Dealerships are constantly seeking ways to improve their day-to-day performance and profitability. What follows are some issues and questions to consider when identifying best practices for your dealership. These items are essential in supporting increased performance and long-term dealership profitability: Profitability does not happen on its own! It is an intentional and deliberate process of following the rules that increase performance and makes you profitable!
- First and Foremost The Numbers – not “benchmarks” but Critical Performance Indicators (CPIs), which measure your business performance. How can you plan to improve performance if you don’t know how you currently measure up?
- Your vision for your dealership. Have you translated your vision into goals and priorities that will optimally direct how you manager your time and the time of your dealership team members – all of them?
- Your distinctive market position. What makes your dealership and business different and better than your competitors and more appealing to your target customers?
- How you generate more leads in every profit center. Are your teams working together to develop leads and share cross selling opportunities?
- How you improve the rate and the way you convert leads into actual customers. Are the leads qualified, and do you analyze unsuccessful conversions for continual improvement?
- The way your retain customers not only to buy from you once but to buy more from you in the future. Are you providing consistent, excellent service performance in every profit center of your dealership to build customer loyalty?
- How you lead your team. Are you developing a happy, motivated and loyal team that will achieve your specific dealership’s goals and overall business vision?
- The way you systematize your dealership. Is every profit center of your dealership delivering consistent, high quality, predictable results even in your absence?
- How you understand the decision making process. Many people avoid making decisions because they are afraid of failing. If results were not what we anticipated, do you allow yourself and others to learn from the experience, make adjustments and continue taking action?
Planning by learning and making the necessary adjustments is critical to reaching your dealerships performance and business goals. While these are just a few of many, each pillar above requires specialized efforts and provides you with unique opportunities to see how you can improve your processes, best practices, operational inventories and move you and your business results closer to achieving you long term dealership profitability goals.
