welcome you on board.

Congratulations, and thanks for securing your own copy of Smart Yacht Marketing 101.

You hold in your hands almost 30 years of sales and marketing experience, and just about every trick and technique I have learned (so far!) in helping you, your yachts, services and company stand out from the crowd.

But, before we dive in, I want to tell you what this guide is, and perhaps even more importantly, what it is NOT all about!

It is NOT a step-by-step guide to becoming a successful yacht sales or charter broker – although the tried and tested tricks and techniques I am going to share with you ARE going to bring you to the attention of many more new clients and endear you to many more existing clients than ever before.

It is NOT a guide to teach you how to sell yachts, but it IS going to increase your sales by showing you how to tap into the resources, talent and tools you may never before have even been aware are there for you.

And it is NOT a technical guide to digital marketing – although we will be diving into the tricks and techniques used in digital marketing, especially emailing and social media, that will guarantee you better awareness, increased standout and much higher client engagement and retention.

If you are a broker who is quietly concerned about where your next client may be coming from, then this guide is going to help you. If you are a marketer frustrated by the lack of real leads being generated by your efforts and the wrath of brokers and bosses that often ensues as a result, then this guide is going to give you some key solutions. And if you are a company director, CEO or shareholder who is thinking of investing even more into your marketing so as to appease those broker cries of ‘our marketing sucks’ and ‘we need more leads’ then this guide is going to save you a lot of money. You might be forgiven for thinking that working harder, bringing more people in or throwing even more money at the problem will help.

In my experience, it won’t!

Instead, you’ll end up with the same results, a team that is considerably more stressed and a lot less money in the bank.

To quote the great Henry Ford: ‘If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.’

The real secret to finding those new clients, retaining existing clients for longer and with increased spend, and getting a much better return on marketing investment tends to be revealed only when we are prepared to take a step back, become clear on what we are trying to achieve and then decide on how to do it smarter!

And that is the point of this guide.

If you are ready to take a good, hard look at the mindset, the steps and the actions you take today in your bid to become the bestest, most successful possible version of yourself, and if you are ready to get out there and shake things up, then Smart Yacht Marketing 101 is the blueprint that will help you to start selling like a god by marketing like a guru.

For more than 60% of potential clients, the marketing images and messages we put out there actively influence who they turn to for help. Marketing influences decision-making, for better or worse, long before our brokers even have a chance to say ‘hi’.

And yet, just how involved are our brokers in determining that message?

This guide tackles the one aspect of our industry that has been eating away at our return on investment and our ability to effectively generate new revenue and business for years – the gaping disconnect that exists between our sales and marketing departments.

It is not unique to yachting; it consistently ranks in the top three reasons why companies lose out on potential business every day. One recent study by the research and advisory firm, Forrester Research, showed that companies with poorly aligned sales and marketing teams recorded an average decline in revenue of 7% – that’s compared to an average annual growth of 32% enjoyed by those with tightly aligned teams. A 2017 study by LinkedIn of 6,000 sales and marketing professionals showed that companies who had well-aligned sales and marketing teams, as well as shared measurable objectives, recorded a 67% increase in closing deals, a 58% increase in client retention and an increase of more than 52% in productivity.

So how the heck has this disconnect come about in our game?

However they come to yachting, yacht marketers don’t naturally land with an inbuilt understanding of either the yachting sales process or the intricate machinations that are the mindset of our ultra-high net worth (UHNW) clients. Why should they? Luxury yachting is a peculiarly unique environment. However, in the absence of that understanding, so many marketing efforts are, at best, severely hampered in their drive to generate quality leads. Yacht brokers, as a direct consequence, are left with an image of marketing that is little more than an ability to organise shows and place pretty pictures on websites or social media. Brokers rarely, if ever, get to see or experience the full extent to which a properly trained and integrated marketing team can not only support their sales efforts in sourcing and keeping clients, but also help them to convert.

When I first started working in our industry, over 10 years ago, nothing like this guide existed.

For my peers and I, there weren’t even any sales and marketing mentors we could turn to.

And the truth is, I couldn’t have written this guide back then, even if I had wanted to! 80% of what I have written about here was unknown to me at that time, despite my 20 years’ previous sales and marketing experience (some of the tools I talk about here hadn’t even been invented!). Neither was there any other way of picking up on that 80%, other than just getting out there and doing it, for better or for worse, no matter how long it took to learn (and boy, did it take a long time!).

Yacht marketing was just one big jigsaw puzzle, with lots of pieces but no box or lid to show us the big picture we were supposed to create. And as for how many pieces were actually needed to complete it… who knew?

The fact is, there isn’t the time anymore for our marketers to learn about yachting on the job, and we can’t afford for marketing to remain the cost centre it has traditionally been. Marketing should always be a driving force of revenue for any company – sales and marketing are the most influential components of any yacht company in its battle to win and retain business. And they need to be operational from the word go!

So, treat this as your guide to ‘smarketing’, and not the disparate worlds of sales and marketing, because we work in an era when delivering a unique, smooth and rewarding experience for clients who are more demanding and better informed than ever, is all we have left in our fight to stand out and win business.

If our sales and marketing efforts are not in sync in striving to achieve the same goals and objectives, then for all our efforts, we are investing our way into obscurity.

John Jantsch, the author of Duct Tape Marketing, once said the difference between sales and marketing is that marketing owns the message and sales owns the relationship.

This guide shares the tricks and techniques it took me and my peers literally years to master. The tricks that will help you to get those messages and relationships on point. Techniques that will help you to better tell the stories we want our salespeople to be able to sell.

It explores the essence of our industry: what we do, what we sell and who we are selling to. Step by step, it analyses the tools we use to communicate with existing clients and reach out to new ones. It illustrates the multitude of ways on and offline in which sales, working more closely with marketing, is better equipped to serve clients by giving them what they need in the form they need it.

The creative advertising legend, and a hero of mine, Bill Bernbach, once said: ‘Getting a product or service known isn’t the answer. Getting it WANTED is.’

Whatever your place in yachting today – whether you’re a broker, marketer, departmental director, yacht manager, CEO or even yacht owner or captain – my goal is that this guide, and all that’s shared within it, will help to show you how, with the right mindset and tools, we can be more efficient and effective in getting ourselves, our brands, products and services not just known by UHNWIs… but wanted by them.

Ultimately, I want to help speed up your ability to identify and resolve those client pain points that rob you of so many opportunities and potential business. I want to present you with the missing part of the puzzle that eluded my peers and I for so many years: the lid to the box it all comes in. The lid that finally reveals the big picture we’re trying to create. The one that tells us just how many pieces we need to complete it.

So, get your straight edges and blue-sky pieces together, it’s time we nailed that puzzle.

INTRODUCTION

Over the years, I have spent many a wine and beer-filled evening in the company of yacht brokers, lazily chewing the fat and occasionally talking about work. One subject that would almost always raise its head above the parapet and succeed in ruffling a few broker feathers, was the hotbed that is marketing.

Brokers would tell me that whilst they nearly always adored the people in their marketing teams and that having an in-house marketing team was probably a good thing overall, they nevertheless felt that marketing types (read: those good people who do marketing) almost certainly lived on another planet! And, as the wine and beer inevitably flowed, so too would the brokers’ desire to share more. They would tell me that whilst they accepted that much of what they (the said good people in marketing) did – the ads, websites, social media, PR, events and shows – was probably good for company brand awareness, the truth was that it was never really going to bring the brokers themselves any new clients.

Marketing people, they reflected, just didn’t understand the sales process – they didn’t get what makes UHNWIs, our clients, actually tick. And so, rather than risk losing their hard-fought relationships with prospects and clients to poorly targeted or ill-informed marketing efforts, the brokers, understandably enough, preferred to keep their clients, and all communication with them, solely for themselves. Holding on to existing clients and going after new ones, all would agree, had to be the sole preserve of brokers and it was something they all begrudgingly resigned themselves to having to deal with… on their own!

And yet, it seemed, many of these guys were at their wits’ end when it came to understanding where on earth their next client might be coming from.

Some had been selling serious tonnage for years to some very influential clients and yet, all too often, it seemed those networks had a habit of drying up. Others had concluded some useful business, but not yet managed to build a sustainable network. The remaining brokers would normally be brand spanking new to yachting. These were the guys who insisted their little black books were practically spilling over with lucrative contacts from their previous roles in other luxury industries, all of them chomping at the bit to buy yachts. Or so it seemed, until the confessions started slipping out, normally helped along by another round of drinks. That’s when it would transpire that those long-held contacts, people who for years may have been very comfortable in turning to that broker for advice on such things as real estate, now didn’t seem quite so eager to act on the broker’s equally enthusiastic take on the very different world of real estate that floats.

Funny, that!

Now, without wishing to sound like someone who should be worried about the state of their liver, I have also had many similar conversations over the years, though perhaps with less beer and more cocktails, with friends and colleagues from the other side – the ‘marketing types’. Here, the frustrations would be a little different. For some of the older hands, the real problem with yacht marketing was getting the information they needed out of a broker on time. No matter how often they would chase him, said broker was always too busy being busy to reply. Until, that is, the day when the report he’d asked for needed to be delivered to the client! By this point, he’d be screaming, demanding to know why nothing had been done earlier. And why, when it did get done, in a hurry, it now looked so amateurish!

For those marketers who were newer to yachting, freshly headhunted from other luxury industries or via LinkedIn, the real puzzle was how this industry worked at all. The online techniques that experience (or so-called digital gurus) said would never work with UHNWIs, actually worked rather well in yachting, whilst those tools and tricks that were supposed to form the basis of all good practice didn’t seem to resonate at all. And that was before anyone got onto the topic of the clients themselves who, for the most part, had the jaws of most newbie marketers lying somewhere around their high heels and backpacks.

And so it is in yachting. Each day, both sets of people arrive at work and get on with what they each have to do. Their paths occasionally cross by the water cooler where they will maybe exchange some brief notes on running an ad in Boat International for an old Central Agency (CA) or query why a show’s organisers haven’t placed the broker’s yacht in a premium berth for no extra fee. Then, water bottles duly filled, they head back to their own workstations to get on with their own supposedly separate jobs.

Prior to the financial crisis of 2008, this didn’t pose too much of a problem. The phones used to ring back then – with clients on the end. The iPhone was only just celebrating its first birthday in the era of the business phone of choice – the Blackberry. Facebook and LinkedIn were both in their infancy, the preserve of students and geeks. Websites were shop windows offering long-form magazine-style articles and low-resolution thumbnail images that you could only access from a computer. Video was something TV channels used, and if a client wanted to find out anything of worth about yachting, he had to call a broker. Those were the days when brokers spent more time in the air than in the office, and if they were on their phones, it was because they were actually talking to clients (!) and most probably wondering why they weren’t where they said they would be. Sales was sales and marketing was what you needed if you wanted to produce brochures, print advertising, photo shoots, boat shows, websites and general brand awareness. The stuff that everyone said was ‘good to do’.

There was, however, never any notion of marketing getting too involved in sales.

From the time those two words ‘Lehman Brothers’ slid off the tongues of every broker, director and shareholder in yachting from 2008 onward – when the phones fell silent and the market was awash in product desperately for sale – our industry has had to rethink itself. It had to work out new ways of reaching out to potential clients. In what became a buyers’ market without buyers, rapidly developing online technology brought with it greater bandwidth, smarter phones and social media.

And that development came at a cost.

It heralded the beginning of a new era when brokers, once the sole source of insight and guidance for clients, the gatekeepers to yachting, became increasingly sidelined by the spread of so much more information online. Information that soon saw brokers fall victim to a newfound pressure on commissions.

Today, clients know more, see more and experience more about our industry, the product and services we sell than ever before, and all without the aid of a broker. The battle and the challenge we face today lies in our ability to demonstrate to clients why we are needed at all. What is it that can possibly justify our commission rates today?

Before we can confidently demonstrate any of these things to our clients, we sort of need to answer these questions for ourselves. That means leaving no stone unturned in questioning the efficiency and effectiveness of how our salespeople function and how our marketing people support them in the drive to secure and retain quality business.

This is the mindset and the journey of getting back to basics, of avoiding the sort of obligatory, time-consuming, 10-year learning curve that we used to have to wade our way through. This guide is designed to kit us up for the fight and get us ready for action, so we can come up with the goods that clients expect of us faster than ever. So we can stand out, be trusted and respected for who we are and what we do.

Perhaps it is also one way of helping us prepare for that not too distant day when the much-respected, pioneering old guard of our industry gradually don their panamas, strike up their Cubans and wave a final farewell to those who are set to become the key players and personalities of what is rapidly shaping up to be the next generation of luxury yachting.

PART ONE

YOUR YACHTING ROADMAP

THE SIX PILLARS TO BECOMING AN AUTHORITY THAT CLIENTS TRUST

COMING UP...

CHAPTER 1: STARTING WITH THE MINDSET OF CHAMPIONS

Busting the myths that lose brokers opportunities every day

CHAPTER 2: GETTING THE BIG PICTURE

What is yachting, what are we selling and who is buying?

CHAPTER 3: UNDERSTANDING YOUR BUSINESS

When data is your added-value and crunching it unravels the secrets to winning clients

CHAPTER 4: DEFINING YOUR PRODUCT

How your answer to one question that clients never ask decides whether you win or lose their business

CHAPTER 5: KNOWING YOUR CLIENT

The single biggest reason why clients are not buying from YOU

CHAPTER 6: BUILDING BRAND ‘YOU’

Perception is reality – how a client’s perception of you, your brand and service can attract or repel their business

CHAPTER 1

STARTING WITH THE MINDSET OF CHAMPIONS

BUSTING THE MYTHS THAT LOSE BROKERS OPPORTUNITIES EVERY DAY

The fact you are reading this tells me that you have something of the mindset of champions within you already. You are someone motivated by goals and objectives, you feed off the excitement of delivering results that make a difference for you, your clients, colleagues, family and friends. You leave no stone unturned in doing whatever it takes, learning whatever needs to be learned, in order to be the best at what you do.

You are aiming to become the absolute bestest version of you.

Chances are, you are also curious to see if this guide can perhaps answer some of those questions we all have niggling away, 24/7, at the backs of our minds. Questions like: ‘How can I be more successful?’; ‘How can I generate more revenue?’; ‘How can I find and keep more clients?’ or that beauty which rarely gives us a minute’s peace: ‘How can I achieve more by doing less?’

Well, my friend, let me step up onto my soapbox and loudly proclaim: ‘Hell, yes!’

So, let’s dive right in and get some of those answers right now.

If you are in marketing, the answer to all the above is taking the time to better understand the industry we are in and the process of selling to UHNWIs. The answer is working more closely with your salespeople.

If you are a broker, the answer is to get past the pretty pictures, websites and social media that clients never seem to read in order to better explore how marketing and its full kit of wizard wheezes can support you, promote you and help you to convert some serious business… once it understands what you are trying to achieve!

For the record, this is not some guru-style self-improvement guide to positive thinking or goal setting (although, if you’re in search of such inspiration, by all means, check out the bibliography at the back – some of the books there are real game changers). It is, however, a guide based on one simple premise: sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin and when the two work together to achieve the same goals there is precious little that can get in their way.

Let’s illustrate that by busting a few myths.

HAVE A GO AT ANSWERING THESE TWO QUESTIONS:

Let’s consider your answers to Question 1.

I ask this question all the time at seminars and presentations, and the answers are pretty much always the same. In fact, over 80% of brokers (and even marketers) reel off some or all of the following:

•Website

•Social media

•PR

•Yacht shows and events

•Yacht brochures

•Yacht photography and video

•Client/corporate brochures or magazines

•Company brand colours and logo

•Company business cards

•Uniforms

•Name badges

•Dodgers

•Event invitations

Looking at your own list, how does it compare to the one above? Pretty much the same?

Well… sorry… but it’s time to get…

BUSTED!

In much the same way a hammer or chisel isn’t ‘carpentry’, the truth is that these are not examples of marketing; they are, however, great examples of marketing tools.

In fact, significantly, some of the most influential marketing tools for generating sales don’t even make it onto most brokers’ lists. If any of these tools are on YOUR list, then congratulations are well and truly in order because you, my friend, are already ahead of the game:

•CA presentations

•Client yacht selections

•CA client monthly/quarterly reports

•Emails to clients or prospects

•Online yacht listings

•Client billing or quotations

•‘Thank you’ gifts or gestures for clients

•The way in which we conduct yacht visits

•How we follow up with prospects after yacht visits, meetings or presentations

•Advising on and producing onboard yacht-branded literature, welcome guides or videos for CA owners, their guests and charterers

•Data and trends in yacht sales or charter markets that can help to better prioritise where we allocate our time in prospection

•Presentations and talks to the industry or even to potential clients

When we, as brokers, overlook these marketing tools, we are seriously missing out on the input and the influence of the very people who stand to make the biggest difference for us! We are missing out on the experts in design, layout, content creation, new technology and digital solutions that make up our marketing teams.

But, as I said earlier, they are tools. Not marketing.

Which kind of begs the question, what is marketing?

After many years of tweaking, this definition, I think, nails it best:

MARKETING IS: THE COMMUNICATION OF A SPECIFIC MESSAGE TO A SPECIFIC GROUP OF PEOPLE AT A SPECIFIC TIME DESIGNED TO CREATE A DESIRE FOR SOMETHING WE ARE SELLING AND SHOWING THEM HOW TO GET IT.

Read that definition again.

Doesn’t that seem like a pretty good definition for sales, as well?

Sales and marketing are two sides to the same coin, except marketing has so many other ways of reaching out with a sales message to so many more people and so much more often than any one broker could ever hope to achieve (no matter how industrious or insomnolent!).

Payday comes when brokers, commercial directors and C-suite management agree on the message that marketing needs to get out there and the people who need to hear it.

Which brings us neatly to the second question, probably best summed up as: ‘There’s a place for marketing in yachting to help a company stand out and be known, but it doesn’t help when creating real client opportunities. That’s something only brokers can do.’

Is that pretty much the tone of your answer?

Well, sorry again, but…

BUSTED!

Well, partly…

This statement is unfortunately partly true, especially when marketing is left to its own devices in coming up with the messages and the people it feels ought to be targeted.

That’s not to say marketers don’t know what they are doing.

It’s just that they might be pumping out messages on the joys of Mauritius as a charter destination when our charter team is struggling to fill its CA yachts for the Caribbean. They might be focused on Russia as a new source of clients, when our brokers, and our business, needs a boost with Americans. Analysing our brand colours might seem like a top priority for our marketers when our yacht management team is struggling with a groundbreaking new app that nobody even knows exists.

All of this can so easily be avoided, however, and royally nipped in the bud when we move away from our old, tired and desperately outdated vision of marketing.

When we start to look at marketing in a different way, we can start to see it for what it really is today – the extra broker in any sales team.

And not just any old broker!

Marketing is the star player who can talk to and influence more people than any of the other guys put together, and then – and this is the best bit – unlike any broker in the world, when prospects do reach out to find out more, marketing (our extra broker) passes them straight on to the rest of the team without asking for any commission.

Genius!

There are just two things this superstar broker needs to know before he can get started: who he needs to reach out to, and what he needs to say.

And guess where he gets that inside track from?

Yep. The sales team!

Bringing marketing into every aspect of sales is what makes the magic happen.

No one understands the clients we are going after better than experienced brokers.

They know only too well the core messages they need to get across about their service, their product or themselves. Most will know the areas where they feel weakest, if only by looking at the resources of their heel-snapping competitors. What they frequently won’t know is how best to get that message out there or how to improve the tools they use to communicate it. Assuming a similar level of competence exists between brokers and marketers, the most common factor in marketing tools that look great but fail to perform is that the marketing people were not working to the same sales goal as the brokers.

The secret many successful brokers have uncovered is the power that a well-constructed message, properly distributed to the right set of people, can have when it comes to generating interest and enquiries on a yacht, a service, themselves or their company. They realise that great marketing is essentially tantamount to having an ambassador, another salesperson, out in the field on their behalf, 24/7, anywhere in the world. They realise that great marketing is out there, communicating the exact message they want to be communicated to hundreds, if not thousands, of potential new clients. And, perhaps most significantly of all, they realise that it’s those messages that allow that broker to wake up each morning feeling less and less surprised by the increased number of responses and enquiries already sitting in their inbox.

For those who subscribe to the pearls of wisdom shared by the world’s fourth richest man, the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett, this is the stuff that goes a long way to realising the goal in his famous quote: ‘If you don’t find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die.’

The key to getting it right lies in asking two simple questions before launching any marketing effort on any level at any time:

If the answer isn’t immediately apparent to everyone or it takes too long to make the link between the action and the goal, then it’s not ready to go to market.

Getting our two departments into sync also comes with one beautiful fail-safe mechanism already built in: for the best working relationship with the glorious absence of risk, nothing goes out until the broker and the marketer have signed off together.

And, when both are focused on the same goal of generating more business… both have a stake in getting it right.

We’ll be wrapping up this guide by looking at some of the practical ways we can bring our sales and marketing departments so close together that they end up finishing each other’s sentences! But for now, suffice to say, this is what it takes to stop our brokers from missing out any longer on the tools that smart marketing can – and needs to – deliver to increase sales.

This is the Mindset of Champions.

CHAPTER 2

GETTING THE BIG PICTURE

WHAT IS YACHTING, WHAT ARE WE SELLING AND WHO IS BUYING?

Now we are free of the shackles of those marketing myths, let’s take a moment to check the foundation blocks upon which absolutely every single element of our future success rests. Let’s help those marketers, junior brokers or old hands in search of some mental refreshment to better understand the business we are in.

Like the golfer and that eternal battle with his swing, when we are in the thick of it, out there fighting for the business, the obvious and the common sense, the basics and

Reviews for Smart Yacht Marketing 101

[AndyM · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is the definitive book on HNW marketing for the super yacht industry. By accident it is also the definitive guide to marketing anything in the HNW space. Use a little imagination and yachts as a metaphor for whatever industry you’re in. The author has a great sense of humor and clearly knows 10x more than he shared in this already comprehensive book. It’d be great if there was an audio version. Although how does one render data easily audibly? I can’t wait for the next edition.