Does this sound familiar?

Does this sound familiar?

A new sales consultant greets a customer on the lot. Customer says, “I’m just looking”. Sales consultant says, “Ok” and walks back into the showroom. Customer drives off.

Your desk manager pencils a deal, discounting the vehicle by $1,500, putting all the money in the trade, no money down and a 72 month term payment. By the way, he/she didn’t ask the salesperson any questions about the customer.

Your service advisor greets a customer in the service lane. Customer says that he/she wants an oil change. Service writer writes the ticket and directs the customer to the customer lounge. Transaction over.

Your finance manager presents the F&I menu to a customer and the customer declines all products. Finance manager says, “Ok” and completes the rest of the paperwork.

Is this the way you want business conducted at your dealership? Is it fair to say that the employees in the above transactions were ineffective?

What is the cost of ineffective employees? Lost sales? Lost gross? Lost opportunities to do business? Lost referrals? Lost repeat business? The list goes on. In this business climate, can you afford lost anything?

I suspect the answer is a resounding “no!” What, then, is the solution? The solution lies in an examination of what I call the Performance Optimization Paradigm.

The Performance Optimization Paradigm gives guidance to the requirements of optimizing the performance of any business, dealership or department. Its elements include:

· The right person

· Properly trained

· Using the right process

· Held accountable to performing the right process

· On a motivational compensation plan

· Selling the right products

· Provided with the right system support

· Doing business in a compliant and ethical way

· With management support

In the coming weeks I will get into specifics about each of the aforementioned elements of The Performance Optimization Paradigm and how you can use them to optimize your dealership’s performance.

David Worrall