Expediting Guidepoint

Last week, we hosted our annual expediter conference in Fort Worth with 10 of our distributors from around the country. We spent a couple of days talking about the business, introducing new programs, conducting sales training and unveiling some new POP. The other cool thing that we announced is a new incentive program that should help our expediters drive their sales to car dealers even further. And, of course, we had a great steak at Ruth's Chris on Friday night. Geoff Dixon, our vice president of sales, put together a great program.

Geoff also did something really smart during the program: He stopped talking. Not that he's a gabber or anything, but Geoff (and the rest of us) got out of the way and let the expediters talk among themselves about "what works" in the field. Our veteran expediters shared how they pitch the product to dealers, incentivize F&I people and handle customer issues successfully. They also shared how they use Guidepoint as a unique product that they can open a dealer with, and then expand into other 12-volt and custom accessory products. My personal favorite part of the conference, though, was hearing the "expediter horror stories" about accidentally deployed airbags, screws through the roof of expensive import cars and sunroofs installed on the wrong vehicles. That is why these guys all carry expensive insurance policies.

On the whole, the conference and the way Geoff set it up was a great reminder to all of us that we need to sit back and listen sometimes, rather than feel the need to lead the discussion.

Special thanks to our boys from Boston, Jeff Fuller and Frank Salkovitz of Micorp, and our guy in Northern California, Manny Moncada of Autohaus, for sharing their successes -- and occasional failures -- with the group. Micorp and Autohaus have been selling Guidepoint since day one, and they've built some great relationships and some great brand equity for us. Am already looking forward to next year.