Landmark Training Blog Sight

“Our industry needs more nurturers and fewer managers.” 

What does that statement mean to you?

The trend in our industry is to hire people based on tenure and experience rather than talent and skills.  How many sales people and sales managers have we all met in the automotive industry that have tons of experience and yet lack the skills or craving to be excellent day in-day out?  They lack the desire to work to improve themselves, practice their skills, enhance their talent pool through education…and yet they advance.

Not only do they advance, they leave behind subordinates who think that is the way it is done so it becomes a cycle that perpetuates this behavior generation to generation.

What if we did continue to train and motivate our front line managers to be the kind of people that nurture their employees to be good, skilled sales people but also good stewards and servants to their clients…OUR clients; the external customer?  What if we held our layers of management to a higher standard of service to their internal customers; the people under their charge?

What keeps us as employers from creating that type of a culture that people, when planted there, cannot help but to grow?

How good is a growth plan that is rooted in growing the people into the business rather than growing the business and continuing to have to go out and find people?  Growing the business as our people grow and growing our people so that our business grows…

What are the ingredients to this culture?  It is simple, but it is not easy.

• First, there needs to be a meaning behind the message.  Do you have a mission statement?  Do you have a credo?  Do your employees believe in it?  Do they even know it?  Can they recite it?  Do they live it?  Is it really foundational to the desired message you want your business to project in your community and to your customers?

• Second, there needs to be management servitude.  What I mean by that is that managers need to have an active role in your business development to the extent in which they are accountable.  Managers and supervisors are two different job descriptions.  One is absolutely participatory and the other is almost entirely administrative.  This doesn’t mean that managers no longer delegate responsibilities to their subordinates but it does change the manner in which that responsibility is rendered and accounted for.

A sales manager with a servant’s attitude is going to communicate with his sales people, his internal customer, in a way that is caring and nurturing and that attitude is going to be passed along to the sales person’s interactions with the customers.  That sales manager’s behavior towards his sales people is going to be a direct reflection of his relationship with his General Sales Manager or General Manager.  If the GSM takes a nurturer’s position toward his relationship with his internal customers; the sales managers, F&I managers, used car managers…that will be the behavior he can expect and demand from these managers towards their sales people and in the sales people towards the customers.  Now you are developing a culture.

• Finally, there needs to be daily disciplines.  Using the “fake it till you make it” philosophy…

If you want to change a culture, you have to start with behaviors.

• Daily One-On-One’s with each person directly under your charge.  Done at that person’s desk with 2 questions asked:
• What is your plan today?
• What can I do to help?

• Have daily “Save-A-Deal” meetings where each sales opportunity is discussed in a round table and a plan is formulated for each potential deal.

• Daily inventory walks. At one point everyday every manager should take the time to look at their lot.  Merchandising, inventory, overall condition…make it a habit to see your business externally from your customer’s perspective.

• Have a sales process that includes a manager interacting with a customer early on.  Every dealership has a Road to the Sell but how are we managing it; from the outside-in or from the inside-out?  So often, managers get bogged down with minutia that a customer in the showroom becomes a distraction or it is the sales person’s job, not ours.  That is an easy change in the way we do business that will yield immediate results.

If we are going to move into the future with the customer in mind, understanding that we come from a way of doing business in the past that has, it would seem deliberately, alienated the buying public, then we have to begin to change our culture.  We have to begin to genuinely care about and nurture our employees and then expect that same behavior from our employees in the way they interact with one another and our clientele.

The beautiful thing is that, in doing this, not only do we now have a workplace that is pleasant; we are going to be more successful in our ability to create customers for our products.  When a sales force has made this deep of an emotional investment in their external customer’s then they have earned the right to ask for the sale and for a profit.  When a manager has made this deep of an emotional investment in their internal customer we will have decreased turnover and foster greater tenure leading to more repeat and referral business, more service and parts business and a customer base that begins to span generations.

Let’s start today, nurturing and caring for one another as a business principle that translates quite nicely into a lifestyle.