From a numbers perspective, the logical way to make more money is to make more sales. But, as we all know, it’s not that easy. It’s about our team and our leadership strategy; it’s not just about making more sales.
Choosing a great team is just as important as having a good leadership strategy. As a dealer principal or department head, you need to have a range of strategies for a different outcome. Each team in your dealership engages with a different aspect of the client experience and manages different client expectations. Everyone needs to work together, but everyone needs a different strategy.
While one perspective acknowledges that it’s not just about the salesperson, it’s about everyone in the value chain – from sales to finance to service and parts, it’s also not about any individual consultant or team.
It’s about the customer.
Bob Burg, sales and leadership guru, says it like this:
Great salesmanship is never about the salesperson.
Great salesmanship is never about the product or service.
Great salesmanship is about the other person — that person whose life you touch, that person whose life you add immense value to…that person whose life becomes better simply as a result of doing business with you.
This is an excellent perspective because it’s something that we can use to create uniformity across all of our customer engagement strategies. We know that so many industries are starting to do this – they’re creating customer-centric models that focus on the customer and their needs, plugging in the products and services accordingly. This is different to legacy models that bring a product or service to market, and then the sales team is given the arduous task of plugging in customers.
In the tech space, they call this siloing the customer rather than siloing a product or service.
For us, it’s helpful to remember that we cannot micro-manage the success of our dealership by focussing solely on our team; we have to have a balanced approach to staying connected to our customer expectations. When shareholders and brand managers push us on sales and turnover, it’s easy to focus on the one thing we feel we can control, which is our immediate team.
When this happens, we need to remember to keep our customers in focus too. We don’t only do this through call-centre follow-ups, but we also do it in our weekly meetings through our team engagement. We need to remind our managers, consultants and technicians that every client deserves to be heard and understood in a way that helps us find the balance between what they expect and what we can reasonably deliver.
If we want our staff to empathise with our customers, we need to lead by example. Creating time and platforms for constructive engagement will help us navigate ‘bad press moments’ and support long-term relationships with those people whose lives become better simply as a result of doing business with us.