Andy Church shares the importance of the proper inspection of tires in front of the customer during the walkaround to dealership revenue in this Quick Tip.

Many dealerships subscribe to some type of call tracking service that records incoming phone calls, however, many sales managers neglect to listen to the calls on a regular basis. Typically, it’s not until the end of the month when they’re trying to squeeze out those last few units for the month, that the call tracking service comes to mind. They listen to calls and then, oftentimes, want to bang their head against the wall.

How salespeople handle incoming calls with prospective buyers can make or break a sale, causing the customer to choose a different dealership or brand entirely. Many sales people believe they can sell the car over the phone and close the deal without ever meeting the prospect!

Therefore, making sure that staff handling calls are prepared to do so by having the right training and approach, is vital to getting more prospects in the door and opportunities to make more sales. Yet far too many dealerships neglect to teach and coach, their salespeople in effective ways to handle incoming calls.

Here are three tips that will help sales managers prepare their staff to handle incoming calls more effectively:

1. Smile – When you smile while talking on the phone with someone, your attitude is naturally transferred within the conversation. Ensuring that there is a smile on your face makes a great first impression with the customer on the other end of the line, and we all know how important first impressions are! If your attitude is positive, the customer will sense it and be more interested in talking to you.

2. Tone Matters – It’s not simply smiling while on the phone but how you are speaking. We all know that saying things with different tones can change the meaning of what is trying to be communicated. Being conscious of how you are speaking with a customer – keeping an open, friendly and helpful tone – will start a relationship on the right foot and make the customer more interested in doing business with not only that individual salesperson but also the dealership.

3. Be Conversational – Just like when a customer is standing in front of you on the lot, make sure that you’re having a conversation with them. If you can find common interests and start building rapport with the customer, you greatly improve your chances of them trusting you and liking you before they’ve even met you in person.

Finally, you everyone needs to understand the definition of success when answering the phone. If they don’t know what success is and have that as a goal, the conversation can easily be cut short without the salesperson accomplishing anything. Have you ever heard a salesperson answer the phone, have a customer ask if a particular vehicle is in stock, for the salesperson to simply reply “No” and have the customer simply say “Thanks” and hang up? That’s a lost opportunity!

So, what is the definition of a successful phone call? There are 2 goals…

1. Get the Customer’s Contact Information – Even if nothing comes from the phone call, succeeding in getting the customer’s contact information allows the salesperson to follow-up with the customer. What if your dealership gets a unit in-stock the day after the phone call in which the salesperson simply said it was not and the customer hung up? Without contact information, the salesperson would have no way of reaching out to the customer to let them know.

2. Make an Appointment – It’s one thing to have a great conversation and have the customer say that they’ll come down and look at the car. It’s quite another to not only get their contact information, but also get the customer to commit to a day and time. This builds a sense of obligation on the part of the customer. In addition, if a sales manager calls and confirms the appointment, it allows the dealership to reinforce the appointment while making the customer feel valued and welcome. That will greatly improve your show rate and opportunities. Statistics show time and again that the closing rate of sales appointments is far higher than walk in traffic! So book it!

Start making sure that your sales staff understand the importance of handling incoming calls properly. Make it a subject of your Saturday Sales Meeting, talk about it at your daily huddle, listen to calls that are recorded and coach your team on what they did well and how they can improve. Make it a habit, define success, and reinforce the message on an ongoing basis! Doing so will sell more cars, make more money and the dealership will be more successful!

Happy Selling!

It's time you started making your Dealership space work harder for you and this Quick Tip gives you a simple and very effective way you can do that for under $30!

Greg Ternoway discusses the best practices for presenting an invoice to a service customer.

Say the words “We’re changing Pay Plans” in a dealership and everyone starts to run for the hills! This is typically because pay plans in our industry are usually designed with little thought, flexibility, or consideration for what you are actually trying to achieve. The pay plan is written around “So how much do you make now?” or “what does the average person make in that job?” instead of what really matters, Incentivizing, Motivating, and Rewarding employees to achieve GOALS!

Spend even a little time defining your goals, and then creating a pay plan in line with those goals, and your employees will reward you with improved employee retention, performance, and a winning culture! My workshop will provide you with the skills and tools to create Pay Plans that Drive Profitability!  

For example, here are 3 tips for designing a successful pay plan:

1. Position not Person – When designing the pay plan make sure you do it for the position not the person. In other words, just because Bob looks good on paper don’t give him a “Special” Technician pay plan to do the same job as your other Technicians of the same skill. 
2. Define Success – If we don’t know what success looks like, monetary compensation, performance achievement, and any other areas we expect, how can we know if the person achieved success or if the pay plan had any impact on their performance at all? And how do they know what they are trying to achieve? Define success and then monitor results!
3. Win = Win – A successful pay plan will result in a win for both parties involved. So, the Dealership gets a win and the employee gets a win. If the employee earns more money than ever, yet the Dealership is far less profitable, you can bet dollars to doughnuts that the pay plan will be out with the trash in no time!

Remember these 3 tips when reviewing, adapting and creating pay plans for your Dealership! And Make sure to attend my DSES Seminar where I will share with you the skills, tips, and practical examples, for “Creating Pay Plans that Drive Profitability!”

Be Profitable!

Do you know how many "lost customers" you have in your service department? This ProfitByAction.com Quick Tip is about the importance of Customer Retention to help improve your Service Absorption.

Department Managers have an enormous impact on your Dealerships Profitability. That impact can either be positive, or negative. The choice is really up to you. We would never let the coach on the field without a playbook and a strategy, yet as an industry we let our managers “play” every day without the skills and support to manager their teams. Ask yourself “do I have a plan in place to ensure my managers have a positive outcome on the bottom line?”

Managers have so much influence over the daily operations of the business you would think we spend tons of time and money developing leaders who understand how the business operates, how we make money, deliver great customer experiences, get and keep great staff, plan the business, all of the essentials in running a successful department and dealership. 

Unfortunately, we find there is no strategy or plan for these essential team members. Managers are just good people, doing the best they can with the tools provided. The average department manager has been promoted through the ranks (which can be a very positive thing) but actually never received training in how to be a manager and be successful in the job. Sure, we show them how to work the computer (a little), how to handle customer situations, and how to juggle, and say “get on with it”. But do we actually have a plan in place to improve their skill set, knowledge, and understanding of how to drive the business and contribute to the bottom line?

Here’s how to start turning the tide for your team and increase your managers skills and knowledge:

1. Make it a topic of conversation – At your next Managers meeting ask the Managers where they believe they might benefit from additional training. Then act to fill the gaps.
2. Create a training plan – Making Manager training a monthly habit drives the whole team forward and gives you a “Topic of the Month” to focus on with your team.
3. Follow up – At each Managers meeting have each Manager say 1 thing they learned that month and how they applied it to the business to drive the bottom line!

Take the 3 actions above and your team will have the competitive edge to drive profitability and increase your bottom line! 

Questions or want to talk more? Message or email me andyc@aseamericas.com

Be Profitable!

Andy Church

Andy shares his Magic Formula for determining profitability in this ProfitByAction.com Quick Tip. 

Take a look at the most current version of your local business directory, and count the number of NEW mechanical repair shops which have opened up in your community recently.

I’ll bet you can count more than three; some being sole proprietors, while others are national chains.
Ask yourself: “Why?"
 

"What is going on in my market that justifies an additional repair shop?" It could be your area has seen increased growth, so a larger vehicle population demands an increase in service providers. But ask yourself:
 

1. If my shop is not completely stuffed to the gills every day, how could I allow a competitor to open his doors and steal work from me?
2. How did I drop the ball so he could eat my lunch?

The answer can be broken down into four basic categories:

1. Wishful self-limitation: You are a franchised dealer. You specialize in your franchise’s brand. You market solely to your brand audience, hope they will do business with you, and reach no further. After all, your only competition is other dealer franchises selling your brand…not the aftermarket; You additionally dislike the complication which comes with setting up and using different vendors, pricing, accounting, and pay plans required to be both competitive and profitable – it’s too much work for such a limited market share opportunity.

2. You didn’t see it coming: While development in your area has increased, you are hoping for “converts” to purchase new or used vehicles from your brand at your place of business, and crossing your fingers that service customers find you.

3. Fear of misdiagnosis: Your techs are brand specialists. They might misdiagnose another manufacturer’s product simply because they don’t know it well.

4. Poor return – on – investment perception: “I won’t do general repairs on other brands that much, so why should I invest in the tools and technology required to capture that market share?
 

But the world is different now.

• If it has lug nuts and some sort of propulsion system (be it diesel, gas, hybrid, or all-electric) you’d better be able to fix it if you want to keep your business and make it grow

• Few clients are concurrently product-loyal; ask any client about the other vehicles in their driveway…there’s a high probability they don’t carry the same name badge as the one they brought to you for service today. The other vehicles will still need maintenance and repair. Why can’t your shop do this? Or at least facilitate and manage the repair for the customer as sublet?
 

• Your techs all learned the same mechanical principles during their trade school training. They simply need the infrastructure (read: information and occasional tool resources) to effect a proper repair. There is no excuse…a good tech can fix anything.
 

• Clients open their wallets where they are well-treated. In this economy, clients will spend a thousand dollars today to avoid a three – to – five year car payment;
 

• You don’t just want your client’s branded vehicle in your shop. You want ALL of their vehicles…and their family’s…and their neighbors.
 

• The shop that sells tires (meaning, gets the wheels up in the air, off the vehicle, and performs a free safety inspection) wins. All of it-Everything, Sales, gross profit, client loyalty and retention. The whole bag. Don’t want to sell tires? Your client will go somewhere else to get them…along with their brakes, shocks, exhaust work, and oil changes. Let one thing go, and you are letting it all go.
 

• It’s time for “empire building” to end between your service and parts departments regarding aftermarket repairs and “who gets what” as far as profit margins are concerned. Adopt weighted-cost average pricing models for aftermarket work, structure your pricing to be competitive in the marketplace, and go after your “unfair share” of the pie.
 

• You must be profitable, but consider your investment in “all makes service” to be just that – an investment in building your store as a brand in the community while capturing and keeping clients away from your competitors.

It’s now 3pm on a Wednesday night, and your service bays are empty…what are you doing to fill them for tomorrow, next week and next month?

Missed Shots in your Service Department

How many times have you heard: “How many (fill in the blank) did we sell this month?

We’re always pushing our service advisors to sell every possible opportunity they can find, be it from a walk around, factory maintenance, or what the technician finds.

We need to examine one specific word: “find”.  In this context, “find” is a verb, indicating some form of action. In our industry, action is an essential element of everyday life, and at ASE, we translate that into the simple word “do”.

For this discussion, and to start your thinking process in the right direction, ask yourself this one question: In terms of finding immediate service sales opportunities, who, in your dealership, is responsible for performing the action we call “find”?

• Service Advisors find work every day through walk arounds and visual inspections at vehicle drop off.
• Technicians find work through diagnosis and in-depth vehicle examinations.
• Service Managers find opportunities in terms of new revenue generation ideas, efficiency improvements, and expense controls.

Problem is…human nature only compels us to look for things that are of interest to us which might prove beneficial to our work skills or paycheck…and sometimes, work needed on a customer’s vehicle is simply overlooked because it is not advantageous to the Technician to do it, or for the Advisor to sell it, or for the Manager to ensure said work is being “found”.

Sure, you may have a “21-point inspection sheet”…if a vehicle comes in needing work (a necessary job which is excessively complicated and/or time consumptive), what’s the likelihood that item will make its way onto the inspection sheet, and then be sold? Moreover, what auditing tools do you have in place to ensure this process happens with every customer every time?

I’ll provide a simple example…your battery vendor probably has a tester which they will provide you basically free of charge which provides a complete battery test in thirty seconds, provides a printed battery health report as a customer sales tool, and also keeps track of total battery tests performed per week/month, and by whom. Obtain this device, and require 100% battery testing in your shop. Match your monthly car count against battery test count and determine how many opportunities were missed.

You will be astounded how many “shots” you are missing!

People like to do what comes easily to them…unfortunately, not all opportunities in vehicle repair offer this luxury. All professionals are compelled to “do the right thing” which may not be the easiest, or most interesting act of our day. However, we discipline ourselves to ensure our area responsibility is covered, and we demonstrate an awareness to ensure repeat business and profit. This awareness must become a “culture” within your shop to ensure 100 per cent of the “shots”…good and bad…easy and complicated, are taken.