Salesperson%20Activities%20Tracker_v2.pdf

You cannot manage results; you can only manage activities. When activities are habitually performed and flawlessly executed, the results take care of themselves!

Sound activity-management requires that you do the following:

• Develop, document, and implement the processes that are critical to your business strategies,
• Clearly define and communicate your expectations,
• Measure what you need to manage,
• Inspect what you expect, and
• Reward those who meet your expectations, and deal with those who do not.

Today, I’m going to talk about the last three bullet points.

In the early 1970s the “McMillan Leaderboard” was introduced to, and became quite popular with, the retail automotive industry. Some of you may remember this.

I had one in my dealership, hanging on the back wall of my general sales manager’s office. My intent was to scoreboard performance, inspire competition, and incentivize vehicle salespeople within numerous categories of unit sales and gross. This was back when I was so naïve that I believed that we could manage results! The message now is that my intent for you is unwavering, except that I strongly encourage you to measure, scoreboard, inspect, and incentivize activities, rather than just results.

To demonstrate this methodology, I have developed a sample Vehicle Salesperson Leaderboard template and have attached a PDF version for your review. Should you wish to receive a working Microsoft Excel version of this template, together with instructions for its use, please email your request to me at ghouse@garryhouse.com. This leaderboard template will focus on up to nine separate categories of sales activities, for up to 25 salespeople. Each category can be weighted, based on its respective importance to you. The activity categories on the sample template are:

1. Percent of Opportunities to do Business (OTDBs) Against Objective
2. Percent of OTDBs Delivered
3. Average Price-to-Sale Gap
4. Percent of OTDBs with “Set” Appointments, that originated from Pro-Active Salesperson-Generated Efforts
5. Percent of OTDBs with Appointments that “Showed,” from Item #4 above
6. Number of Vehicles Delivered that were classified as “Over-Age” at time of sale
7. CSI Score
8. Percent of Vehicles Delivered that were classified as “Pre-Owned”
9. To Be Determined

Obviously, any of these activity categories can be easily modified. Get as creative as you wish!

Should you wish to adopt this type of activities-management discipline, I recommend that you:

• Have an administrative assistant update the Excel template every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and also at Month-End.
• Following the update, immediately transfer the results from the Excel template to a highly-visible scoreboard. (By the way, customizable magnetic leaderboards, similar to the old “McMillan System” are available today at https://www.magnatag.com/page/LEA/board/contest-whiteboard.asp).

Should you wish to include activity-based compensation, I recommend that you:

• Devote between 15.0% and 20.0% of your total sales compensation budget to incentivizing your sales staff, based on leaderboard performance. As with most golf tournaments on the PGA tour, it would be appropriate for you to ensure that all salespersons that finish in the top half of the leaderboard are financially rewarded for their efforts.

If you like the concepts of activities-based management and activities-based compensation, don’t limit yourself to just the Vehicle Sales Department. These concepts work equally well in the BDC, in the F&I Department, and in the three Fixed Operations Departments.

Join the conversation! Let me know what you think!