Solve Dealership Turnover (PART 9)

How To Solve Dealership Turnover & Staffing Issues Forever (PART 9)

TRANSCRIPT: Let’s jump into part four, processes. I want to make sure you understand about processes. Processes sell cars. They really do. More than that, processes keep people happy. They keep happy people happy and they make sad people happy. Now why do happy people like processes? Remember this. Good people need guidance and rules and structure and boundaries, and guess what good processes do? Good processes provide that guidance, provide those rules, that structure, those boundaries. See, great sales process means everyone who can, does succeed at selling. Think about this. How many people did you blow out last year or this year who weren’t cut out for the car business? How many?

Some of you, that number might be close to 100. Some of you it might be a couple of dozen. How many of those really weren’t “cut out” for the car business? It’s just that they didn’t get the right kind of training, that you don’t have the right kind of processes in place and that these processes don’t provide boundaries and structure and rules and guidance, the things that good people need? When you have great processes, you reduce your onboarding time and you remove almost all of the learning curve. If everybody is doing everything the same way, then you have almost no learning curve.

This means training and retraining. It means less wasted money on consultants and trainers and all of the above. This means lower initial turnover, okay? Meaning people leaving right away, because people ramp up more quickly. I can start in this car business never having sold cars before. At your dealership, if you have great processes in place, I’m selling 15 cars a month by my second month and I’m staying there or moving higher. This means you can start hiring people with less experience, but more character. Wouldn’t that be refreshing? What makes processes great?

Well, listen. Great processes are easy. They’re easy to follow, they’re easy to explain. They’re simple. In fact, if you can’t simply explain a process in your dealership, then it’s a hot mess, okay? Then it’s not a good process. In order to be a great process, it has to be easy. It’s got to be simple. It’s got to be intuitive. It means your process makes sense. People say, “Yeah, it makes sense to work in those steps. It makes sense to say those things.” Your processes have to be repeatable. Let me repeat that. They have to be repeatable. If you have a terrific salesperson who is out there freelancing, but they’ve got a great process that they’re working on, then take their process.

Write it and let’s repeat it because without repeatable processes, you’re going to have months like this and your salesperson will have months like this. If you have great processes in place, your sales go like that and your people, individually, they start selling more and more per person. Your processes have to be effective. That means their goal-driven and they’re everlasting, they last in the dealership. In fact, if they’re not easy to explain, I told you, they’re a hot mess. If they’re not intuitive, people are going to forget them. See, if they don’t make sense, people will just forget your processes.

If your processes are not repeatable, your team will never improve and if your processes are not effective, actually, effectiveness is the least important process trait initially. Let me give you the argument for writing bad processes because bad processes are better than no processes. No processes equals freelancing and chaos, and great people become mediocre. Good people will leave and bad people will never improve if your dealership is full of no process. That means you have freelancing and chaos on your sales floor and great people, like I said, are going to be mediocre; your good people will leave and your bad people will never improve.

Now bad processes that are enforced can be improved. That’s important to understand. We’re talking about continuous process improvement. This doesn’t mean we work on our processes every single day. It means that we create some processes and we start enforcing them. Once we have processes that are strictly enforced, those can be tracked and measured. When we measure something, we can create benchmarks and when we have benchmarks, we can experiment with new approaches. For example, let’s look at my internet sales process. My internet sales process in 2006 was 150 days long and we made phone calls on that process through 60 days. In 2016, it dropped to a 90 day process and we only make phone calls through 23 days. In fact, my 2017 trade process which is on the screen, we make no phone calls after 11 days.

We’re going to review my 2017 internet sales process, which has already been distributed to all my clients. That process is only 45 days long and we don’t do any phone calls after day 15 in my 2017 internet sales process. Your teams will love it, but how did we start making these improvements? Why did we improve from 150 days? Why did we shorten it from 150 days to now 45 days in 2017? That’s continuous process improvement. We didn’t just throw a bunch of crap against the wall to see what sticks. See, continuous process improvement is not about that.

It’s also not about changing everything just because we came back from a 20 group with some new idea. It’s about making small changes to processes to coincide with or in response to market changes and our measurements, and then measuring those changes. Back then in 2006, 150 days, it made a lot of sense. Making calls through 60 days made a lot of sense because you could catch someone at the right time. I mean, we had teams that were making calls at day 60. They’d get a hold of someone and the customer would say, “Oh, I’m so glad you stayed in touch with me. Yeah, I’m ready to buy now.”

Today the cycle is extremely short. Plus, there’s great data out there that shows us that making more than six to nine calls is a waste. There’s data out there from a company called Velocify that shows that by the sixth call, your team has reached 93% of the people who will reconnect with you. By the ninth call it’s on like, 97%. There’s no ROI in making more than nine calls and that’s what my new process has, but it wasn’t made just because I threw crap against the wall. It was made because I came back from some 20 group. The changes were made in response to the way the market has been changing and then through measurements.

Let’s write your internet sales process. Internet sales processes are what I call a CRM process. There really are two types of processes in your dealership. One is the CRM process. That’s where the CRM dictates all of the steps, so we’ll talk about that in a second. The other one is a human process, which may be overseen by the CRM, but it’s really driven by the human and we’ll talk about that one as well. CRM processes are the easiest to implement and the easiest to understand because the CRM tells your team exactly what to do and when to do it. Pick up the phone today. Call. Say this. Right?

All you’ve got to do to write this process is just pick the dates that you want stuff to go out and write the templates. Dates and templates. “Steve, how do I choose? How do I choose when to send out stuff? How do I write them? How do I write these templates?” We’re going to go through that in just a minute. We’ll go through the steps. It’s easy. Don’t overthink this. Processes are easier and more effective than the alternative. They really are. Your team will have so much more free time, if you will just put these processes in place.