Use the ABCs of CRM Stats to Increase Sales

Many automotive CRMs have reports, spreadsheets, and data comparisons for you as a sales manager, GSM, GM or Dealer Principal to review.

As you already know the data comes from many different sources. The data may come from sales people entering certain information into the system. Incoming sales calls, floor traffic, all logged by BDC employees or sales staff should be tracked by most CRMs. Internet leads that are filtered through your CRM are also tracked and added to various scoreboards within the system. In DriveCentric you can have any and all custom reports tailored to your dealership, department or even specific users available to look at on demand. With all this information at your fingertips, you must remember one thing. All the data in the world means absolutely nothing without a process in place to review these stats with employees and focus on improvement.

3 Step Process To Help You Improve Sales

At DriveCentric we want you to learn and utilize a simple 3 step process we call the "ABCs" that will help you use all the amazing information for pipeline growth and sales progress. This will help you sell more cars and make more profit. Regardless of which CRM you use, follow this simple three step plan for immediate improvement!

A - Assess the Important Statistics For Each Team

It wouldn’t do much good talking to a starting line up hitter on a baseball team about his team's pitching stats like "Strikeouts per walk" would it? You should talk to the batter about "batting average" because this is the stat based on their performance.

In the same way, you don’t want to discuss the wrong statistics to the player at the dealership you're trying to improve. It won't do them any good and will waste time. For each department at your dealership, determine the metrics that they should focus on improving. For used cars, front end gross profit, turn time, days in inventory, average cost per vehicle, average market days supply, sub prime vs prime paper...etc. For new cars you may want to focus on volume, finance penetration, lease penetration, and many others. For new and used car sales, you may want to look at closing ratios for walk ins, internet, and phone customers. For BDCs Internet lead response times, percent of customers that received videos, number of attempted contacts, average call duration...etc. Choose the statistics that matter to the department, the manager or the team member, and separate these reports.

B - Bring The Stats To The Key Players

Go over these reports with your team in the presence of the right people. The people that matter most are the employees whose sales and income are directly dependent on the stats you're presenting, as well as the person over them. Schedule a non negotiable time and review these stats with your teams. [blockquote-left]Collaboratively set standards and benchmarks as these expectations will help the manager and employees in each department know where you expect them to be.[/blockquote-left]Do this as regularly as you can to help maintain accountability and forward momentum. Enroll them in the activity and generate buy in by showing them how an increase in each statistic will help improve their results.

C - Coach and Craft Action Plans Around Scoreboard

Use the benchmarks you created to determine where in each department they are successful. In other words, what are they doing well that they should continue to do? Next seek to improve the lowest stat, as this is your greatest area of opportunity. Point out the problem, and let your manager or team know how it would benefit them to improve this particular stat. Ask them, "What is your plan to improve this particular statistic?" If they don’t have a plan, ask them to create one and schedule a time to review it. Help support them in improving this statistic long term, ask them how you can best support them. In asking, you may discover, you play a key role in the improvement of the statistic. These are coaching basics, but are neglected by so many Dealer Principals, GMs, and Sales Managers nationwide.

Follow the 3 step ABCs of CRM data reporting to create immediate sales improvements throughout your company. Remember, statistics mean nothing without them being put in front of the right players or leader. Also, without discovery and action, the stats will not improve unless by luck. Support your managers and teams in improvement and watch your sales (and statistics) get better every week. We at DriveCentric are here to assist you in this in any way possible and hope you found value in this read.