What causes a dealership to overtake their competitors?

What Makes A Profitable Dealership?

- Brand

- Personnel

- Processes

- Capacity

- Marketing

- Car Selection

- Price

It takes all of the above to annihilate your competition. It takes at least 5 of the above to make any noticeable move. No one of the above will make much of a difference, but there is one that you can't completely control - Brand.

Brand demand is not in your hands except in those few instances where a good salesperson can tip the scales with their knowledge and personality. However, you wouldn't have had the opportunity unless the customer was at least considering your brand to begin with. Personnel comes into play here because people buy from people they want to buy from. That also includes Processes, which is an integral part of Personnel.

On this subject, why do we continually train salespeople to alienate customers? Sure, most of the big shot trainers possess energy, excitement and most of all, ether on their side. They promote methods that would not work on them no matter how expertly those methods were deployed. To make it worse, it's a rare student of these methods that can deploy them expertly!

So, what happens is that those with the least training in these methods are usually the ones who sell most effectively. No wonder dealerships end up taking sales training out of their budgets. If the sales training was effective, dealers would flock to it and increase their training budget, not eliminate it. In just about every other industry, sales training concentrates on product knowledge and how to communicate that knowledge - not so in the car biz. Most accepted sales training is counterproductive. It produces customers who loath dealing with your dealership and salespeople who end up loathing the methods they are asked to employ. There are better and less expensive ways to address this. I welcome the opportunity to discuss this with any of you GMs or DPs out there who would like to get into this further.