Does Your Business Process Support Your Sales Professionals?
Posted by
Don Graff on Sat, Jan 14, 2012 @ 04:25 PM
Posted by Kurt Hoppe
Technology Performance Consultant, Don Graff Automotive
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The automotive marketplace is never going away. It represents an industry that sells upwards of 12-17 million units per year in the United States alone. This is a multi-billion-dollar industry that fuels many segments of the American economy, from finance to fuels production, raw materials to manufacturing.
The best way to keep and hold your slice of this big profit-earning pie is to constantly develop and invest in the three main pillars of your dealership: People, Process and Technology.
Investing in your People is an everyday thing. Starting with hiring and training, you should always be on the lookout for ways to develop your employees into experienced professionals. Your team of managers should always be evaluating your employees and placing them into training that builds on their skills and removes deficiencies in their performance.
Don Graff Automotive provides a number of programs to help recruit and hire the best associates, and to facilitate the ongoing development of your people assets.
Technology is important to drive efficiency. If we can't remember more today than we did yesterday, having a computer-based CRM would help, so we can touch all our customers and more tomorrow when they need their next vehicle. Technology is important so that your Dealership's chief marketer can send the right message to the right people at the right time. Not to mention, it aids in communicating between our own people and our customers, who are more and more getting into life on the go, and shopping through smartphones.
Don Graff Automotive's technology performance team can help with everything from website strategic planning to leveraging your digital assets to craft a strong marketing message.
And then we have processes. Always quoted, but also frequently forgotten, a process simply states how your business is done. Salespeople should always test drive their customers. Paperwork is filed a certain way. Service technicians need to perform a certain number of checks when they put a customer's vehicle on the lift. If technology provides a brain for the business and people its lifeblood, processes are the roadmap that takes the business from being nothing to being something. And sadly, while a lot of people talk big about being process-driven, most failing businesses have not put enough emphasis here.
People, Process, Technology. It's a three-legged stool. If one leg is shorter than the rest, the stool will eventually lean. Consider your processes like a bucket of water. Anyone can reach in and send a ripple through the water, but lift out the hand, and there's still a bucket of water. The business processes should outlive individual managers, employees or even owners. And, as they should be under constant correction, the better they are, the quicker they will return to normal after a bad "ripple" comes through the bucket.
Don Graff Automotive is a strong advocate of process. We help to evaluate, design and implement processes that drive success in your Auto Dealership. Why not check us out today?