Employee retention: the notorious and ever-present affliction of the automotive industry. One of the most important components in the quest to win the battle against employee turnover is proactive employee engagement strategy. But what is employee engagement? I mean, what does it look like? How do we know which tactics are truly effective and which are a waste of time and resources? And how do we apply that information to a variety of employees?

The Brandon Hall Group recently released the results of its 2018 Engagement Survey. The report provides an excellent jumping-off point for figuring out how to effectively drive employee engagement: generational differences. The survey shows that there are "some striking differences in attitudes when it comes to valuing activities for engagement among organizations with a younger age-mix compared to older age-mix organizations. The younger age-mix organizations are more likely to consider team-building activities and recognition programs to be highly valuable for their engagement initiatives. The older age-mix organizations are more likely to consider career development, coaching, work/life balance supports, and wellness/well-being to be highly valuable."

The report provided this visual breakdown:

 Of course, it's important to tailor your employee engagement strategy to your particular dealership, and perhaps the best way to do that is to ask your employees themselves what types of activities they consider highly valuable for increasing their own engagement with the organization.

Do you find this to be an accurate summary based on your own experience? Managers, what engagement activities have you found to be more or less successful for your dealership? Non-managers, what age group do you belong to, and which types of activities do you find most valuable?

You can find the full report here.

Scott Hill, Executive Chairman and Cofounder at PERQ, shares why the "control the process" mindset is becoming obsolete for dealership sales.

Yesterday, we published an infographic with some interesting stats about the power of local SEO. Now, here are some quick tips for improving your dealership's local SEO to leverage that power.

RELATED: 5 Tips to Improve Your Local SEO

David Bell, professor of marketing at the prestigious Wharton School, talks about why digital native customers' expectations are different.

Chris Thomas, owner of Krieger Ford, talks about the growing importance of building flexibility into the processes you use at your dealership every day.

RELATED:  Are You Managing a Process or an Experience?

Scott Hill, co-founder and executive chairman at PERQ, describes what "lead traps" are and what they can mean for lead quality.

Brian Finkelmeyer, Direct of Business Development at vAuto, discusses the dos and don'ts of pricing and stocking inventory.

When Shannon Crane, founder of BDC PowerConsulting, started out as a BDC Manager at a local dealership, she was “as green as it gets.” Not only had she never worked in a dealership, she’d never even financed a car before.

To use her words, she “kind of fell into the automotive industry” – much like many of us did. And, like so many of us, there wasn’t a whole lot of training involved. She was thrown to the wolves. As a result, “when something worked, I’d add it to my repertoire. Basically, when it stuck, it stuck,” she says.

Crane started out with a bare-bones BDC, taking internet leads at a makeshift desk in a corner of the dealership showroom. Eventually, the GM had the receptionist start sending sales calls her way. A little over a year later, and after a small amount of growth in her department, Crane was promoted to the management position.

Crane explains that people who have to figure things out the hard way tend to be very good at training others because they had to carve their own path and make (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes to learn and therefore can pre-empt the major pitfalls and misunderstandings green employees will come across before they have a chance to make common mistakes with customers.

When Crane first took over the BDC role, there wasn’t a lot of structure in place. There was no path already in place to follow because the department was brand new when she started, so she carved her own path. She revamped the word tracks and created the process, the reporting system, the templates, and the variations thereof. Crane strove to set up an “efficient, machine-like system” that was personal at the same time. She also wrote the BDC departmental handbook, administrated various systems, and participated in the morning managerial save-a-deal and sales meetings.

Crane notes she was “very fortunate to work for an incredibly talented, and surprisingly wise GM” She described her former general manager as a genuine person who understood things in a realistic way. “I learned a lot about managing people from observing him, and he always stopped to answer my deeper questions when they came up. When he gave me run of the BDC, he basically just said, ‘It’s your world, I just live in it. Run it.’ It felt good to have that confidence from someone I respected so much.”

After four years at this dealership, Crane decided to branch out and start her own BDC consulting firm. She knew there was a great need for the niche-style of training and coaching designed specifically for BDC’s: when she was managing her own department, 60 percent of her job was spent coaching, and she was always on the lookout for someone to come in with a fresh perspective.  Crane needed someone to come in and refresh her team, but she could not find a professional trainer that specialized in BDC appointment closes.

“When you have a team you’re in the same room with every day, and reinforcing the same wordtracks and strategy multiple times a week, sometimes it stops landing with the agents. It becomes background noise,” she says. She believes that hearing the same call strategy from a second voice reinforces the legitimacy of the process, as the second voice will always have a fresh spin on coaching or teach a new turn of phrase to use on calls or emails that reignites the team’s motivation.

Crane would take time to pick the brains of outside showroom sales coaches who were brought in to that dealership on a semi-regular basis, but found that their processes, although wonderful for floor sales, always fell apart about ¾ of the way through for her team’s needs, since their specialty was on closing showroom sales, not setting appointments for internet and phone customers. This was the experience that informed her decision to go independent.

Crane’s Advice to Dealers: Keep It Simple, and Grow Slowly

BDCs can be expensive to start up, which holds dealers and GMs back from moving forward.

Crane recommends a type of “baby steps” approach for dealers who want to incorporate a BDC but are put off by the overwhelming process of integration:

For Crane, the first step for a new BDC is to answer incoming internet leads only. This allows the team some time to get comfortable and perfect their phone skills with outbound calls they can mentally prepare for first. The next stage of growth is to then integrate incoming sales calls. After that, the BDC can learn the service process and start taking all incoming calls as well as scheduling service appointments. 

These small steps don’t benefit only the BDC, either. “Service departments can be overloaded. The service writers’ inability to be at their desks all day to answer customer calls is something that will give a service department bad reviews online. Bad reviews they don’t deserve,” Crane said. Taking over service appointments and calls can dramatically reduce the load for often-buried service departments.

Crane says that funneling all incoming calls through the BDC ultimately eliminates the need for a receptionist position and keeps the customer from having to wait patiently through multiple transfers to find the right person to talk to about their needs.

“The point is to make those changes, but [to] make them in increments so you’re not overloading your team [and] your expenses,” she said. “Introduce one new step, let the BDC get comfortable and confident in its process, and then add in the next step.”

Crane believes BDCs that also specialize in service appointments are integral to ROI because you can generate sales from people who are calling in for repairs, sometimes major. If trained properly, your BDC can begin to integrate your service customers into dealership sales campaigns.

Crane advises spacing out the stages of growth in increments of four to five months. Start off small, she says, and gradually build up the number of staff only as needed. Some dealerships may start new BDC agents to be focused on service calls and campaigns first, while training in sales with overflow leads when the other agents are weeded. This solution may or may not work for everyone, as dealerships are individualized “just like people.”

Draw on the Arts, Sciences, and Philosophy, for Starters

Crane says she often has to come up with unique takes on sales training and coaching; there’s no “one size fits all.” Crane’s approach draws on the arts and philosophy, for example.

“You have to be able to understand people on a deeper level,” she says. “My approach is sometimes unexpected at first, but when the agent I’m coaching sees results and begins to understand what we’ve been building, they appreciate it.”

Start by engaging in casual conversation to get to know them, learn about them, discover what moves them, and learn how they communicate. It’s important that this is a genuine interaction. From there, you can adjust your approach to each individual.

Crane offers the example of a young woman she coaches. This woman is a very talented musician, so Crane often uses music metaphors to get through to her to explain the philosophy behind the call strategy.

Another example is one of Crane’s clients who is “very linear and left-brained, which is okay because everyone is unique.” Crane coaches this client to write sticky notes of word tracks that were less commonly needed but extremely powerful when used. This is a good coaching strategy for agents that have some structure but are learning how to crush it in tougher calls.”

“The left side of the brain is being used at its fullest capacity when an agent is taking an inbound sales call. For starters, inbound calls are always a surprise. The agent is now shifting gears, listening to the customer, researching vehicle info, running calculations, and making sure they respond to the customer in a way that brings them further down the sales funnel and closer to closing an appointment. So I advise agents to write sticky notes of word tracks that are less commonly needed but extremely powerful when used. The hand-writing of the word track on a sticky allows the agent to quickly find that lesser-used-but-important word track, but not lose focus on the left-brain operations on the call. The right side of the brain recognizes variations of handwriting and spacing on paper, and it will lead your eye straight to the wording note you’re looking for. The subconscious mind does a lot of background work for us, so it’s important to let it do ‘its thing’ for us at work, too.”

“I don’t like to train people to parrot things. Sales is an art like any other. I liken it to playing an instrument. “To elaborate, a person is not playing their own music when they’re still memorizing where to put their hands to create notes and chords, but they are learning the basic process. They are awkward at times and will have to check their sheet music and hand placement often. However, with practice, these things are mastered in time, and the chords are assimilated as muscle memory. This is when the musician can play as themselves and improvise, like jazz. Learning sales strategy is no different. There is a structure you need to follow, as well as certain points an agent needs to hit. Once the fundamentals are learned, their voice is going to come through,” she explains.

I learn a lot by being asked questions while I’m coaching,” she said. “You can plan all you want, but at the end of the day, I’m going to be playing improvisational jazz, too."

Professional Development & Hiring

“The employees I found who tend to be the most driven, dedicated, and willing to learn are those who are intelligent but weren’t born into a privileged position in life, unable to follow what’s considered the traditional path,” Crane says.

Crane cited one young woman who had worked at a chain shoe store for six years – for $8 an hour. Another had twin babies and had been working at an airport sandwich stand when she was still carrying them. And there was a “driven” 19-year-old who had been in AP classes in high school and an effective communicator with a great phone voice, but didn’t have the opportunity to go to college.

“What these three women from my old dealership team have in common is the will to grind in humble positions, often under difficult circumstances, for the long term. They operate under the philosophy of taking care of business no matter what. When you find someone like that and you give them the opportunity for a real career, where they are treated well, and will pay a working adult’s wage, they will be the most loyal and hardworking people on your team, because they’ve been finally given the opportunity been looking for and deserve,” she said. “They tend to be the type of people who have been driven since childhood but simply didn’t have an outlet for it. You give them that outlet, and you have an excellent, high-performing team. When I hire people for BDC, the biggest thing I look for is longevity at places of employment and I don’t really care what [that job] is. If a person is driven enough to grind in a humble position for that long, and is an effective communicator, they’re going to be someone who’s invested and driven to make the most out of the opportunity that they can.”

Scott Pechstein, Vice President of Sales at Autobytel, Inc., talks about the buzzword of the moment: "digital retail."