Industry trainer Mark Tewart recently sat down with CBT Automotive Network to discussed where the direction of the industry is heading. As we learned that it’s just as much a guessing game for him as it is for anyone else, he lets us in on some patterns he’s noticing and his general assessment on the best way to plan for everything at your dealership.
Mark Tewart, is the Host for the CBT Network show, On The Mark, where he shares with our audience tips to inspire and boost your professional career. Though Mark will be the first one to say he cannot predict the future he does see some old habits coming back into play and has a few suggestions on how dealers can best build their dealerships to sustain the industry shift.
Tewart starts by sharing a phrase that comes to mind, “it has to be high tech, high touch” after CBT News asked him where he thinks the future is heading in retail automotive. He continued and explained how this means in all aspects of the dealership and is not restricted only to the technology side of the industry.
That leads us to ask him about how the role of a salesperson has changed over the last ten years and what that could do to the roles transformation over the next five. Tewart believes dealers need to choose to stay or get off the fence when it comes to how they will build the structure of their team moving forward. “You either got to spend a lot more resources, time, money, training, effort to getting the right person doing the right things. Or, we got to go to more of a hybrid model where you can have somebody basically doing three things, and everything else in your store is specialized. I think we try to sit the fence… I really think you got to make a choice going forward that it’s going to be one of those two.”
