This is a transcript of Mad Mariner's MadCast, the podcast that covers all aspects of boats and boating. In this segment, we interview Bentley Collins, vice president of marketing and sales for Sabre Yachts and Back Cove Yachts, which builds Down East boats in power and sail. He shares his insight on the company's unique brand of customer communication with Mad Mariner Contributing Editor Diane M. Byrne

Now for the benefit of listeners who aren't entirely familiar with either Sabre Yachts or Back Cove Yachts, can you paint a picture of who the typical buyer is?

Bentley Collins: Our customers are experienced boaters. They're people that have either grown up with boating or they've been at it for a while, mostly married couples, some children, but in great part, folks that are, like myself, 55 to 60, you know, where grandchildren are becoming more the norm than their own children being on board, but definitely experienced boaters who've been around boating for a very long time. I think our last customer survey we showed an average time boating of something over 30 years.

One of the things I know you like to emphasize is the Maine built boats aspect for both Sabre and Back Cove.

Collins: I'm a member of the board of Maine Built Boats, so I have to put that out there first just to make sure people understand. But here in Maine there are literally hundreds of small shops who build custom projects for customers in both sail and power, boats from as small as ten feet up to hundreds of feet built by companies like Hodgdon Brothers. And there's a work ethic here that exists in Maine that I believe doesn't exist in other states. People are extremely proud of what they do. They're very conscientious. They always want to do everything right. They're what we call fiercely proud. And that Maine Built Boat's ethic translates to the quality and the integrity of everything that we do. So I do like to talk about it because I think a lot of people recognize Maine through our other brands, like L.L. Bean and companies like that who have, for generations, been recognized as high quality companies, Thomas Moser in the furniture business, ourselves and the Hinckley Company and so on, and the Morris yacht people in the boat business. So Maine's recognized as that place where you go when you want to buy something of high quality and integrity.

One of the things that also sets Sabre apart, particularly, is the continued focus on both power and sail. Some other builders over the years have switched to one versus the other. Why continue to build both?

Collins: Well I think of it as a three legged stool when I'm talking to people. We have three product groups, really, not just Sabre sail and power, but we also have Back Cove, and by having those three different segments, as you know as a marine industry professional, a lot of listeners are gonna know too, that certain parts of the industry go up and down and have their cycles at different times. And although this most recent downturn in the economy's been pretty universally bad for all boat builders, in the past, like back in the 70s when the sailboat industry had its biggest moment of fame, was when fuel prices were very high. So the cycles in sail and power tend to be a little bit different and very conservative customers in the sailboat business, more reactionary customers in the power boat business. But we like the concept of being able to do all of those things. It also gives us recognition too. I guess sailboats are recognized for being able to go offshore and be heartier and, you know, more heavily built, that kind of stuff. And we build all of our boats the same way, whether it's sail or power, although the construction methods are basically the same. So I think sail adds a little bit of mystique to it. Certainly with the media there's nothing, I don't think, prettier than a big sailboat sailing, and a lot of people will recognize that. And I get a lot of phone calls here for images of sailboats, for example. And that's one of the things about sail; it's kind of got this romanticism to it that people still hang onto. And I think it gains us a bit of respect. With our Back Cove versus Sabre brands we're addressing two very different segments in the market. One is production oriented with fiberglass interior liners, a single engine diesel boat that only goes up to 37 feet, and then the Sabre range starts at 34 and goes all the way to 52 and it's stick-built, highly customized, very different customer. But both sort of work and integrate well together. So we, like I say, I think of us as having a three legged stool so we don't fall over every time something bad happens.

Some of your customers are conservative, some are more reaction oriented, some like to go cruising long distances. Speaking of those owners, one of the things that I think is also interesting about both Sabre and Back Cove is the fact that youwill showcase the owner's own photos of them and their boats. It seems like there's a real invitation out to them to submit photos and a real interest among them to submit the photos.

Collins: Well it's really a pride issue. People are very proud of their boats, and I think that's true of anybody that owns a small aluminum boat or a 450 foot mega yacht. There's a source of-- a sense of pride in anything that's beautiful and well maintained and, you know, really a shippy kind of thing. And I just think a lot of customers like to tell the world about them and their boating experiences. Certainly we use customer references all the time. If a customer comes in to visit with us and says "˜can I talk to some of your other customers' we literally have an almost unrestricted number of people that they could call up and say hey, what was your experience like dealing with Back Cove Yachts or dealing with Sabre Yachts. The internet has made-- has taken the clothes off everybody, so now we're very susceptible if there's an after sales issue out in the marketplace or anything like that. Not only are you gonna bare your soul to the world but you're also gonna expose it to customers who may see something that they might disagree with. So our customers are the first ones to jump in. Interestingly enough, we never jumped into what was called chat rooms or blog discussions. We never jump in, we sort of let our customers have their due, and if somebody's got a gripe then we let them do it. But inevitably one of our customers jumps in and defends us, which is kind of fun, you know, because we think of our customers as friends, and in fact a lot of the people we've built boats for have become very good friends of mine and we see them on the way and we'll hang out with them. We'll go to their house for dinner or whatever. It's not just a-- for us it's not a case of just building a boat and pushing it out the door. We know these people, we know their families, we know their, you know, we know too much about them in some cases, but we really do consider them friends of the company. And anything that we basically-- anything that we screwed up on we're first to admit and we'll call them up and say hey, I think we might've made a mistake when we cleaned this part in the boat or we might have adjusted this wrong, can we take a look at it? And we'll go on board the boat and sure enough, you know, sometimes we'll find something that we did do wrong. So we try to make our customers part of the whole process, and that's why they like us and that's why we like them and that's why they are first to defend us.

Now is that also one of the reasons why you created blogs for both Sabre and Back Cove? I know you've been blogging for what, now, about a year or so?

Collins: Yeah, it's been about a year. I go through fits and starts and then I need to be reenergized again. One of the things I decided to do with the introduction of two new boats, on the Sabre side, the Sabre 40 Sedan, and on the Back Cove side, the Back Cove 37, what I decided to do with those two boats is to blog about them from the very outset, from everything from showing how the-- what the tooling looks like all the way through to the finished product, with just like almost ridiculously frequent updates. And it was really cool to watch how many people followed along. I even had one fellow call me up one day and say, "Oh yeah, your hull plug just left the shop down in Ft. Myers." And I said, "What? How do you know that?" And he said,"Well, I was following it on the blog and I saw where you did the work down at Marine Concepts, and I happen to live around the corner from there. I saw the plug leaving with your carrier the other day." So it's really fun to see how many people like to follow that whole process, which, for most builders, is a very private process. And blogging is something that allows you to be far less private, to just throw it out there for all to see, bare your soul if you will, and talk about, you know, the things that happen along the way that are good, bad, and indifferent. And I think it also helps to personalize the whole thing, so people understand that a boat is an individual thing that's created by a whole group of people. But it's just an interesting process and the blog sort of allows that to be very current, very up to date, very sort of up to the minute things that are going on with our lives, in our lives.

Have you ever posted anything along the lines of "˜hey, we're thinking about x versus y, what do you all think?' Do they give you input on the blog as well?

Collins: Yeah, they do. We did that with the Sabre 40. We had a couple of alternative layouts where we had a dinette in the second cabin which converted to a double berth or just a straightforward double berth. And there was a lot of discussion about that, a tremendous amount of discussion about that. And interesting enough, a lot of people think-- they still like the anonymity of the keyboard, and so they tend to sort of hide behind it in many cases. They'll find me and they'll find my email address in some other way, either on the blog or some other way, and they'll email me personally and say, "I didn't really want to talk about this publicly but don't you think this would be a great idea." And in a lot of cases I've said to them, "That is a great idea. Put It on the blog, go back and do it." And then one guy didn't know how to do it and I said, "Well look, tell you what, I'll blog on your behalf. I'll say you're Bob from Chicago." And I went back on and I blogged exactly what he had said to me. I cut and pasted his email right into the blog. So it is funny, though, that people still aren't comfortable commenting on blogs. But they certainly love to read them, certainly love to read them. So yeah, I've had a lot more feedback than may appear on the blogs, but in reality I think there's an appropriate amount there. I just hate to be standing on a soapbox in Hyde Park. I'd really rather have people commenting publicly back to me so everybody can see the comments.

Can you just real briefly describe what a blog roll is and how you also discovered the blogs of all these owners that you've linked to.

Collins: Well I do a little bit of research and I guess the bigger answer to your question is that anybody who has a website really has to understand what search engine optimization is and the effect that blogs can have on the amount of activity you get coming to your website. And so I've gone through two search engine optimization programs in the last five years, the most recent one about a year ago, where we've gone back to our website and looked at key words and all those kinds of things to make sure that we're getting as much traffic as we could possibly get and our standings on the Google search and Yahoo search engines are as high as they can be. And the blogs really help that because you're putting that Sabre or that Back Cove name out there all the time, and the more times search engines see those names the higher your rankings come up in your standings, if you will. So we really have worked quite hard on search engine optimization. It is an infrequent thing. I wish I could do it more often. I just seem to run out of time a lot of times. But the SEO work is really what has led us to using blogs. Blog rolls are lists of other blog sites that we would recommend to customers who are on our blog, and we get that same reciprocal privilege from somebody else's, you know. The customer-- my favorite customer blog of late is a fellow who sailed his Sabre 386 sailboat from Maine over to Ireland. And it was kind of a classic thing of a blogger who sets up a blog and then doesn't do it much because he really didn't have a means of communication that was really effective and he didn't want to use his phone at however many dollars a minute to post his blogs. So he kind of starts when he's close to shore, they're having a good time, and then all of a sudden boom, he's in Ireland. And he's hasn't related all of the experiences along the way, which is kind of too bad. But a lot of people would love to have had that day by day, you know, today was windy, today wasn't windy, today we saw a whale kind of thing, you know. That's the beauty of blogs to me, is being able to sort of imagine being part of something that somebody's writing. And I think that's why so many people enjoy our boat building blogs, is they, you know, everybody, for example, is a frustrated yacht designer. I'm sure, Diane that you probably are too. You sit down once in a while and say gee, I wonder why they didn't put the head over on this side of the boat or whatever, you know. And everybody's a frustrated yacht designer so when you give them an opportunity to say what you think is better, this dinette or that second cabin; you get a bunch of input, because everybody's got an opinion. Great thing about boating, everybody's got an opinion.

There's a social network for Sabre Yachts and a social network for Back Cove. What are the types of things that these allow you to do and allow the owners to do?

Collins: I wouldn't say we were the first but we were certainly an early adopter of the concept of customer rendezvous and get togethers, you know. Today you have the Aquapalooza program with Sea Ray and virtually every builder does get togethers every summer, although this summer being a poor economy I don't think there are as many as there were in the past. But we want our customers to talk to each other and if there's one thing that our customers express to us over and over and over again is they want to be able to talk to owners who have the same boat that they have because they want to see a) if they've had the same minor issues that we might've had with the boat or they might've had with the boat, they want to know more about little projects, conversions, ideas that they've adopted on their boat they might be able to incorporate on another one. So the goal of the, what we call, the Ning websites, that's N-I-N-G, ning.com, they basically allow you to go out and establish a social networking site that's private. So we have the Sabre Yacht's group and we've got the Back Cove Yacht's group on Ning, and there the owners can basically communicate with each other, post pictures, talk about trips, you know, I'm gonna be here this weekend, I'm gonna be there this weekend. I will say that we haven't had as much activity on those Ning sites as I would really like to have but I think it's just a matter of going back and trying to reinvigorate people now that social networkinging is more commonplace with 50-somethings. When we first started those Ning websites the average age of a social networker was in the 20s, and the average age of a Facebook user today has actually risen dramatically. Now it's up in the 50s. And the kids are staying at MySpace and the older people seem to have migrated over to LinkedIn and others like that. So I think they're all good tools, I think, anytime you have an opportunity to have customers talk to each other. A lot of builders don't want their customers talking to each other because they're afraid of what might get spread from one to the other, but I'm a true believer in the open atmosphere of the internet and the fact that if somebody's gonna slam you they're gonna slam you and that's all there is to it. So we encourage people to talk to each other.

Do you find that you are getting feedback through Twitter as well? I know you've set up a Twitter account to send information out about the brands, but also to get a conversation going, if you will, with various people.

Collins: I think Twitter as a medium of communication is amazing. I'm still trying to build up my number of followers and I'm still trying to remember to go on there and tweet every day, but I'll tell you something, I've seen other industries where they've used Twitter to amazing advantage, really amazing advantage, and I think the best example of it, nothing to do with-- only because it's getting near lunchtime now, I'm thinking about restaurants, restaurants are doing it now, where the chef gets on and he says, "Well, I just got in some fresh Maine blueberries. I'll use those for the salad tonight." And he's got a ton of people that are following him on his Twitter page so that says "Oh gee, I was gonna take Diane out for dinner tonight so let's go to that restaurant." And it's amazing how you can literally sit at a keyboard and with, I've forgotten how many letters it is, 100 letters or something like that, 120 letters, talk to people and get-- and apparently these restaurateurs that are using it are having tremendous success in getting people to refocus on their business, and if they say the right thing about the right food preparation that they're doing this night, they'll be there. From my perspective I haven't found the really good use for it yet but I do find that people are finding out about our presence at boat shows, so the day of a boat show or the day before a boat show I'll tweet about, you know, this weekend we're gonna be in Rockland. We're gonna have these boats at the show. And I'm learning some Twitter techniques that allow you to make your search engine words work more effectively. And so yeah, I think it's got tremendous potential. I really think that Twitter is something that-- it looks a little goofy and it looks like one more social networking thing at the end of the day, but it's really not. It's just you blabbing. It's just you saying something about yourself or your company that's up and coming, something that's gonna happen in the next 24 hours. And it's very timely and very cool. I like it very much.

Now with Twitter and with your blogs and the social networks, you mentioned the boat shows a couple of seconds ago, are people sharing their thoughts about the upcoming boat shows, and are they sharing their thoughts about the weak economy perhaps having an impact on what they may buy or what they may look for in the next couple of months?

Collins: I haven't seen anybody sharing any thoughts with me. I know our dealers who have upcoming shows are all very concerned, asking me what do we think, what's gonna happen at the shows, one thing and another. There's a tremendous fear and trepidation on the manufacturer and dealer side that a lot of old inventory's gonna show up at the shows and be promoted at extremely low prices. And as much as a manufacturer like our company would like not to have that inventory at a show, it's a fact of life, and until such time as that inventory goes away, it really is an excellent time for a buyer to go to a show and look at something new. And so as much as it concerns me that there might be some different type of sales activity this year at shows, I think it's a great time for a consumer, and the industry really has to get over it and get through it and get all this stuff gone. So I'm strongly encouraging, you know, certainly I'll be tweeting about my boat shows every day before Newport and Norwalk and all the rest of them. So I'm-- my own personal experience thus far is we've had a couple of small shows, we had one up here in Maine last week at Maine Boat's Homes and Harbor show in Rockland, and it felt great. It felt so much better than the fall shows of last year and the winter shows of 2008 and 2009, getting into January, February. It just felt better. People have a sense that maybe we have hit the bottom and that things are going to get better. So even though the economy is still in a bad state, I can tell you from talking to my dealers that there's no lack of activity at the dealer level.

So what about the upcoming boat shows? What are some of the boats from both Sabre and Back Cove that people can expect to see?

Collins: Well with Back Cove we're going to have Back Cove 33s and the new 37 at most of the shows down the East Coast. We also have a Back Cove 37 that'll be out at the show in Seattle. It's leaving our plant this week to go out to Seattle. And we also have a Back Cove 37 that's down in Southern California. And we just did the boat show in Sydney where one of the first 37s was on hand, and we'll have a 37 in Cannes and in Genoa. So as far as new boats go, for Back Cove, the 37 is the new thing. It's extremely popular. The shows that we've done so far have created a tremendous amount of interest in it and we're very excited about that boat. It's a good time to be exporting and the Australians are looking at that boat and loving it, the Europeans are loving it, and the American market seems to be happy to see it too. And then on the Sabre side, the new big deal is the Sabre 40 Sedan, and that boat will be at Newport, Norwalk, Annapolis, Ft. Lauderdale, nowhere else overseas at this point because Sabre's are more limited production. But the Sabre 40 Sedan is, again, a boat that's creating a tremendous amount of interest at the early shows, and we're looking forward to showing it to people in the marketplace. On the sailboat side nothing new, but the 386 Sabre, which has always been a popular boat, and the Sabre 426 will be at a couple of shows in the East Coast this year.