Solve Dealership Turnover (PART 3)

How To Solve Dealership Turnover & Staffing Issues Forever (PART 3)

TRANSCRIPT: All right, so why business rules? Why do good businesses have good business rules and why do rules even matter? Let me tell you this. Good people want, good employees want and even need guidance and rules and structure and boundaries. They really do. They want these things and they want the fairness that comes from having this guidance and rules and structure and boundaries. See, your salespeople are not individual artists and this is not some artist colony or commune, where everybody can do their own thing.

You are running a business and good businesses have good business rules. I’m talking about some basic fair business rules. We’re not rewriting the Affordable Care Act’s 20,000 pages of regulations here. Think of these good business rules like your 10 commandments. In fact, we’re going to go through five today that we can write very quickly. Rules that make your business run smoother, that’s what we’re trying to put in place. We’re trying to put in place rules that keep you on the right track, but more than anything else, we’re trying to put in rules that create the behavior you want because again, this is not some artist colony and your salespeople, believe it or not, are not artists.

I don’t care how good your best salesperson is. He or she is not an artist. These rules must be transparent. This means any rules that we put in place, we’re going to review with people before we hire them so that they understand, “Hey, we’re a different dealership. This is how we operate. We operate with these rules, but these rules make life better for everybody.” When you review the rules with your new hires before they’re hired, it means there’s no surprise two months into the job. That NADA study found that 39% of your team leaves in the first three months. That’s crazy. That’s almost four out of 10 leave in the first three months on the job. You can’t recoup any cost from that. You’re wasting your time.

Imagine if you didn’t have to train 80% of your staff over and over and over again, year after year after year. How much time would you have for desking deals, for customer service, for doing real T.O.s, for pre-selling your F&I products? Again, no surprises. You’re going to review the rules with people before you hire them and then you’re going to review the rules after you hire someone, and they’re going to sign off on them because we don’t want any surprises. The rules have to be transparent. These rules should make sense and they should feel fair. They should feel like they’re fair to everybody involved.

Here’s the first rule we’ll write. We’ll call it, “Thou shalt not skate.” See, simple anti-skating rules are necessary. You know what? Your current rules are mostly non-existent. Every dealership I work with swears to me, “Oh, we’ve got anti-skating rules in place. It always works great.” Let me tell what you’re doing. You are rewarding skaters and splitting the baby, and you got to be tired of doing that. What do I mean by rewarding skaters? What happens if I’m a salesperson on your floor and Bob had an up yesterday, and the up comes in today and asks for Bob, and Bob’s with another customer.

I say, “You know what? Bob’s off today. I’m Steve. We’re partners. I’ll help you out and I’ll make sure that he gets full credit for the deal.” When I get caught, what do you do to me? What do you? You give me half the deal. That’s like the FBI catching a bank robber and letting them keep half the cash and sending them on your way. You are rewarding skaters with your current rules and you’re spending time splitting the baby. You’re listening to “he said, he said” stories. Let’s stop. Let’s put some protective prospect rules in place, right? Let’s tie a protective prospect to an appointment that shows, a same day be-back or asking for the salesperson by name in front of a manager on the day you work.

Let me go through that. What I’m saying here is that we will have an open floor unless you’ve set an appointment with someone. If I’m a salesperson at your dealership and I caught an up on Saturday and today is Tuesday, and that up walks on to the lot today without an appointment, and doesn’t ask for me by name in front of a manager, it’s open season on that up. Anybody can and should take that up and they get full credit, and I get zero credit because you know what? I should have set an appointment. If I wanted to protect that prospect, darn it, I should have set an appointment that arrived within 45 minutes at either side of the appointment. That’s a 90 minute window. That’s all I’m asking for.

This is an important rule because it stops skating in its tracks, because if I had an appointment, let’s say I caught an up Saturday, I set an appointment for today at 10:15, the up walked in at 10:00 o’clock for their appointment, somebody skated me, if they sold them a car, under this rule they get zero because they need to know what’s on the appointment board. If you are living in an appointment culture, and you can learn about the appointment culture at stevestauning.com, but if you are truly living in an appointment culture, your floor will know all the appointments that are coming in, when they’re coming in, when they’re scheduled and what their names, and so if somebody skates me, nobody needs to split the baby because I’m going to … If I’m the manager, I’m going to give that whole deal to the person who got skated, okay? “Thou shalt not skate.” That’s our first rule, okay? If you think it’s unfair, then write a better rule, but it can’t reward skaters and it can’t keep splitting the baby.