In McKinsey’s ‘How to build top-performing auto dealerships’ they reported that:
“At top performing dealerships, automakers’ field representatives devote more time to coaching, performance reviews, and long-term business planning.” *
This illustrates the importance of having the right team at both the OEM and dealerships, who don’t solely focus on taking orders and managing inventory. Instead, relationships are nurtured with good communication and support, aiding the dealerships in providing excellent customer service and achieving targets.
However, the backbone of dealership success is clear performance metrics and reliable, real-time data analytics and insights. Your field teams need to be reassured that the business performance management software they use is trustworthy, intuitive, and meets the organisation’s needs and demands. Here, we’ll explore how best to use your software and explore strategies around this to help drive positive dealership performance.
Like a car mechanic assessing a car, you want to ensure you delve deeper, review the situation, and diagnose any issues before getting stuck into the work. The same goes for understanding your business performance at all levels of your network, from individual locations to regional sectors, up to a global level.
Having business performance software in place will certainly supercharge this process, benefitting you by saving time, as well as eliminating human error. Moreover, if your data analysts aren’t manually uploading data, they can focus on surfacing valuable insights based on clear performance metrics to help drive your strategic direction.
One such tool they can use is real-time performance comparisons. The team, typically at field management level, can interrogate large sets of data using dashboards to tell a story across multiple scenarios and spot trends or issues. This is accessible all in one place and can be displayed in charts, maps, and graphs to help quickly visualise performance.
In the example shown below, the results have been filtered by the ‘Sales’ category and ‘Area’ business level. In this instance, we selected to investigate the New Car and Used Car CSI scores side-by-side across all vehicle models in the current calendar quarter to date. Depending on what data has been captured, you could potentially also create a leaderboard based on individual sales reps, for example. When receiving push-back from a dealership stating the market conditions are affecting their ability to meet set targets, the Sales Area Manager could utilise the performance comparison tool to see how other dealerships, in similar conditions, are faring. This would either validate what the dealership is suggesting or indicate that they might need further support to meet the desired results.
The balanced scorecard is another tool designed to achieve optimum business performance management. The focus here is more on monitoring progress against long-term strategic goals, rather than real-time performance of KPIs, which is achieved via a dashboard. Typically, balanced scorecards are used by the leadership team to help shape the strategic direction of the organisation.
In the example shown below, we see performance for selected KPIs grouped. Participating dealers are given points relating to their performance against a KPI over a set period; the system then looks across all participants and allocates them a rank dependent on the overall points score for that group of KPIs. Benchmarks can consequently be set and weaved into future goal setting.
What’s more, the league tables are often used by OEMs to reward high performers at highly anticipated awards ceremonies. A great way to incentivise the network, but ensure the system is fair and acknowledges individual and team contributions.
Basic intelligence tools will give you the ability to centralise and present your data visually, but Loop uniquely takes it a step further. With the Action Centre module, you can set and monitor actions based on your data. Housed in the same tool for ease, it streamlines your action management. This centralised hub is customisable, so you can tailor it to the needs of your network and create a programme of continuous improvement with action plans focused on your biggest opportunities.
This feature is key to enhancing communications between your dealerships and your Area Managers. Everyone can see what actions have been set (unless they’ve been tagged as confidential), to which team members; comments and documents can be added for context, and completion of the tasks can be easily tracked. This is especially beneficial when your completed actions relate to regulatory requirements, as the system gives you an auditable trail.
Rather than actions working in silo, they can be connected to KPIs and visit agenda items, saving the user having to click between different modules. As deadlines loom, automatic flags appear to aid with prioritisation and automated reminders notify action owners of upcoming deadlines.
All of the above can be done manually, or via a different tool, but using one system will optimise efficiency and aid more positive outcomes.
Setting targets and actions as we’ve outlined above, will certainly get you on the right road. However, your team needs to be effectively communicating with the network to avoid bumps along the way. The expectations-feedback-accountability framework is a performance management cycle that continually revisits its three pillars; this is a key factor in improving dealer performance and sustaining it.
This can be effectively achieved when leaders utilise business management software to set clear expectations and continually embrace open two-way communications with their dealerships. Looking at the bigger picture, a network that has an embedded culture of accountability and thirst for improvement will witness an increased level of engagement, motivation and productivity.
It’s clear that to improve dealer performance OEMs must invest time in populating the right tools for the job. This must also be driven by a team dedicated to supporting, training and motivating the dealerships.
* How to build top-performing auto dealerships | McKinsey