The Five MUST HAVES for Creating a Successful Automotive BDC – PART 2
The 5 Must Haves for Creating a Successful Automotive BDC – PART 2
TRANSCRIPT: Many of the BDC’s I encounter today, generally because they have better training, better templates, better talk tracks and a better overall direction, are beginning to drive plus business for their dealerships. BUT, they are still cost centers. They haven’t become profit centers for the dealership, in fact, just as in the past, the primary reason I see BDC’s shuttered this year is because they’ve become a cost center and not a profit center.
See, it only takes one bad month or a couple of slow months before a dealer says, “You know what? We’ve gotta cut costs”, and everyone looks upstairs and says, “Hey, that BDC is costing us $50,000 a month, or whatever. Let’s close that.”
Now, despite their success, or maybe, because of their success, BDC’s today often cause a dealers overall sales compensation to get out of whack. This profit loss is often easily absorbed in the short term so dealers don’t care or they set up a pack and move $50 per car to pay for the BDC. That doesn’t work, right? Over the long term no dealer can live with this.
No dealer can live with a BDC that’s become a cost center instead of a profit center. So something has to change. What changes is we close the BDC, right? We send the leads and reroute the calls back to the floor.
This is a bad move for dealerships. It really is. Instead of shuttering a successful BDC, dealers need to work to make their current BDC’s profit centers and not cost centers. There is one easy and instant solution for this and it’s called ‘the sustainable pay plan.’
Ray Fenster
October 13, 2014 @ 4:07 pm
Wrong, you must move dealerships to all hands online.
Steve Stauning
October 13, 2014 @ 4:20 pm
Thanks Ray, and great to hear from you! While I agree that “all hands online” is the ideal, the truth is that no dealer (that I’m aware of) has been able to successfully drive true plus business from this over the long term (18 or more months). Without every sales manager on board and actively driving the efforts, the floor sales teams devolve into faking calls and gravitating towards waiting on the Up Bus. If you’ve got a dealer that’s been truly driving plus business from “all hands online” for 18 or more months, send me an email about them and I’ll observe their efforts and actual results.