05-02-2014, 07:02 AM
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#13
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King P.V. is currently offline
Status: First Lieutenant
Join Date: Apr 2014
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Thanked 1 Time in 1 Post
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Re: just another new guy....
About 1998 or so, our small dealership decide to display our Mariah's at the Big Seattle Boat Show held in the Kingdome. We had been selling a few Mariah's into the Seatttle/Tacoma area for a while but do to distances, we spent most of our selling efforts in Central and Eastern Washington. The Kingdome show was usually held on the last two weekends of January which meant we would have to travel our boats 4 to 5 hours just to get to Seattle while dealing with Snoqualimie Pass and winter weather. DIrt, sand, snow and ice just weren't very good for the boats but we decided to stage the traveling well before winter, so I'd take a boat to a storage facility in the months prior to January whenever I went back to Seattle to visit friends and family.
Now, the thing about the Seattle show was And still is) its very expensive to get space AND, if you're not a longtime boat show exhibitor, you will get pushed into a potentially "less than perfect" space out in the middle of no-where. On the main floor is where you want to be, but we were boxed into a spot that was approx. 20 x 60, I believe. We had to spend $12,000 and were able to slip an 18' , an all red Z222 and a 27 ftr in that tight space.
For two weeks we lived in that booth, talking and talking and talking boats. Not just about Mariahs, well, mostly about Mariahs. But people were surprised that here was a boat that look'd so badd-a$$, with such an awesome interior, at such a good price. (Ya gotta have boat show specials ya know). I always told people that we really should charge more for these things ya know!!!! We sold 4 18' boats and the Z 222. We just couldn't keep people out of the Z boat!! The 27 was a hit but everyone wanted to trade in a 32 footer or such. We just couldn't take trades like that due to the trade-in values everyone wanted and our market (Central Washington) . Anyway, about the beginning of the 2nd week, we noticed that the salesmen from all the other dealerships at the show where coming around to see what all the hub-bub was about. It seems that all the customers we were trying to sell boats to were telling everyone that "those Mariah Boats over in the corner, being sold by those nice young, knowledgable handsome guys" were sooooooo superior to anything else at the show, blah, blah, blah... We had to stay late after the show and early to the show every day in order to "help" the salesmen who came acalling and wanted us to show our boats to them. Actually, I thought that a few of them could or would have cut up our interiors or scratch'd up the sides of the boats if given a chance. I didn't trust boat salesmen any more than I would've a used car salesman!! The nicest ones were from Seattle Boat Company who sold Cobalt boats. They were truely interested why Mariah's were being marketed so well by three young studs and we show'd them all about the Mariah's. We had lots of features but were much cheaper than Cobalts were. Seattle Boat catered to the rich, MicroSoft kinda people who didn't have to worry about money. They were very professional and created the "country club" kind of boating experience. IF we had our dealership in the muli-million people marketing arena that existed in Seattle, I think we could of kick'd anyones butt in terms of a hig quality product and hard work. However, we never did return to Seattle as yet again, some dealer took on the line in the Puget Sound area, lock'd up the territory and kept us out. The fact that they didn't do many numbers meant Mariah was stuck with an under-performing dealer... again.
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