The more efficient your dealership is, the more profitable it is likely to be. With so much involved in running a dealership, it is not easy to keep on top of things, but the following five tips may help to Make Your Dealership More Efficient.
Keep Everything in One Place
When you have so many different things to manage, including stock, leads, sales, vehicle preparation, collections and finances, you need to be organised. DMS specialist, Click Dealer, recommends keeping your stock lists, supplier details, purchase costs and important documents effectively categorized in one system, so you know exactly where to find everything.
Streamline Your Dealership’s Sales Process
Making your sales efficient is beneficial to you and your customers. The best thing to do is break down the sales process into its various stages, from greeting a customer at the door to finalising the payment.
Whether each of your employees is assigned a specific stage or every team member takes each customer through all of the stages, make sure everyone knows exactly what they are doing and how to progress so that customers aren’t kept waiting.
Implement Processes for Aged Stock
Days in stock is a key performance signal, so it is very important for a dealership to keep track of this. Establish a maximum number of days a vehicle can be in stock before you start losing money and set reminders at certain points throughout this period when you think action should be taken.
For example, if your maximum stock turn is 60 days, you may want to set up a reminder after 30 days to move a car to a better spot on your forecourt and another one after 45 days to lower the vehicle’s price.
Review Your Sales
The key to improving the efficiency of your dealership is constant assessment of your performance. Running regular sales reports can make you aware of how individual sales people as well as your team as a whole are performing, and bring your attention to areas which require improvement.
Keep a Diary
With vehicles coming in and out of your dealership constantly, it is easy to lose track of preparation and collections if you don’t have a clear plan. Having a diary for collections and one for prepping vehicles allows you to spread out jobs, so you don’t end up having to deal with four collections at the same time and find out that half of them haven’t been valeted yet.
Doing all of the above should help to keep your dealership organised, so that things can run more smoothly and efficiently, giving you more time to spend actually selling cars!
