In the exclusive world of superyachts, owners and crews come and go, but the vessels themselves - barring a catastrophe - sail on for decades. For a sailmaker and supplier such as Doyle Sails, based in Avondale in west Auckland, that means your customer relationships tend to be with boats rather than people.

Of course, that’s not literally true - it’s people who write out the cheques for the high-tech sails that for a large yacht might run to NZ$2 million. But Doyle New Zealand sales manager Matt Bridge worked out when the company was implementing a new customer relationship management system early this year that the yachts themselves needed to be at the centre of things.

“Superyachts are our core business, from which we make the majority of our money,” says Bridge, a former skipper of one of the vessels that are often 50 metres or more in length, with a price tag in the region of $50 million.

New Zealand, with a profile earned through success in international events such as the America’s Cup, is a world leader in superyacht construction.

This extends to sails as well, with New Zealand having the largest operation – 70 franchised Doyle sailmaking lofts –that have sprung from the original business.

The company began in 1982 in Marblehead, Massachusetts, on the east coast of the United States.

Robbie Doyle, founder, has an applied physics background from Harvard University and is also an experienced America's Cup racer.

The combination of advanced technology and competitive sailing experience is a hallmark of the New Zealand operation too. It has helped it expand into the Australian and European markets.

“We don’t just get a roll of cloth and cut triangles out of it,” Bridge says.

The company’s Avondale sail loft, one of five throughout New Zealand, is 100m long and 28m wide.

The laminates of carbon fibre and other exotic materials that go into high-performance sails are made in-house, with design being led by Volvo round-the-world and America’s Cup sailor Richard Bouzaid.

Where the business was lacking, says Bridge, was in keeping track of customer relationships, an area of its operations it needed to upgrade if it was to expand successfully overseas.

“Rather than being people or customer-orientated, it was important for us to be able to keep track of boats, because boats get sold and skippers change. If you have a good knowledge of a boat - be it a superyacht, race yacht or cruising boat - and can keep track of where it is in the world, who owns it and who’s running it, then you can, hopefully, bring in more repeat sales.

“You have to remember that a lot of these boats are very transient. One minute they’re in Europe, and three months later they could be in the Seychelles, on the way down to New Zealand. And crews change fairly regularly, particularly captains and project managers, so keeping track is really hard.”

If a vessel changes hands, there’s a competitive advantage for the existing sailmaker to be able to demonstrate to the new owner comprehensive knowledge of the yacht’s set-up.

“If you can show existing knowledge of the boat, and can do a development of the existing sails, you’re already one step ahead of the competition.”

So Bridge says Doyle New Zealand decided late last year to implement a better record-keeping system than the simple database it had been relying on.

“Previously, we didn’t really have a very good vehicle for keeping records and we found we were losing track of existing customers. If a boat was sold or a new skipper came on who had different ideas, it was difficult to maintain the relationship.”

Sales leads tended to reside in the heads of the company’s half-dozen salesmen, and customer service records were equally haphazard, a risk for the business, given the high expectations of wealthy boat-owners.

When Bridge began looking at customer relationship management (CRM) systems, he found they typically put businesses and people first. Once he made the mental switch to putting boats at the centre, he began to see the software’s potential.

“It was just the logical way of doing it because we are boat-orientated — we need to keep track of the boats because everything else is very transient.”

Bridge chose SugarCRM, supplied by 10-year-old Auckland company TEIQ, for a couple of key reasons.

“Because of the peculiarities of the way we do things and the way we sell, it needed to be very flexible. I liked the whole open-source concept – that if we wanted a particular feature we could contract software programmers to do it.

“We don’t have a dedicated IT department, so it wasn’t something we could consider doing ourselves, although, when I did start playing with it, it was relatively easy to customise.”

It took one session with TEIQ chief executive James Beamish-White for Bridge to understand how the system could be set up to suit Doyle, and he took it from there.

“I don’t claim any particular IT expertise, but I was able to customise it myself,” Bridge says.

A few months after implementation, Doyle has about 500 vessels recorded in SugarCRM, about 60 percent of them superyachts, and the majority existing customers. The information recorded includes when a vessel was built and by whom, the designer, names of captain and crew, and anyone else associated with the boat. Doyle’s history with the boat, any competing sail supplier, the loft where its sails were made, plans and other technical information about the boat and its service history are also included.

Since SugarCRM is web-based, all of this information is available to Doyle’s sales team wherever in the world they happen to be.

“We’re always going off doing regattas, fitting sails and meeting customers all over the world. You never know where you’re going to go next. So, the whole concept of implementing CRM in the (internet) cloud was a real winner,” Bridge says.

Another feature, that has served to show his boss, Chris McMaster, the point of the software, is its workflow functionality. When McMaster received a CRM generated reminder to contact a customer, and he subsequently made a sale, the penny dropped.

“That really brought home to him SugarCRM’s value,” Bridge says. “If you can pick up all the little sales that tend to be forgotten about among the glamour stuff, it actually makes a considerable difference to our turnover.

“It’s really been a great tool so far.”

FOR MORE INFORMATION//

TEIQ CRM
www.teiq.co.nz
James Beamish-White
P: 09 527 0260
www.sugarcrm.com









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