Pre-Conference Workshops
Get a head start with Dealer Week Pre-conference Workshops
Before Dealer Week officially begins, join top dealership leaders for hands-on workshops focused on the challenges shaping marine retail today. From building high-performing sales teams to creating more proactive service operations, you'll leave with practical tools, proven frameworks, and a roadmap for implementation. These sessions are in-person only, there’s no online version.
Choose Your Workshop
Choose from two hands-on workshops designed to help your dealership improve performance, adopt The New Fundamentals, and return home with an actionable plan.
SALES WORKSHOP
Sales Bootcamp: Learn the 7 Habits, Including AI, of the Best at Boat Sales
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After studying hundreds of the best boat salespeople in the marine industry — and just as many underperformers — one thing has become impossible to ignore.
The great ones aren't great because of personality. They're not great because they've been doing this for thirty years. They're not great because they got lucky with a good territory, a good brand or a good dealership.
They're great because of their habits.
There is a clear, observable, repeatable set of habits that separate the top salespeople and the top sales cultures in this industry from everyone else.
· The way they ask questions
· The way they handle pricing conversations
· The way they run a customer interview
· The way they follow up
· The way they use AI
· The way they hand off a deal
· The way they show up each morning
None of it is by accident. All of it is teachable. And almost none of it is being taught inside the average marine dealership today. These are the new fundamentals of boat sales.
In this hands-on, half-day Sales Bootcamp, Marcus Sheridan — the marine industry's most-requested sales and communication thought leader and a longtime Dealer Week favorite — will pull back the curtain on the 7 habits that define elite marine salespeople and the dealerships that build them. This is not a sit-and-listen session. This is a working bootcamp built for owners, sales managers, and salespeople who are ready to roll up their sleeves and rebuild the way their dealership sells.
You'll role-play. You'll diagnose. You'll be challenged. You'll have light-bulb moment after light-bulb moment as you finally see — clearly — why your top salesperson keeps winning, why your bottom salesperson keeps stalling, and exactly what to do about both. You'll see the habits that are quietly costing your team deals every single week, and you'll walk out with the system, the language and the plan to install the right ones across your entire sales floor.
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Identify the 7 habits of elite marine sales reps and dealership sales cultures — and diagnose which ones your team is missing right now
Apply the habits to real customer conversations through live role-play and small-group work, including how to integrate AI without losing the human element
Walk out with a written 30-60-90-day plan to install these habits across your sales floor and build an elite, high-performing team
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Implementation Tool: The "7 Habits Sales Culture Scorecard" — a working document each attendee completes during the workshop that grades their dealership and their salespeople on every habit, surfaces the two biggest gaps, and maps the first concrete move for each.
Activities: Live small-group role-plays on the toughest customer conversations marine salespeople face today (pricing, discovery, pushback, follow-up), plus a hands-on "build your habits roadmap" exercise where each dealership maps the 7 habits to their current team and walks out with a personalized rollout plan.
SERVICE WORKSHOP
From Reactive to Ready: 7 Top Tips for a Proactive Profitable Shop
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In every marine service department, the mission is clear: keep customers on the water, keep the shop moving, and keep opportunities from slipping through the cracks. But too often, future work goes undocumented, communication becomes reactive, and open repair orders turn into missed revenue, stressed teams, and frustrated customers.
This focused 3-hour session is designed to help service leaders and advisors change that story. Through 7 practical top tips, participants will learn how to position their department as the trusted guide in the customer’s ownership journey, anticipating needs, creating clear service plans, organizing deferred work, improving follow-up, and using AI to bring greater consistency, visibility, and confidence to daily operations. The result is a stronger service experience, a more proactive team, and a department better equipped to drive profitability year-round.
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· Build a more proactive service workflow by identifying future work earlier, organizing deferred opportunities, and turning everyday repair activity into a long-term customer service plan.
· Improve customer trust and team alignment through stronger communication, clearer scheduling visibility, and more consistent follow-up across the service department.
· Use AI-enabled tools to support work order audits, service timeline planning, deferred work organization, open repair order management, and performance insight reporting.