Northrop & Johnson sails to exponential growth with Microsoft Dynamics 365

The superyacht business is about making dreams come true. Whether pursuing the pinnacle of luxury or experiential travel or a meaningful lifestyle, every aspect of the journey needs to be personalized for the client’s unique taste and desires. But the journey doesn’t just start with the onboard experience. It starts days, months, and even years before clients ever step aboard a yacht. From the first moment, every interaction needs to be extraordinary to build intimate relationships with clients. When expectations are this high, there’s no second chance. The engagement must be exactly right.

As the world’s leading superyacht brokerage, Northrop & Johnson provides clients with first-class services, including yacht sales and purchases, charters, new construction, and more. Throughout six decades, the brokerage has achieved steadfast growth and success by providing clients with an unrivaled yachting experience from start to finish. 

Yet broad digital transformation isn’t something the superyacht industry has embraced. This lack of industry-wide adoption gave Northrop & Johnson an opportunity to gain a real competitive edge. By being forward-thinking and embracing the latest customer experience technology, Northrop & Johnson has gained this advantage and managed to stay at the top of its field. “Nobody out there has even remotely tried to do what we’re doing—using technology to understand our customers’ journeys and predict their buying behaviors so that we can be more precise in our marketing and provide valuable intelligence to our salespeople,” says Daniel Ziriakus, President & Chief Operating Officer at Northrop & Johnson. “There’s a point where our charter clients will want to buy a vessel of their own,” says Ziriakus. “And then later will be a point where, to offset some of the costs of owning it, they might want to charter it out. We recognized that if we could pin down those trigger points, we could significantly increase sales.” 

Catering to a small group of high-value clients worldwide requires precise marketing and exemplary sales and service. “Many traditional brokerage houses appeal to a more mature clientele, but that’s not us. We’re young and fun, and so are our clients, even if they are only young at heart,” says Keith Perfect, Director of Technology & Intelligence at Northrop & Johnson. “And we dare to disrupt the industry by delivering an elevated, data-driven, end-to-end experience because the future of superyachting is younger, more dynamic, and has higher customer experience expectations than ever before.” 

“In this market, we have high-wealth customers who are considering very high-value purchases, and we can’t afford any interactions that leave them feeling anything less than special,” says Perfect. 

Charting extraordinary sales success

In 2019, Northrop & Johnson deployed Microsoft Dynamics 365 Sales and Customer Insights journeys as part of its digital transformation for a whole suite of different services including lead and opportunity management. Since then, the brokerage has seen a 250% increase in charter bookings. Northrop & Johnson has continued this innovation by adding the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights data platform. “We started looking at how to take customer experience to the next level,” says Perfect. “And all the cutting-edge ideas like personalized journeys and real-time engagement have one thing in common—unlocking insights from data to understand each client’s innermost aspirations and desires. That’s why we turned to Microsoft once again. With our strong alliance and Microsoft’s customer data platform and journey orchestration capabilities, we know we can stay ahead of the pack and continue surpassing our clients’ expectations.”

Now the compounding results of implementing Dynamics 365 speak for themselves—enabling brokerage sales to grow 36% in the last year as well as accelerating improvements in the average close rate by 20% and 23% year over year in 2021 and 2022 respectively:

Business use cases and scenarios

Powering the next chapter of innovation at Northrop & Johnson is the comprehensive client profile generated by Customer Insights. Each of the more than 250,000 profiles contains a 360-degree view that brings together data from contacts, leads, opportunities, marketing forms submitted, marketing emails, and website visits. Northrop & Johnson, however, didn’t stop there. The brokerage also enriches the profiles with a wide array of demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data that results in richer profiles for the marketing and sales teams:    

• Lead scoring to prioritize leads (from Dynamics 365 Customer Insights) 
• Demographic data about website visitors (from third-party data provider site See Pixel) 
• Behavioral data from website activity (out of the box with Customer Insights) 
• Interests that show preferred activities and hobbies like golf and air charter (out of the box with Customer Insights) 
• Brand affinity that shows preferred brands like Rolls-Royce and Penfolds (out of the box with Customer Insights) 
• Enhanced address that increases accuracy of mailing addresses, leading to higher delivery rates and elimination of duplicate mailing for marketing materials like the Navigator magazine

“Customer Insights brings together the data we have about our clients into one place,” says Perfect. “But just as important, we can easily enrich that data to uncover our clients’ aspirations and intent. The more insights we provide our teams, the closer they can get to our clients.”

With a 360-degree view, every team entrusted to serve clients has a complete and accurate view, from the emails they have clicked on to the events they have registered for to the sales proposals they have received, as well as signals of intent such as viewing a yacht listing online. Soon, Northrop & Johnson teams will have at their fingertips additional profile information including detailed charter preferences, surveys, and more event data.

For the sales teams, the profiles from Customer Insights provide comprehensive and timely data for each client. Sales professionals get a complete timeline of all interactions across marketing and sales. Rather than using multiple tools to get this information, the sales teams can see all the client information directly in Dynamics 365 Sales, the app they already use every day.

Microsoft Brands and Interests enrichments are also configured to capture additional information on affinities and share of voice (SoV) for Northrop & Johnson customers. The segments created in the Customer Insights data platform are seamlessly exported to the Dynamics 365 Customer Insights journey orchestration application for marketing campaigns, and to LinkedIn Ads and Dynamics 365 Sales for further activation. Finally, some Microsoft Power BI reports have been created on top of Customer Insights data to measure performance. Further activation is done through Facebook Ads, Google Ads, and LinkedIn Ads.

“We can do great things with the insights we generate in Dynamics 365,” says Ziriakus. “We can deliver more targeted content to each customer, make sure customers always get through to the right sales agents, and ensure that every agent is up to speed with exactly what their customers need and expect.”

Delivering the experience of a lifetime

With a unified client profile and AI-enabled insights, Northrop & Johnson now delivers an experience tailored to their customers’ wants and needs, as well as to the business priorities such as focusing on the highest value customers. It then uses this data in an extensive, highly personalized, real-time customer nurturing process that enables it to focus its lean global team on the moments that matter most and empower them to have the most impactful client conversations.

“With Dynamics 365, things that took hours or days now take minutes,” says Perfect. “This time we save, along with previously unobtainable insights, can help build relationships with our clients. The sales team can sell, and the marketing team can be creative—it’s great.” 

Marketing, Sales, and Customer Relationship Management teams work with the same customer information but get a specific view of the customer for their needs. The teams can move customers up the value chain from digital interactions to yacht shows, to charters, to purchases, to additional services, and to partner products/services. From deciding who receives bespoke printed Navigator lifestyle magazines to developing highly personalized sales proposals, to prioritizing the right leads to invite to an upcoming yacht show, each journey is tailored based on the customer and business goals.

Sales teams get comprehensive and timely data for each client, including a complete timeline of all interactions across marketing and sales. Rather than using multiple tools to get this information, the sales team members can see all the client information directly in Dynamics 365 Sales, the app they already use every day. Not only do sales team members have the context to deliver personalized conversations, but they also know the right time to engage. Knowing when to reach out to a client is especially helpful because it allows the sales team to seize the moment when clients are most receptive—especially important since decision-making is often based on emotions rather than hard facts.

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, Northrop & Johnson has acumen that no other brokerage house has. “Especially when you’re dealing with clients at this level, they want to know that they are taken care of,” says Ziriakus. “And when you must make an impact in minutes, which is all you have with these busy clients, you need to be very attuned to them. Otherwise, it could cost you the sale. So, having a solution at your fingertips that connects the entire journey is huge for our sales team.”

Sailing to new horizons

Being at the forefront of technological innovation within the industry has meant the Northrop & Johnson team is consistently looking for what’s next and how to best apply it to their organization. In the wake of the generative AI wave and Dynamics Customer Insights and the introduction of Copilot, Northrop & Johnson employees have become superusers, taking their experience to the next level and increasing team efficiency. As Perfect says, “We shared the Copilot capabilities with our worldwide team, and they were ecstatic. This was the most excited I've seen them about any technology on our IT roadmap in a long time. They not only thought it was very cool but also highly valuable for the business!”

Northrop & Johnson delivers a world-class experience at scale, optimizing its technology capabilities and democratizing insights out of its data. To enable this, Northrop & Johnson has been testing Copilot to enable non-tech business users to ask questions about their customer data and get new insights that were not previously possible without a data scientist. Copilot has also enabled Northrop & Johnson teams to create high-quality content in the right tone for their customers exponentially faster. Copilot provides the key points they want to land in natural language, letting the team simply select the best Copilot suggestion and tailor further as needed. The teams are discovering that, as Perfect says, “The new Copilot capabilities in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights are a game changer. We expect they will fundamentally transform our marketers’ workflow—helping us save time, boost productivity, and enrich the quality of engagement with our customers.”

With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights at the helm, Northrop & Johnson is sailing to new horizons. “As we continue into the next decade, we can confidently build long-lasting relationships with the personal attention that completely reassures our clients that we will go the extra mile to fulfill their dreams,” says Perfect. 

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