Does the manager in your dealership have a written job description with clearly defined responsibilities and expectations? Does your manager know that having specific goals for their department is required? Does your manager know that daily action plans for selling, training, appointments, one-on-one coaching, save-a deal meetings, deal structuring, follow up etc. should be required? If the answer is no to most of those questions, what is their chance of success and your dealership's chance of success? Don't change managers until you can answer yes to the aforementioned questions and give your manager a chance to succeed. Making someone a manager doesn't mean they automatically know how to be one.
If you read biographies of successful people or businesses, one common thread always seems to be passion fueled by big goals. When you write specific goals down on paper, you are committing yourself mentally, emotionally and physically to the attainment of those goals. It has been proven that 95% of people in the world will never do this. Do your managers and your employees set goals for long and short term? As the dealer have you committed your dreams to paper for the month, 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years? Speed of the boss, speed of the crew, if you make the commitment, your employees will to.
Once you have set your goals, plan your specific actions to reach them. Write a specific action plan for when to train, what to train on, who will conduct the training, how long the training will last and your expected goal of improvement for that area. Post a training schedule for the month and make it a priority. Training is not a sometimes activity. It's an everyday requirement.
Set goals for appointments and make action plans to reach those goals as a dealership. This requires goals and action plans for each salesperson as to their activities to set daily appointments. Strive for and monitor appointments and watch your sales increase.
Every salesperson should be coached daily in a one on one session. Set a game plan for who does this, when they do it and the expected results. A one-on-one session should be done for each salesperson daily. Items covered in those sessions should be, their current sales pace in relation to their goals and their percentage of success for total seen contacts, demo's, write ups, closed, and deliveries. Those items should be monitored for both yesterday's traffic and month to date totals. Does each salesperson have a day timer? The salespeople should be required to have a plan for their day, which is broken down into an hourly focus. To-do lists and follow up systems should be reviewed for both sold and unsold customers. Review yesterday's traffic for each salesperson and walk back through what happened and listen for clues that would show breakdowns in their sale process. These activities alone can increase your dealerships sales 20%.
Each morning, sales managers should be required to hold a save-a-deal meeting in the F&I office to review yesterday's sold and unsold traffic. All deals in F&I should be reviewed. Review approvals to see if they have been delivered and if not, why? If delivered, have they been booked out and turned to the office? Review finance turn downs for reasons why and any possibilities to approve those deals. Review dealer trades and the current status of those deals. Review heat sheets and contracts in transit for deals not funded and deals that have missing items such as titles etc.
The first step is to get rid of the notion that there are good and bad months. You either have good or bad goals, game plans, actions and reviews of actions. Good or bad months are directly attributed to those items and are not luck.