Stressed & Underprepared for 2023?

So what does it mean to be prepared going into 2023?

We are already seeing the shift in the marketplace. Dealers are dropping their prices to move new inventory, and used values are significantly decreasing very quickly. This means if your teams are not currently selling the "value" to our customers, you will quickly find your inventory position being underwater.

Do you know what your people are saying to your customers right now? We all know the saying, "garbage in, garbage out". If our people are the source of our data, does that data show us what we need to see in order to make the most effective decisions in our business?

For example, we manage by the results we see in reports, right?

One sales person might show a closing percentage of 48% in the CRM, but what if we found out there were 22 other customers they talked to & missed because they never put it in the system?

How much is just one underprepared person costing you right now?

So how do we better prepare ourselves for the coming year?

Your personnel capacity will be the most critical area we will need to uncover, measure, & then improve consistently. I will provide the variables & specific examples on what to look for. I also share playbooks & resources throughout this article to help you position yourself as a superior competitor so you maximize on the opportunity so many other dealers are going to give you next year.

The three areas are:

1. Individual Impact
2. Skills & Expectations
3. Scalable Onboarding & Development

There are a lot of people that share "ideas" about what needs to be done, but throughout my career I have found that the majority unfortunately don't move past the stage of an idea. Ideas are great, but if ideas never translate into action plans, you will continue finding yourself in whirlwinds.

First, what is "Personnel Capacity"?

1. The Individual Impact

Ask yourself these three questions:

1. Do we need the ability to extract information from customers in order for us to sell the value we provide them?
2. Do you think time effects how many customers you will sell?
3. Do you think the level of experience you provide customers will impact your margins?

One individual can impact your overall performance next year.

But how?

In 2012, I remember working at Penske Honda in Indianapolis. I was only 21 years old at the time, while working for this operation that sold over 5500 vehicles that year. To help put this into perspective, we had between 50 and 60 sales people. Pertaining to personnel capacity, there were so many things that happened throughout the day that slowed me down and ended up costing me deals.

I want you to picture yourself when you were selling vehicles. If you have been in the business for many years or even if you just started selling cars recently.

Have you ever lost a deal because your customer had to wait on you?

You can probably see yourself losing the customer that had to wait on you when you were searching for keys, waiting for an appraisal, or my favorite, searching for vehicles. This is created when individuals don't follow process, or do things without thinking about the impact it has on the other team members. That is your culture & your overall operation proficiency. Ultimately, it's missed revenue & opportunities that go to your competition.

 For example: Penske Honda had three different lots our inventory could be parked at throughout the day. New, used, and our reconditioning lot down the street. So many times sales people would take a vehicle to go get another one, and guess where they left the one they took?

Two years later I was promoted to run the used operations in this dealership. I got to experience what it was like leading a team of individuals and the difficulty of trying to get them all to follow the same process. On top of that, learning how to hold them accountable on what we expected from them.

As a young manager I began leading people that were the same age as my grandfather. I only say this because it was a factor of leading people that didn't want to change the ways they did things for such a long time. This combined with having to figure out how to lead the multitude of different personalities of people lets just say, it wasn't the easiest thing to do.

I realized very quickly how important it was to not only have enough people, but you had to have the right people.

This goes for your managers even more than it does for your sales people.

This holds true today, as you are most likely having a difficult time getting your people motivated. Just as I had to learn, managers struggle understanding their people.

The right people are the ones that want to get better.

The ones that follow your processes.

The people that know they have room for improvement and are willing to put the effort in.

Once you understand if you have the right people, you have uncover where they're abilities are. This is the only way you understand what level of capacity you have. This is your closing percentage & the margin they are able to capture based on how well they are prepared & what level of expectation you set.

2. Skills & Expectations

These are the skillsets sales pros & managers need as well as the required expectations you need to set to build the most effective sales team. You hear how important it is to set the right expectations in the beginning, but how to you hold them accountable to it?

If you want to capture more revenue & more market-share than any of your competition, check out the explanation video below. (Watch Here)

Once you know what level of skillset you need them to have, and after understand the right expectations;

How do you test their skillsets & if they are following what you expect from them?

If you don't do this right now, your probably thinking, how in the hell do you do that?

Listen, there has NEVER been a great way to do this, but we must start thinking about how we start.

I will say from my experience, having to invest the time into training & development was something I always knew was important but doing it consistently is difficult!

3. Scalable Onboarding & Development

EVERYTHING MUST BE SCALABLE GOING INTO 2023!

What does your development strategy look like?

This is where you start, having a scalable, systematic approach that you track and measure.

Development is training, right?

It is harder than ever to keep our peoples attention in a training room and the majority of our managers, they are unfortunately, ineffective at training. Lets be honest though, have the MAJORITY of managers in the auto business ever been shown how to do this effectively?

The only way we improve our skillsets and build experience, is practicing for situations we know we are going to face. Roleplaying is one of the most effective things that improves our peoples ability to perform, but doing that consistently seems almost impossible for most.

As a General Manager, what would be your answer to this next question:

"What percentage of all managers you either worked for, or ever worked beside, what percent of them were effective trainers?

Meaning, they had the ability to keep the entire team engaged, actively participating, where you knew your team was going to take away what was being taught and would actually use it with a real customer?

Almost every one them said less than 10% of all managers did this effectively.

How will our sales people be able to sell value if were not consistently improving their ability to do it?

If we have sales people that have to go through ten customers before they sell one, but our competition closes one out of every three customers, how much money is just one ineffective sales pro costing you?

Here is a playbook to begin assessing how your people handle difficult customers.

How many people have you hired and thought they were going to be successful, but ended up leaving 90 days later?

Our people are a product of our leadership and our leaders need a better way to develop their people.

Lets talk about your Scalable Onboarding Strategy.

You might be thinking,

"What's required to be able to scale onboarding or implement changes at scale?"

First, ask yourself..

"Do I have a documented strategy that I can expect my leaders to follow & execute?"

An Onboarding plan should be focused on ramping up new hires to begin contributing faster. An "Orientation Plan", is not an Onboarding Strategy.

If you hire employees and think you can change the way they do things 30-60-or-90 days from now, this is a massive part of the problem. Most of the mistakes you have to continue fixing, are made by employees that have had to guess. These mistakes are called bad habits.

This takes time to fix, I know!

I created a playbook outlining an Onboarding Breakfast Session to help you start the conversation with your team.

I will argue there is nothing else more important going into 2023'.

If your serious about making it easier on yourself, get with your team and ask these 5 questions.

Do we have clear expectations documented?

Do we have clear direction & what success looks like for each person on my team?

Do we have an environment that challenges & improves the skillsets in our people?

Do we currently track and measure the improvement in my peoples "skillsets"?

Do we know who or what is holding us back from scaling changes in our operations?

If you answer NO to any one of these questions, its not a problem, its an opportunity!

The only way it ends up being a problem is if you don't do anything about it.

Create action plans that consist of:

1. The goal clearly defined
2. Steps to implement
3. Roles & responsibilities
4. Milestones with accountable deadlines
5. Tracking to measure the changes you are putting in place.

There are dealers that already have these established and continue to work on them daily. Those will be the superior dealers in the market place.

The question is, will you be one of them?