Managers: you are the linchpin of employee development.

In fact, I’ll go a step further and say that management is the key to all process implementation and operational success.

Ask any vendor. Ask your OEM rep. Without management buy-in and active participation, nothing happens. Your GM becomes frustrated that they can’t get “buy-in”, and the store doesn’t progress.

Managers drive employee development. They create your customer experience. They mentor and grow your team. The performance of your organization depends on the caliber of your managers.

So why are you so often left out? Ask yourself, do you receive as much training as the Salespeople, BDC agents, Service Advisors, etc. that you manage? Do you know how to coach your employees to success or are you a “glorified babysitter?

Here are four things you can do to become a better manager and leader:

Focus on Important as well as urgent

Too often I hear that managers don’t have enough time to do their job. You do have enough time, but you must prioritize and let go of activities that aren’t important.

There is no getting around upset customers. You can’t pause the service drive so you can spend some time mentoring your service advisors. There isn’t a calendar schedule that you can use to manage car sales. These items are urgent.

But there needs to be time allotted for important. Frequently, important takes a backseat to everything else. Think about how you can clear the clutter out of your day. Find time to deal with important.

Make a personal connection

We’ve all heard the saying, “people buy from people”. It’s true, but people also work for people. A key to motivating and coaching your employees is to build an emotional bond and personal connection.

That doesn’t mean you have to become best friends. It means you know why your employees are working at your dealership. It means you know what they want to achieve in their career. They need to have the confidence that you are working to help them achieve their goals.

Do you know why your employees work at your store? Do you know what truly motivates them to succeed? Do you know where they want to be in 2 years? Find out.

Create scorecards that measure success

If you want me to work for you, I must know what success looks like. That doesn’t just mean how many cars is a good number to sell, or how many appointments your top BDC agent sets.

Employees need to understand the activities they need to execute to achieve success. Activities lead to results. You’ll get the outcomes you want if you are able to show your employees that if they complete activities on a daily basis, they’ll be successful.

These activities should be different for a new hire than a grizzled veteran that’s been with you for 12 years. Make sure your scorecards include levels based on experience. You can always “promote” an employee from one scorecard to another as they progress.

Growth mindset

Earlier in this post I asked if you are receiving as much training as your employees. If not, that’s on you. There are almost an infinite number of resources you can tap into to improve your management skills.

Youtube, LinkedIn Learning, leadership books, DrivingSales HCM and community, are just a few platforms that can help you develop better coaching and mentoring. Take the time to use them.

Having a growth mindset means you believe you always have more to learn. You aren’t sitting back and using your experience to manage your team. You need to constantly be looking for opportunities to grow and develop.

Execute

Duh.

None of the above activities mean anything if you don’t execute. The road is paved with good intentions. What separates true leaders from babysitters is their execution.

Just about anyone can desk a deal. That’s not where your value lies. The real reason you’re in the position you are is to develop your employees. Remember, you are the difference between dealership failure and success.

Finding the right people to join your dealer team is flat-out tough.

Employees have a long checklist of what they are looking for...schedule flexibility, training opportunities, leadership and advancement, competitive pay...

All of this, without having even a shred of experience. To add salt to the wound, many of them will end up leaving within 12-18 months.

So how on earth are you able to find, attract, and keep (longer) the right people?

Find out Coach K's secrets to successfully creating your dealer dream team in this Master Class.



The ability to offer options to your customers is a luxury that not a lot of dealers can offer right now. And...it can give you a massive unfair advantage over the competition.

Find out how a small town dealer in Graham, NC routinely sources 80-100 new cars per month from across the Southeast.  

Uncover:

• The steps County Ford took to become a sourcing juggernaut
• Lessons learned from their multi-year journey (and mistakes to avoid)
• Industry trends that will keep sourcing from consumers a go-to strategy through 2023

Does it ever seem like the auto industry learned how to run business development centers (BDC) from Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) and Jerry Maguire (Tom Cruise) in the film Jerry Maguire? Constant instructions to, “Show me the money!” Or, in our case, “Show me the numbers!” Although every dealer reviews their financial statement and numerous KPIs for every department on a monthly basis, few departments are held accountable to the numbers like a BDC. Why is that? What makes us treat them differently?

Every dealer is being held accountable for their numbers by the manufacturer. If not the manufacturer, then it's your 20-group. And if not the 20-group, it’s your own goals. No matter the source of the KPI standard, you have a goal designed to help you push forward to achieve success. Since we are all accustomed to goal setting, it was easy applying this same approach to our newest department: the BDC. But BDCs aren’t new. They have been around since the ‘80s, and nearly every dealership has some variation, but we still treat them differently than our other departments with the typical reasoning of, “this is how we’ve always done it.”

And you’re right… successful BDCs are managed by the numbers and, whether sales or service-focused, the team members are accustomed to regular check-ins about their call and appointment stats. These check-ins allow their leader to catch small issues before they become huge problems. So why aren’t we doing the same thing with our sales and service teams? “We’re too busy!” is what many sales managers or service managers would tell you. We also have to consider how the check-ins are being handled in our BDCs.

According to JMA Group, “the employee turnover rate in the automotive industry is 46%, an all-time high.” We need to stop looking at check-ins as a negative experience and consider all the positives. Cox Automotive found that ⅓ of non-management dealership employees do not feel engaged or excited about their jobs. Check-ins are our opportunity to engage our team, but how we approach the meeting will often determine the outcome.

So how can we engage but not enrage? First, we need to make sure our team is aware of what success looks like. Then, let’s start with listening instead of commanding. The best leaders listen, but in automotive, that crucial skill is rarely revered. So why not try it out? And as your team “shows you the numbers,” you will be able to help “show them the money!”

If you want to learn more about creating scorecards for your team, register for one of our Master Classes or reach out to me or any member of our Human Capital Management team. We would be happy to walk you through this easy process.

So I’m going to stop typing and start listening… Let me know what you think in the comments below. 

The customer experience (CX) is the driving force of any successful dealer business. More than ever, providing customers with seamless service and access to information is vital to attracting and retaining valuable consumers.

For that reason franchise and independent dealership websites must focus on the customer experience by reflecting this cultural shift and offering auto buyers a variety of ways to find the information they seek.

Crafting a rich and engaging dealer website will elevate your customer experience and set you apart from your competition.

Service departments are experiencing an increase in phone traffic. With this good news, however, is a disturbing trend. More and more customers are dropping before they are connected to a live person.

What can dealerships do to capitalize on their phone traffic and generate more service revenue? In this webinar, we discuss the latest fixed ops phone analytics and provide tactics on how you can improve your phone processes.

What does Duke basketball have in common with your sales floor?

I just got back from the 2022 DrivingSales Executive Summit, where there was a ton of great content. One of the keynote presenters was Steve Cadigan, and he gave the attendees a different way to think about your employee development strategy. One of the examples he used was Duke basketball.

Coach K used to have his college athletes for four years. This allowed him to build consistency into his teams. Remember Grant Hill? He stuck around for all four years of college. Think about what that allowed college coaches to do.

The “1 and Done” rule flipped the script. When this rule was implemented in the NBA, top talent wasn’t sticking around. It changed the rules. Coach K went from having his players for 4 years to 6 months (the start of school until March Madness). Instead of Grant Hill, he had Zion Williamson.

If Coach wanted to win, he needed to rethink the way he recruited and coached. The old way wasn’t going to get him an NCAA Championship.

For example, he changed the way he recruited talent. When sitting with high school athletes, he would tell them how he would get them to the NBA. Here are some of the things he communicated to potential Blue Devils:

·     We will prepare you for the next phase of your career

·     Your value will increase

·     We will grow you as a player and a person

·     We will surround you with great talent

·     Our culture is all about winning and building great talent

·     Even if you don’t make the NBA, we will help you get a job as a coach, scout, or etc.

In addition to the change in mindset, he also simplified the playbook. He knew he didn’t have time to coach his players on difficult offenses and defenses. He got the committed recruits interacting with the current players as soon as possible, not waiting until they were on campus.

Think about what you would do if you knew your salespeople were going to leave. How would you modify your process? What would your onboarding look like?

In today’s job market, we are kidding ourselves if we think our employees are going to be “lifers”. We would all love them to stay, but the majority of them will not. We can maximize the value they provide while we have them and prepare them for their next opportunity. If they stay, great! If they leave, your dealership got as much out of them as possible.

If employees leave and go to worse jobs, that’s on the dealership. Too many of those are an indicator of a broken employee management process.

Think about your employee management. How can you optimize your processes for today’s workforce?

In this webinar, Upstart presents tactics you can use to improve your eCommerce process. Digital Retailing is not going away. Learn what successful dealers are doing to optimize their conversion rate and sell more vehicles.

Greg Gifford sits down with us and presents the recent Search Lab Digital research. He explains what dealerships are actually doing in search and provides tactics on how they can improve their visibility.

For years, the managers in the automotive industry have been telling their troops the true cost of a lead. When I started in 2003, It was believed the cost of a phone call or a walk-in customer was $200 - $300. Nowadays, it’s much higher. The way it’s typically calculated, take the total marketing spend and divide it by the total number of leads. Simple, however, the true cost of rushing the onboarding process with your new hire is much greater than that. 

It is believed by many managers in the automotive industry the only way to learn is to make mistakes, however, does it have to be on day one? In most cases, the new-hires have never worked in the automotive industry and lack the competencies to provide the customer experience necessary to build trust with our brand. This lack of trust pushes customers to our competitors and we miss out on many post-sale-revenue-generating opportunities: repeat business, trade-ins, referrals, service work, etc. In addition, the grosses are getting higher and the delta between an average sales consultant and a new hire is five units per month. If you take all that into account, what’s the true cost of missing this many opportunities? 

It gets worse. The mental toll the new hire goes through when they are forced to talk to customers in the first few days on the job is detrimental to their long-term success with a new company. In many cases, a new hire is still contemplating whether or not they’ve made the right decision by choosing to work in the automotive industry. Let’s face it, nobody except for the owner’s children wants to sell cars when they grow up. For a small percentage of people, forcing them to perform and compete against other top performers with years of experience does drive them and shows them what’s possible. However for most, it simply disengages them, and they start looking for opportunities elsewhere, while burning through leads. After a few months, they quit, and you start the process over again. 

In reality, there is no way to eliminate all costs associated with hiring a new employee, however, by investing in a systematic new-hire orientation and onboarding process will greatly reduce that cost. Slow down, and give your new-hire an opportunity to meet everyone in the company. Educate them about the mission, vision, values, and history of the company. Give them the basic competencies and time to internalize them. Roleplay through every step of the process so they know the basic flow and how to execute it. They don’t have to be perfect, but they must be confident when talking to customers. This may take some time, and you may think this costs too much. When you compare the cost of improper onboarding, it pales in comparison. You are left with two choices, “pay now, or pay a lot more later.”