Director of marketing discusses digital promotion

Keep an eye out for an upcoming Power Hour podcast with Team Powersports’ Sarah Walker.

Sarah Walker of Team Powersports in Garner, North Carolina, grew up around motorcycles and for as long as she can remember, she had always wanted one of her own. When she turned 18, her father helped her buy her first bike.

“It was a Honda Shadow 750, and it came from Team Powersports, right here where I work today,” she says. “That started the lifelong obsession. I rode from my senior year of high school all the way through college. When I graduated, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with my life yet, so I decided I would go and sell motorcycles for a couple of years until I figured it all out. That was 13 years ago, and I have figured it out. What I want to do is sell powersports.”

She joined Team Powersports as a salesperson and after two years in that position, she became marketing manager. In 2019, as marketing became more digitized, she took on the role of director of sales and marketing.

“We have a sales manager and then me, sales and marketing. Our sales manager is very much on the leads, on the follow up, does backup F&I, and keeps control of inventory. He’s a very organized fellow and does everything by the charts and by the book, which allows me to run around with a camera in my hand and act like a crazy person,” she laughs. “It’s more of a parallel thing where we have two people doing the work of the sales manager, but we have slightly different, specialized roles to make sure the other stuff that’s not selling vehicles gets taken care of. It’s literally the most fun I’ve ever had at a job in my entire life.”

Optimizing social media

Walker has become the face of the dealership through Team Powersport’s social media. She is typically the spokesperson featured in posts and keeps viewers’ attention with her infectious energy and comically animated mannerisms.

Before she took over marketing, “Our dealership was pretty much on the cutting edge when it came to videos,” she says. “Our general manager of Team Powersports, both locations, was making videos long before I even worked here for the original YouTube channel.

“Prior to me, they would do videos at events or have a salesperson talk about a motorcycle, but I tried to rejuvenate or revive the video content just to try and bring something that nobody else was doing,” she continues. “How many dealerships are there in the U.S. and what can I do to make us different? How can we stand apart? It was energy, excitement, comedy, and a little bit of a Loony Toons character that is me.”

She shares that when she was younger, she didn’t hesitate to talk to anybody. She preferred to be in front of the camera instead of behind it, and spent her time in drama, plays, and in marching and concert bands. She also marched with the East Carolina Pirates during her freshman year of college. “It’s just always been fun for me to put on a show, be the life of the party, and tell the joke,” she says.

She strives to create content that is entertaining and informative. “Powersports should be fun… I want that sense of fun to be conveyed and I don’t want it to be scary for a new rider or somebody who hasn’t been in the dealership for a long time to cross the precipices,” she says.

She posts mostly on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, and she describes the type of content she posts as one of three categories: high-quality, “quick and dirty,” and commercial content.

“My passion project is on YouTube,” she says. “It’s our moto blog where I’ve got a helmet-mounted camera and microphone, I take a half-hour ride on a motorcycle and whittle it down until it’s 10 or 15 minutes of content, and do decent editing and intros. I call that my high-quality content. Then, the opposite of that, we call them ‘quick and dirty.’ That’s just whatever the promotion is, or the new thing, or something funny we thought up. I can film it in vertical mode for an [Instagram] Reel or a [Facebook] Short and just slap it out there really quick with no editing. We do a commercial every holiday season. That’s typically the funniest thing of the year because my boss lets me get a little zany with it.”

The dealership has shifted to a mostly digital-based marketing strategy, and it’s working well. Team Powersports hosted a Can-Am, Spyder, and Ryker On-Road Demo Ride Experience, and the event was 40 percent booked before it took place. Can-Am informed the dealership that the average pre-booking rate was 10 percent. Walker credits the higher pre-booking numbers to the dealership’s heavy promotion on social media.

Sunday Funday

Her other passion project is Team Powersports’ Sunday Funday Lunch Ride. The dealership hosted a bike night with a local Harley-Davidson dealership until about five years ago. When the bike nights halted, the dealership’s Sunday Funday Lunch Rides kicked off.

The dealership invites customers to ride with Team Powersports employees on the second Sunday of every month from March through November. “Having lived in this town for the last 35 years, I’ve got some pretty cool routes planned out that go to different places,” Walker says. “Each month, we choose a different location, take a 45−minute to hour-and-a-half ride, and eat lunch together.”

She noticed that many customers were looking for something to do with the products they bought from the dealership. She says the bike nights offered a place for customers to hang out with other riders, but the Sunday Funday Lunch Rides offers that as well as friends to ride with.

“The benefit for Team Powersports is that we always have something going on as opposed to constantly having to plan an event,” she explains. “We can just tell our customers, ‘Hey, you just bought that bike, come out and join us for a Sunday Funday lunch ride.’ And the benefit for our customers is that they have a place where there’s no pressure to buy anything, the store is not even open, we just use it as a meeting place.

“I’ve seen friendships forged through the Sunday Funday ride, both with patrons and myself,” she continues. “It’s something to talk about, it’s something to do, and let’s be honest, I’d be riding my motorcycle on a Sunday morning whether the store was doing a ride or not, so why not benefit Team Powersports and our customers.”

The team at Team Powersports

The dealership, originally known as Honda Raleigh, was founded in the 70s. The current owner’s father, Carol Stephenson, acquired the business in 1985. “When we merged with Yamaha Raleigh in ’95, which is when this building was built, that’s when we became Team Powersports,” Walker says. “We picked up Polaris, Can-Am, and Sea-Doo throughout the years and the current owner has owned it since 2001 or 2002, when it passed from father to son.”

Will Stephenson is the current owner and Walker shares that he is very involved in the business. “I really appreciate the fact that he’s boots on the ground,” she says. “He’ll push out the bikes, he’ll pick up the trash, he’ll talk to the customers. It’s nice to have an owner that’s involved in the business that he owns.”

She says that Stephenson and the general manager care greatly about the industry and the business and, along with their passion, they use measurable data to manage. The dealership is made up of a team that fluctuates between 25 to 30 employees, and the business is a 28,000 square foot facility. “We’re all very excited, very passionate, very driven people,” Walker says. “The customer comes first, and we take care of each other.”

Shop talk

“It really feels like things are moving back to what we can consider normal,” she says. “The seasonality of the industry has returned. Through the Covid years, we were on the gas the whole time basically. There was a small lull as the Corona stuff went away, we’ll say mid-2023, but now we’re seeing when it’s colder outside, less people are in the shop buying. When it’s warmer outside as we move into summer, the people are out and about. It’s nice to see things for what they are as opposed to seeing a falsely inflated time to really get a meter on how we’re doing as a business.

“With return to normality and more inventory in the showroom, we’re having to pay attention to stuff that we haven’t had to focus on in a while, like making sure that we’re not getting eaten alive by flooring costs and making sure we’re maintaining the correct level of staff,” she continues. “We’re back to the train and hire on a cyclical basis to make sure that our people are staying engaged and staying fresh and focused.”