If you work in the motor industry, you would’ve heard this saying. When we break it down it certainly holds a lot of truth. Look back at your own dealership experiences during a slow month, a below budget quarter, when the sales team’s morale was down, when a certain sales person was not performing. In all these circumstances selling cars fixed everything! It really is as simple as that, and if it is that simple we should do more of it.
Unfortunately, it isn’t as simple as that today, because if we could all sell more cars we would be doing it already, right? Due to the reasons we explored in my last post the current landscape has become difficult to traverse with much success. During this challenging time, let’s face reality, there are going to be winners and there are going to be losers. None of us want to fail but to be one of the winners we need to take the right steps and we need to be a bit different to the rest. We will need to strike the right balance between activity, customer experience, ingenuity, process, staff, culture, pressure, reward and fun.
Why would this be important? If selling cars fixes everything then we must give our sales staff every opportunity to perform their most important duty effectively. We should make it a simple and seamless process, so they can dedicate themselves to the most important person, the customer.
There is a trap that many of us, including myself, have fallen into over the years. When things get quiet, we might notice our sales team sits around drinking coffee waiting for the next person to walk in. We set them to work in all manner of prospecting activity, whipping them into shape while making them understand the financial impact of the current month and incentivising the benchmarks we want to accomplish. I am not saying this is wrong, on the contrary it is necessary as activity creates activity. The challenge is finding the right balance of the items mentioned above because too much of some and too little of others can undo all the good work we are doing.
We will dig deeper into this interesting thought during later posts.
