There is still time to tune-up your selling skills before season slows down. Here are three overlooked secrets that can have a big impact. Greeting The first few minutes of your initial contact with a customer are crucial. Like building a house on a cracked foundation, it’s a lot more difficult to have a positive sales experience if you don’t start out on the right foot. Based on the initial moments of the greeting, impressions [...]
I was recently visiting with a dealer about how to expand his marketing list. He was excited to start putting more time and energy into marketing his dealership, but he didn’t know where to start. If we are looking for an easy place to start, that costs us nothing, let’s focus on growing our marketing list by utilizing our own customers. This is the easiest, least expensive, and most ethical way to grow your list. [...]
“I’m trying to put together a marketing schedule, where do I even begin?” a dealer asked me after a recent National Dealer Meeting. It can be overwhelming to decide where to spend your marketing money. The stakes become even higher when you don’t know what you are trying to achieve with the budget. Spending marketing money to spend marketing money is a bad plan, but these are the steps I walked through with the dealer. [...]
Most people know I like to have fun when training and I work to get everyone, whether they are in service, parts or sales, to understand the dealership has one purpose which is to make obscene amounts of money. Each person on your team should understand that there is nothing wrong with the dealership making great profits. This is accomplished by not only having great employees but also working to keep customers coming back every [...]
In spite of the various shelter in place orders by the states, most of our dealers are finding their year is either just slightly off of their projections or on target with what they were hoping for. While that is good news for the industry, no one knows exactly what the late spring and early summer might bring. That’s why every customer that comes into your dealership is more valuable than ever. As I work [...]
With everything that is currently going on in dealerships, nothing is more noticeable than the phones ringing off the hook. With each state, county and city having their own individual rules on social distancing, showrooms being open, or parts being delivered curbside, the phone has become once again the lifeline we have to connect with our customers. I thought because of that it might be a good time to go back over some of the [...]
As we think about setting our goals over the next 90 days, let’s focus our attention next on whole goods, or the sales department. During season, if we miss the mark on this department, it is painfully obvious! We like to view the whole goods in a dealership as an apple tree. We plant the tree, through the sale of a piece of equipment. Then, we reap the benefits year after year in terms of [...]
One of the most important jobs of a department manager is working to keep their team motivated. In the parts department it is even more important than in service and sales because of the amount of customer contact that happens daily. One unmotivated parts person can impact both your parts sales and your customers’ experience with your dealership. One of the simplest and most overlooked methods of motivating any employee is using goals and objectives. [...]
Calculate closing ratio It all starts off with some basic calculations, the first being your closing ratio. Let’s say that you kept track for a two-week period of time and found that 70 people had come into your dealership to look at equipment. Out of that group of 70, 20 ended up buying from you. Keep in mind that the type or size of the equipment doesn’t matter, the important part is knowing the numbers [...]
Compensation, regardless of the position in a dealership, is always a hot topic. How much can I afford to pay? What level of performance do I have the right to expect as an owner from my people? How do I know whether I am paying too much, or just as bad, not enough, and then risk losing my good people to a competitor? While I could do a day-long program on compensation programs for dealerships, [...]