In my recent visits to various clients’ dealerships, my focus is as always, on sales management performance and accountability utilising the Managing by Numbers sales managers support processes.

Working in a dealership last week, an experience crystalised my thinking on this topic and we want to share our thoughts with you.

In all high performing dealership, the DP sets sales targets and income targets for all departments each month.

In sales departments, the targets involve the following:

▪    Sales targets per month
▪    Average income targets pvs
▪    F&I penetration and income targets
▪    Car care income targets PVS
▪    Extended Warranty Penetration targets

Clearly each departmental manager operates a DOC so that they know exactly where they are operating compared to sales and income targets at any time of the working month.

Also, most of the great sales managers then break down the targets into weekly targets.

All of the high performing sales managers carry out weekly performance assessments (52 critical analysis points very 12) to ensure that their sales team members achieve their individual targets as the departments collective performance relies on each sales consultant and Business Manager and Car Care consultant achieving their individual sales and income targets.

My observation is that most sales managers don't view their sales team members as resources that are paid and empowered to achieve or exceed specific results and maximise their income.

What concerns us more is that when those resources fail to achieve the agreed targets, those people are allowed to continue to produce poor results, well below the agreed performance levels, for extended periods of time.

Every business is in fact a workplace and certain workplace rules apply.

If sales managers are doing weekly and EOM performance assessments, then a trend appears in the performance of all sales consultants.

If the trend is poor and not corrected with weekly counseling and training applied as required, then the sales manager will fail resulting in the dealership failing to achieve maximum ROI and profitability and manufacturer sales and CS targets.