Streamlining Your Automotive Network's Bonus Programme for Maximum Efficiency

As we head into a new quarter, is the burden of finalising your dealer incentive programme for your network still looming? Perhaps the previous quarter still isn’t finalised? Exasperated by a lack of real-time data, this common challenge can be excruciatingly frustrating for many stakeholders, both in the OEM and dealerships. Not forgetting the added pressures of the current challenging economic environment, makes driving improvements and profitability more important than ever. 

The benefits of a purpose-built bonus programme management solution

Incentive schemes are a great tool for boosting motivation and engagement, as well as helping to hit targets and improve customer satisfaction. Therefore, the administrative burden is tolerated. But why not utilise an effective dealer incentive programme management software to improve and streamline your processes? We’ll explore some of the issues key stakeholders face and explain how a purpose-built tool can address these.

Head Office

Researching and securing the right tools for your network is no easy job. When tasked with putting in place a bonus scheme that drives positive performance for the OEM and motivates the field team, there are many factors to consider when digitising your rebate programme management. You need a system that can adapt to your evolving strategy, as well as considering KPI performance, survey results and completeness of actions. That’s an awful lot of data. If every quarter the team has to hop from one system to the next, or separate Excel spreadsheets, to approve bonuses, the task is overly laborious and prone to error. Therefore, upgrading to an all-in-one automotive business performance software that includes bonus management, will boost efficiencies. 

Key benefits:

• Choose a solution that lets you self-serve and create templates to roll out to the network.
• Ensure there’s some customisation possible – so that bonus targets can be tweaked for individual dealerships to improve fairness.
• Utilise automated notifications and reminders to save your team time.
• Create easily accessible downloadable reports based on real-time data.
  
  

Area Manager

Without an effective bonus scheme management solution in place, the role of a Sales Area Manager is undoubtedly more challenging. Sitting between the dealership and the OEM, the responsibility of communicating key messages is paramount. Processes soon become unwieldy if you don’t have a tool to help streamline these communications. An effective tool enhances transparency, meaning all parties know what is expected of them. It can act as a trusted aide, making conversations about under-performance less surprising and bonus disputes less common.  

Key benefits:

• Improved visibility of performance with more regular data updates.
• Easier identification of dealer groups requiring additional support.
• Streamlined communications.
• Increased transparency leading to fewer queries from field teams.
• Auditable activity records assist with bonus appeals.
  
  

Location Manager

The Location Manager collaborates with the Area Manager and as stated above, if the processes and communications aren’t streamlined the job becomes a challenging one. Having real-time visibility of performance is key to tracking overall bonus performance across the dealer group. An effective tool allows the Location Manager to illustrate gaps in performance and encourage the teams to make incremental improvements. For example, it could just be one car sale that’s needed to hit the current quarter’s target – if this can be seen identified the right pressure can be put on the right people promptly.

Key benefits:

• Easily react to actions set by the Area Manager to drive locations towards meeting targets.
• Clear insights leading to easier identification of dealerships requiring additional support.
• Ability to drill down into department data.
• Streamlined communications and ability to add comments to actions as they’re progressed.
• Increased transparency through real-time metrics, leading to fewer queries from field teams. 
  
  

The Dealer Site

With the cost of living putting pressure on many, it’s no wonder that any delay to bonus payments puts people on edge. This might mean that every quarter, the sales team raises bonus queries with the OEM. However, go back a step, some sales teams may not have received any clear communication from the OEM about the KPIs set, so they have no clarity on what they’re aiming for. Without this, and an effective tool in place, they can’t track their performance, and engagement will likely be low. Currently many dealer sites will receive a sea of complex data in an Excel or Word rebate document, which needs to be deciphered to understand if targets have been met. Whereas a bonus management tool does the calculations and hard work for the dealer sites, meaning less queries to Head Office.

Key benefits:

• Improved visibility of performance with more regular data updates – boosts motivation and ability to achieve incremental improvements.
• Two-way communication within the tool.
• Bonus payments can be appealed within the system.
• Get recognised for achievements in a more timely manner.

Having listened to the frustrations of our current automotive partners, Loop have just released their newly-developed Margin Programme module. Release notes will be published in the near future but if you want to learn more in the meantime, drop us a line for a chat.