5 Star Reputation – Digital Experts for Independent Dealers

5 Ways to Avoid a Stale Sales Floor!

Many dealers are quick to make claims of having a flawless sales process and super motivated staff but when brushing the egotistical nonsense out of the way and taking a long hard look at your business, it’s usually always the case that everyone has at least some room for improvement.

It’s important to take an honest assessment of the customer experience and all of your processes and procedures to ensure that your sales staff are consistently at the top of their game and turning forecourt visits into lucrative sales.

When looking at things objectively it’s easy to identify if you have a stale sales floor and what better time to do it than before a busy bank holiday weekend? Look out for these five warning signs to best assess whether you need to act to motivate your staff!

1– Don’t Let Your Sales Staff Stand in Groups

Sales staff love nothing more than standing around in groups gossiping or smoking for hours at a time! But nothing sours a first impression more than customers walking onto a forecourt and being pre-judged by a group of sales people who seemingly have nothing better to do!

If you have gaggles of staff standing by the entrance to your dealership, immediate action needs to be taken! Surely their time could be better spent at their desks setting up appointments, checking internet leads or replying to phone calls?

2- Watch Out for Sharks

A shark is the member of staff who sells more vehicles every month than the rest of your team! Managers love sharks as they help them to achieve their targets and bonuses but they can seriously stifle the abilities and morale of the rest of the sales team.

Culturally sharks can hurt a business and can play a large role in high staff turnover and lacklustre customer experiences if you let them. It’s important to ask yourself ‘why are they making more sales than everybody else?’ Is it because they cherry pick their customers, or are they fastest at identifying incoming cars or even that they pass off leads who they’ve determined aren’t ‘now’ buyers to their colleagues?

3- Don’t Encourage Technophobia

In the 21st century a fear of technology simply cannot be tolerated from any members of staff, top to bottom! So many dealerships fail to fully utilise their sales CRM and instead rely on paper logs because it’s ‘easier’ or they’ve ‘always done things that way.’

In fact, CRM utilisation in the industry is hovering around the 40% mark at the moment! If your dealership starts to fully track all leads, sales and activity against what’s being logged in your CRM, you’ll likely be feeling pretty agitated at all the lost revenue opportunities!

4- Don’t Believe it When Sales Staff Say They Don’t Have Time

It’s too often the battle cry of the overworked sales staff that they don’t have time to follow up leads or update the CRM properly and if they say it enough then managers usually start to believe them.

But the average time that sales staff spend with live customers in a dealership is between 2-2.5 hours a day, this leaves 5.5-6 hours a day for other necessary admin work in order to help your business become more profitable.

5- Take Responsibility and Lead by Example

The fear of accountability can spread like wildfire throughout a business and dealership owners should be careful not to give their employees excuses for being lazy. In an era of evolving technology and processes dealers must not be afraid of adoption.

Once a dealership walks away from statements such as ‘we’ve always done things this way’ and ‘that’s too complicated for us’ you can start to focus on evolving as a business and a team. If the management doesn’t change, then they shouldn’t expect the people they’re leading to change their attitudes either.

All in all, there are many ways to freshen up a stale sales floor including experts who focus on culture and leadership as well as innovative software that helps staff with their admin duties and better organises their time on the sales floor.

A dealership’s culture is created from the top down and just as a bandage won’t stop the bleeding if it’s not properly administered, a business’ culture won’t change if its leaders are cutting corners and setting a poor example.

For more information on how Click Dealer can help your dealership with daily administration tasks through its state of the art DMS packages get in touch today on marketing@clickdealer.co.uk or 01782 904 715.



REQUEST A CALL BACK.

Would you like to speak to one of our advisers over the phone? Just submit your details and we’ll be in touch shortly. You can also email us if you would prefer.

Contact PersonMessage Us on WhatsApp

Get in Touch

I would like to discuss: