Managing a High-Performing Dealership Team: Tips for Success

Learn simple, effective tips to run a high-performing dealership team. Boost productivity, improve teamwork, and lead your team to greater success today!

Running a successful car dealership hinges on more than just great inventory; it requires a high-performing, motivated dealership team. As a dealership manager, your role is to cultivate a culture that promotes productivity, collaboration, and customer satisfaction. This requires strong leadership, clear communication, and strategic thinking. Here are some key strategies to help you manage your dealership and your team to effectively drive success.

Get Your Leaders on Board

Start at the top. Even though engaging employees at every level is important when implementing processes, consistent success must start with your dealership’s management. A committed, well-aligned team will go a long way when trying to implement changes.

Your leadership team would benefit from meetings aimed at achieving dealership goals. These meetings will lead to a united vision of what your dealership will look like once strategies are implemented. With everyone on the same page and using the same language to articulate the vision, your top-level employees will feel confident cascading the plans to their own team members.

Hire the Right People

Success starts with building a team of skilled professionals. When recruiting, look for individuals who not only have the technical skills but also the right attitude. A strong work ethic, communication abilities, and a genuine passion for customer service are critical traits for any dealership employee.

Sales team members should be personable and persuasive, while service staff need to be detail-oriented and reliable. Ultimately, it’s about finding a balance between experience and cultural fit.

Increase Productivity

Identify what needs to change and plan to implement better ways to achieve the desired outcome. For dealerships, this typically involves speed of service and personalization, both of which can be addressed by adopting clear processes.

The best thing about processes is they make car-buying easier and faster by automating (or nearly automating) repetitive tasks.

With processes in place, you’ll easily determine and eliminate unnecessary steps or bottlenecks slowing you down. This not only allows employees to work more efficiently but gives them time to focus on engaging in relationship-building conversations with customers.

Data-Driven Performance

It’s important to utilize data to track performance and make informed decisions. Investing in the right dealership management systems (DMS) and customer relationship management (CRM) tools to gather insights into sales trends, customer feedback, and operational efficiency can be the biggest game-changer for success.

Data-driven insights can help teams remain focused and optimize their performance over time. So, it’s important to share this data with your team regularly so they can track their progress and adjust their strategies accordingly.

Involve Your Employees

One of the main reasons employees resist the dealership strategies is because they often aren’t involved in the decision-making. Engaging employees by welcoming their ideas and feedback about processes and technology will encourage them to take ownership of the dealership’s success.

Employee insights are imperative to determine if anything needs tweaking and what your next initiatives should be. Solicit your employees’ feedback on how things are running at various stages throughout the year. This could be in the form of a survey, email questionnaire, or in-person meeting. This will foster team spirit and engagement and help you gauge how content your employees are.

Manage with Transparency

Skills that make a great manager are often debated. It can be a fine line between accountability and micro-managing. You don’t want your team to feel like they’re being scrutinized over their every move, but you also wish to have insight into how well processes are performing.

Visibility allows you to know when to acknowledge and encourage. Present statistics to your employees on how their consistent actions help achieve the intended goal. This highlights their positive impacts and gives insight into when to celebrate milestones.

Incentivize the Wins

Recognizing successful employees will encourage them to stay consistent and for others to follow suit. There are several avenues you can explore on how to motivate your team. Incentives for following the determined processes or using the dealership software can create some enthusiasm, but they also demonstrate how strategy and procedure lead to success.

If you communicate to your employees that what they are doing is important, they will seek to do the things that gain their favor. As a leader, it’s important to be generous with your praise and mindful of the behaviors you reinforce. These will become central to the culture you build in your dealership. You can read more about the benefits of communication in this article from Cutting Edge PR.

Cultivate Consistency

Nothing keeps things moving like consistency. Consistency leads to routines, which build momentum. Consistency also facilitates innovation because your team isn’t focusing on repetitive details.

Keeping things consistent also ensures customer satisfaction. Once your dealership is running like a well-oiled machine, customers will come to expect this and rely on your store to provide an equal experience with every touchstone.

Nurture Dealership Culture

Dealership culture revolves around the values and actions its employees share, all of which contribute to the overall business environment. When work values and expectations are clearly defined for team members and when everyone is working toward a unified goal, a dealership’s culture begins to emerge.

Engaged employees are the secret behind truly successful businesses because they eagerly provide over-the-top customer service and entice shoppers to come back. With the right perspective and processes in place, you can create a highly engaged team and a positive dealership culture.

Keep Customers at the Center

The end game is your customers, and they should be at the heart of every process. Keep the customer in mind and alleviate any pain points they may be experiencing, such as long waiting periods, lack of communication, lack of transparency in the buying process, and slow or inopportune follow-up. When customers feel valued, they are more likely to return for future purchases and recommend your dealership to others.

Using the right tool to implement processes helps your team stay on task and respond to customers quickly. Software that creates workflows and automates different avenues of customer contact will help the conversation move along more smoothly. This gives your team more time to respond to customer questions and needs that come up, creating a customer experience worth coming back for.