If you’ve found your way here, you already know there’s never enough time in the day for dealership GMs and owners. Good managers know how to delegate effectively without losing a grip on the details, but great ones understand when it’s time to find a partner.
Training is a key part of staying competitive and keeping up with industry trends, but how does one go about implementing a solid training program? Effective auto dealer solutions for boosting revenues are increasingly specialized and rely on a long track record of industry experience to develop. If you have the skills in-house, setting up a training department can work, but it’s an expensive proposition and commits you to a lot of risk for the investment.
In many cases, outsourcing to seasoned professionals is a smart, cost-effective way to go! We’ll lead you through the points you should look for in any training partner.
Look for a Long-Term Relationship
The best learning takes place over time, and there’s just no way around it. Those one-and-done hotel ballroom lunch hours or online training programs can offer useful tips, but they don’t provide any meaningful feedback or ensure coaching points stick. Even if they are superbly designed, they’ll never help your employees absorb them deeply enough to deploy them in real situations.
The agencies you want to partner with will work with your employees at regular intervals. Weekly one-on-one sessions are ideal and give your team the reinforcement they need to convert skills into sales.
If you want auto dealer solutions that will keep on delivering years after you’ve implemented them, coaching agencies that work with your employees until they’re solid are the best bet. You get the benefits of long-term training without the expense of a permanent in-house department.
Prioritize Custom Content
Phone scripts are increasingly dominating the industry and represent some of the best auto dealer solutions to challenges like branding, evolving customer patterns, and maximizing sales opportunities. The partner you hire shouldn’t be providing you with generic sales advice and content—you need customized scripts to match your business philosophy, customer demographics, product strengths, and employee talent.
Scripts are one of the most important ways to differentiate your business in the marketplace, and the last thing you want is to be using the identical auto dealer solutions as your competition. In fact, if your training partner is giving you pre-written scripts, there could even be copyright problems down the road if they didn’t write them themselves.
Work One-on-One With Your Team Members
The most effective and efficient learning takes place in a personalized environment. There are definitely benefits to group coaching scenarios (especially at the beginning), but most of the meaningful work with your team should be one-on-one. After all, while auto phone sales are increasingly a team sport, the individual performance of each team member is what makes or breaks a deal.
The best agencies will work with each employee on a weekly or monthly basis—typically for as little as 15-20 minutes—and follow up training tips with feedback and analysis of their performance. That’s often enough to keep the momentum of the learning going, but not so frequent that it interferes with meeting their sales goals.
The best auto dealer solutions come from one coach working directly with one learner at a time to maximize performance and phone skills development. Insist on it from any training partner.
Mystery Shop to Verify Training
As popular as automated phone and email surveys are, they rarely give feedback specific enough to make meaningful changes. Without looking at what’s actually happening in real-world interactions on the phone, it’s impossible to identify what adjustments will make a difference for your bottom line.
Mystery shops, on the other hand, are perfect for specifically analyzing a team member’s performance on the job from a customer’s perspective. Follow-up questions and other unanticipated occurrences can be tested and analyzed as well. No stone is left unturned, and you’ll get incredibly detailed, actionable reports.
Ideally, the training partner you choose should perform these mystery shops themselves and provide feedback that reflects tangible teaching points. The best agencies follow up with the employee who was shopped and provide additional coaching to hone skills to the highest possible level.
Choose With Care
As you’re no doubt realizing, there are a huge number of factors that go into choosing the right coaching partner. Auto dealer solutions are rarely simple, and training is no exception.
Fortunately, our team at Phone Ninjas knows exactly what it takes to make a real impact on your dealership. With over a half-century of wealth-generating sales experience in the industry, our founders are ideally positioned to design and implement the perfect program for your dealership.
Our scripts are customized to your brand and priorities, and our one-on-one active coaching model ensures employees absorb every point of improvement using examples from their everyday work. We’ll perform all necessary mystery shops (including two free shops to evaluate your dealership’s current level of phone effectiveness), and follow up with each employee with corrective coaching to make sure your investment return is maximized.
We’ve been turning around dealerships across the country with our hand-tailored and time-tested auto dealer solutions. Let us know when we can set up a demo just for you!
As the COO | Partner of Phone Ninjas, Chris delivers leadership, coaching, and mentorship to 55 team members providing software sales and phone skills coaching. He fosters powerful partnerships and collaborations with leaders across various business sectors, establishing expectations, communicating vision, and escalating performance to maximize productivity and effectiveness.
Chris is an innovation-driven business executive with over 25 years of experience delivering leadership to teams of up to 75 overseeing development, launch, and sale of website lead acquisition, reconditioning process software systems, and technology that support automotive dealerships across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
