By Jennifer Robison | Contributing Writer
It’s been several years since I contributed to Powersports Business in my specialty of retail strategy and visual merchandising. Some of you remember my work with Tucker Rocky Distributing for 14 years and more than 1,000 store visits, two dozen conferences, and more seminars and articles on powersports retail than I can count.
Since I was away, a wave of new people has entered powersports retail. New dealers, new managers, new staff, and, with them, a whole new audience that hasn’t yet heard what I believe is one of the most underleveraged conversations in this industry.
So here we are. Let’s talk about your showroom.
When a customer steps into your space, that space speaks first. The question is: do you know what it’s saying?
Customers decide whether a store is worth their time in under eight seconds. In that window, they’ve already determined whether they want to explore, whether they’ll engage with your staff, and whether they’ll ever come back. The National Retail Federation puts it plainly: 65 % of shoppers say store layout and product presentation directly influence their purchasing decisions.
Eight seconds. That’s not enough time for a sales conversation. That’s an environment doing its job or failing to. The eye does not lie. Stores lack good presentations; you are leaving money on the table, and it’s so easy to fix.
Here’s what the best retailers understand that most powersports operators haven’t fully absorbed yet: visual merchandising is behavioral design, not decoration. A well-executed floor guides the eye, simplifies choices, reinforces seasonal relevance, and moves customers toward purchase before a word is spoken. When the first impression is strong, the sales
process accelerates, margins hold, and repeat business follows. When the impression is weak, no sales pitch in the world can undo what the floor already communicated.
Great displays sell faster and require fewer discounts. That’s not a theory. That’s retail.
You may not be aware of the sales you’re losing every single day because customers don’t tell you. They don’t file complaints. They don’t write reviews because the endcap was confusing or the apparel rack hadn’t been touched in two months. They simply vote with their wallets. They buy, or they don’t. They come back, or they don’t.
Consider this: 76% of shoppers have walked out of a store without buying because they couldn’t find what they were looking for. Not because you didn’t have it. Because they couldn’t find it — and they didn’t want to ask.
Some customers won’t engage with staff. They want to find it themselves. If your layout doesn’t support that, they’re gone. Your average ticket will tell you this story if you’re willing to read it honestly.
Aged product, poor adjacencies, inaccessible displays — these don’t just hurt aesthetics. They cost margin. Yes, people will buy from stores that aren’t optimized. But don’t expect repeat business on high-ticket items or apparel. Don’t expect to be seen as anything more than a place to grab an oil filter. The ceiling on what a disorganized floor can achieve is low — and it’s self-imposed.
One costly powersports habit is waiting too long to mark down slow inventory. By the time many dealers act, the best-selling window has already passed. Markdown timing is not just an inventory issue. It is a margin, floor-space, and cash-flow issue, and most stores are reacting too late.
When product misses its season, the cost shows up quietly: deeper discounts, weaker sell-through, tired displays, and open-to-buy trapped in inventory that should have moved sooner. The fix is not complicated, but it does require discipline, timing, and a merchandising plan that sees the season before it passes you by.
I can’t stress this enough: Parts and Accessories are a growth and profit opportunity that most dealerships are leaving on the table.
The accessories business has grown enormously over the past 25 years — especially alongside the explosion of side-by-sides. And yet many stores still treat merchandising as an afterthought. There’s often what I call an R&R problem in parts departments: a lack of Respect and Resources. These departments get the leftover space, the junior staff, and the last dollar of the training budget.
That’s backwards. A well-run P&A operation with trained staff, smart displays, strong adjacencies, and a properly maintained floor doesn’t just contribute to the bottom line — it transforms it. Higher attachment rates on unit sales. Faster turns on consumables. Fewer markdowns. A measurably higher average order value. And customers come back because they associate your store with the full experience of ownership, not just the transaction.
Someone needs to own this side of the business. Displays, restocking, new product placement, signage, coordination with sales and service — this is daily work. Without ownership, it drifts. With ownership, it has become one of the most reliable machines in the building.
Premium brands like BMW Motorrad and Triumph carry deep, high-margin accessory catalogs that belong in curated, intentional displays — not on generic racks near the parts counter. Honda dealers, with the broadest lineup in the industry, have a remarkable opportunity to merchandise by rider type and life stage: the new rider’s first helmet purchase, the mid-level enthusiast adding luggage to an Africa Twin, the Gold Wing owner investing in the touring experience. Every one of those moments is a visual merchandising opportunity. Most go uncaptured.
Investing in your retail environment isn’t a cosmetic expense. It is a revenue strategy. You don’t always need a full renovation; it’s more like you need intention.
Change your thinking first. Merchandising is not decorating. It is a selling system. When you treat the floor as a strategic asset rather than a necessary backdrop, everything downstream gets easier — sales conversion, service confidence, staff performance, and customer retention.
Put someone in charge. The fastest path to a better floor is accountability. Assign ownership of the P&A and accessories environment to a specific person with specific standards, tools, and incentives. This one move, done right, pays for itself. I am telling you this is a winning strategy.
Get ahead of your inventory calendar. Know your turn rates by category. Build a markdown cadence that moves product before it stales. Create seasonal transitions that feel intentional because they are.
Merchandise for the customer, not the category. Accessories shelved by product type make the store easier to manage. Accessories displayed by machine, by ride type, by lifestyle make the store easier to shop — and significantly more likely to result in a sale. The customer standing next to a Can-Am Defender doesn’t need to walk to the accessories department. The accessories belong next to the machine, telling the story of what ownership looks like.
The pandemic gave powersports dealers a pass on retail execution needs for many stores. When demand exceeded supply, the floor didn’t have to sell it; customers did the work for you. That era is over.
Inventory has normalized. Floor plan costs money. And today’s consumers have been shaped by exceptional retail experiences in every other corner of their spending life — REI, Apple, Bass Pro, the BMW showroom they walked through before deciding on the motorcycle. They carry a reference point into your store. When the experience doesn’t match, they feel it immediately — even if they can’t name it.
The dealers who win the next cycle will be the ones who understood that the showroom is a selling tool, that P&A is a profit center, and that the customer experience on the floor is not separate from financial performance — it is financial performance.
I’ve spent more than 28 years in powersports retail, from store-level management and accessories sales to developing retail display systems used in 800 locations nationwide during my years at Tucker Rocky. I’ve been to your stores. I understand the constraints, staffing realities, space challenges, and practical work it takes to move the needle in this industry.
My goal in returning to these pages is simple: to convince you that your showroom matters, that the dealers who haven’t fully optimized it have tremendous growth ahead of them, and that the tools to get there are more accessible than you think.
People are buying. The question is whether they’re buying from you — and whether they’re coming back.
Jennifer Robison is a Retail Environment Strategy and Performance Coach at HeroHub. With more than 28 years in powersports retail, she specializes in dealership merchandising, visual presentation, and customer experience strategy & offers design and placement services for new stores and remodels. If you’re building a new store or in need of a makeover. She can be reached at jennifer.robison@herohub.com or at www.herohub.com.
A company outside our industry came to me because of the Turn Around Project.
They’d followed the whole thing on LinkedIn. They wanted the same work in their own shop. The catch: they aren’t a dealership. They’re a company that does concepting, engineering, technical design, fabrication, carpentry, finishing, and trucking. About a hundred people. Bigger and more tangled than any store I’ve run.
I said yes, and not just for the challenge. I said yes because I’ve started to believe our industry has been learning in an echo chamber. Same processes. Same tools. Same twenty group tables. Same speakers, same vendors, same handful of people reselling each other’s ideas back to us. We’ve leaned on the same everything for so long that we’ve stopped hearing anything new.
So let me ask an uncomfortable question. Why are we surprised when an auto group walks in, buys up the mom and pop store, and runs it more profitably than it ever ran before?
It isn’t just their cash. It’s their openness to evolution. Their willingness to try something different. Their ability to say, “Maybe the thing I’ve done for decades isn’t going to suddenly start working just because I told my staff one more time.”
None of us will grow in this business by refusing to change what we’re doing. None of us will evolve by staying comfortable... So I stepped out of my comfort zone.
I took the exact diagnostic I run in dealerships and pointed it at a business that has nothing in common with a dealership on paper. No units. No service drive. No F&I office.
I pulled the historicals first; the way I pull financial, inventory, and sales penetration history before I form a single opinion. From there I built a departmental composite, then a full DELV analysis, studying all of those components and how different areas of the business quietly push and pull on each other. The analysis surprised the owners, exactly the way it surprises most dealers the first time they see a real one. They couldn’t name which department was actually paying the rent.
Then I stopped looking at numbers and started talking to people. One on one, from the C-suite to the shop floor. Same questions for everyone, so I could lay the answers side by side.
Numbers tell you where. People tell you why. And when I laid the two on top of each other, the picture wasn’t blurry. It was a diagnosis I’d written a hundred times before.
Change the nouns and the illness is the same. The quote-to-profit gap. Our writer over promises to keep the customer smiling and the shop eats it. Their sales team pushes scope to close and production overdelivers to make the promise true. Same gap. What the front of the house promises, the back of the house pays for.
Margin dies in the handoffs, not on the individuals. Those handoffs happen between departments and inside them. We lose deals in the seam between sales and F&I, and we lose them again inside service when the writer, the tech, and the parts counter aren’t working off the same page.
Nobody loses money standing still inside their own lane. We lose it in the space between, where information doesn’t get tracked, doesn’t get shared, and doesn’t reach the next person in time to matter. Not because people won’t talk, but because nobody built the process to move it. The seam isn’t a personality problem. It’s a handoff nobody owns.
Absorption. One department was quietly carrying the whole building, and leadership couldn’t name which one until the math was in front of them. Sound familiar?
The bench. Their best builder got promoted to lead and started to drown. We do the identical thing. We take our best tech, hand him a manager title, and act shocked when the thing that made him great has nothing to do with the job we just gave him.
I could keep going: seasonality, bottlenecks, turnover, comp plans. None of it is purely a powersports problem. It’s an operating problem in a powersports costume.
One more thing, because every dealer should sit with it. I asked everyone my favorite question. A pre-mortem. Imagine it’s twelve months from now and this company went out of business. What caused it? I asked it independently, one person at a time, no comparing notes.
A large majority pointed at the same handful of risks. And the financials had already flagged the top one. The floor already knew. Nobody had ever asked them.
Walk your own service drive tomorrow and ask your worst-treated advisor what’s going to bite you in six months. He’ll tell you. He’s been waiting for someone to ask.
Finding the same problems in another industry was humbling. But it isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is that they’re willing to solve them differently than we do.
That fabrication world gates scope creep with change orders. It prices hard against a deadline. It runs post-mortems as a matter of habit, not as some consultant’s exercise. Any dealer reading this could use all three of those ideas on Tuesday morning. We’ve been regurgitating the same answers to ourselves for thirty years. Out there, the problems rhymed, but the solutions were brand new to me.
That’s the whole prize. Not new problems. New answers to the old ones.
Here’s the picture I can’t shake. Go back a few hundred years to the royal houses of Europe. The tiny sliver at the top only married inside its own tiny sliver. Same handful of families, generation after generation, guarding the bloodline. And you know how it ended. A gene pool so shallow it bred a weakness they couldn’t breed their way out of.
That’s us. Powersports is a few percent of the population, and the people who run our stores almost all come from inside that same few percent. We learned it from the person before us, who learned it from the person before them. Then we all go stand at the same tables and tell each other the same things.
When every store runs the same playbook, the playbook stops being an edge. It’s the same shallow pool we’ve all been splashing around in. The only way out is deeper water. New blood, new ideas, from somewhere outside the pool.
So here it is operator to operator. Name one operating idea you’ve brought into your store in the last year from outside powersports. Not a DMS feature or a vendor pitch. A real idea learned from someone who has never set foot on a showroom floor.
If you can’t name one, that isn’t a small thing. Our problems aren’t special. Our problem isn’t a unique problem somebody else hasn’t already solved. Go find them.
I’ll be taking a little breather from this industry as I continue to Iearn how to fix it.
Melissa Coffey
Let’s get one thing out of the way: AI is not coming for your dealership. Apathy is. I’ve spent the last year watching artificial intelligence go from conference-keynote buzzword to something dealers are actually deploying on the floor, in the service bay, and in the back office.
The DMS and CRM providers have raced to build AI into their platforms this year, and the pitch decks all promise the same thing — work smarter, sell more, sleep better. Some of it is real. Some of it is a chatbot in a trench coat. Your job isn’t to buy everything with “AI” stamped on it. Your job is to figure out where it actually moves the needle for your store.
Here’s where I’d start.
Lead response is the lowest-hanging fruit in powersports. We are, as an industry, embarrassingly slow to respond to leads. A customer fills out a form on your website at 9 p.m. on a Tuesday, and too often nobody touches it until Thursday. That customer bought a side-by-side from someone else on Wednesday. AI-assisted lead response — instant, personalized first contact across email and text, with a clean handoff to a human once the conversation gets real — is no longer exotic technology. It’s table stakes. If your CRM offers it and you haven’t turned it on, you’re leaving units on the table every single week.
Your service department is sitting on a goldmine of drudgery. Think about how much of your service writers’ day is spent answering the same twenty questions: Is my unit ready? Does this repair fall under warranty? What’s the fitment on this part? AI tools can now be loaded with your warranty documents, service bulletins, and parts data so your team gets instant answers instead of digging through PDFs or putting customers on hold. That’s not replacing your people — that’s giving your best people their time back so they can do the work that actually requires judgment.
AI is changing how customers find you before they ever find you. Here’s the shift most dealers haven’t clocked yet: your next customer may not Google “ATV for sale near me.” They’re asking ChatGPT or Perplexity, “What’s the best side-by-side for hunting property in Central Texas?” If your website doesn’t list real prices, use natural language in your inventory descriptions, and have clean structured data underneath, the AI tools recommending dealers to buyers simply won’t recommend you. The days of hiding the price and hoping foot traffic sorts it out are over. Optimize for the machines, because the machines are advising your customers.
Use it to make better decisions, not just faster emails. The most interesting development this year isn’t content generation — it’s intelligence. Modern platforms can now surface trends across your sales, parts, and service data in plain English: which categories are softening, where your margins are leaking, what your seasonal stocking should look like based on actual patterns instead of gut feel. In a market with uneven demand — and let’s be honest, that’s the market we’re in — the dealer who spots a trend in March beats the dealer who sees it in the June financials.
Now, three warnings, because I’d be doing you a disservice without them.
First, protect your data. Before anyone on your team pastes your margins or inventory strategy into a free AI tool, make sure you’ve opted out of data training in the settings. Your competitive advantage should not become someone else’s training set.
Second, keep a human in the loop where it counts. AI drafting a follow-up email? Great. AI closing an F&I deal or handling an upset customer unsupervised? Absolutely not. The powersports business runs on relationships and trust — riders can smell canned in three sentences.
Third, start small. Pick one pain point — lead response is my vote — get it working, measure it, then expand. The dealers who try to boil the ocean in Q3 will be the ones telling everyone at AIMExpo that “AI doesn’t work.”
Here’s the bottom line: the technology gap between dealerships is about to become a profitability gap. The stores that treat AI as a tool — deployed deliberately, measured honestly, with humans firmly in charge — are going to pull away from the stores still waiting to see if this is a fad.
It’s not a fad. It’s the new websites-in-2002. And we all remember what happened to the dealers who decided they didn’t need one of those.
Till next time, shiny side up and checkered flags!