| by David Metter

If you think good salespeople are expensive, try bad salespeople. In 2017 alone, dealership employee wages totaled over $66 billion and “auto retail continues to boast one of the highest average salaries of any industry,” according to NADA’s annual report. Combine infamously high turnover rates with a decently-compensated workforce, and I’d argue the ACTUAL cost of a bad salesperson in the car business is a lot more than you think. As someone who spent my first seven years at a dealership on the selling floor, I was always frustrated when it seemed like our comp plans served the worst salespeople, not the best ones.

To attach a dollar amount to what a bad salesperson could be costing your dealership, we first have to define the value of a good salesperson by doing some simple math. According to Automotive News, last year’s average retail gross profit per new vehicle sold was just over $2,000. Let’s call it $1,500 to be on the conservative side. So, a good salesperson selling 15 cars a month at an average gross profit of $1,500 a car is generating $22,500 in gross profit a month for your dealership, or $270,000 a year.

But that’s really not their true value, and this is why…

A salesperson selling 15 new cars a month equates to 180 customers a year. Then you have to factor in the lifecycle of the vehicle and the potential service revenue associated. Let’s say out of those 180 customers, half of them serviced with you. And, of those 90, each returned for service five times over the car’s lifespan. That’s a total of 450 service visits. According to Urban Science, the cost of an average service RO is $128.88. Do the math, then add it to the gross profit and you get $327,996. (My math is below for anyone in question).

· 450 Service Visits x $128.88/RO = $57,996 + $270,000 = $327,996

So in reality, for a year’s worth of customers, we’re talking a value of over $325,000.

That number sets the stage for what a bad salesperson could be costing you – because you can apply the same logic to 15 lost sales, or defections to competing dealers. If you have someone you think is one of your top performers selling 15 cars a month, but they lost 20 quality opportunities, that’s the equivalent of $30,000 a month, or $360,000 a year in LOST profit. Are you willing to lose a third of a million dollars from employing just one faulty salesperson?

If that cost isn’t enough for concern, there’s also the fact that there could be multiple people under your rooftop disguised as your “best” performers. But when you overlay all the opportunities they touched that we know defected – or purchased from a competitor – on top of what they sold, the story shifts and their actual sales effectiveness comes into focus.

The takeaway here is it’s not just about the 20 cars you could have sold. It’s about the dollars attached to those sales and the potential future profit in service revenue and repeat buyers. We all know the closing ratio on a customer is higher if they’ve already purchased from you. Selling a second and third car to someone who already knows and trusts you is a lot easier than selling the first. It becomes easy to watch the total worth of a single good salesperson exponentially expand when you know their number of closed opportunities consistently exceeds what they’re losing – but you need that defection data to get the REAL story.

| by David Metter

One of the only remaining constants in the car business is an overwhelming surplus of opinions. Unfortunately for Dealers, it’s almost impossible to silence the constant stream of opinion being pitched in their direction at all times – unless, of course, they choose to operate based on what they know. The beautiful thing about science is that it turns the volume of opinion down so much we can no longer hear its intrusive racket. What we’ve come to find is that the opinions within so many facets of a dealership’s sales process can be overpowered and replaced by science, ultimately resulting in Dealers selling more cars, operating more efficiently and employing better salespeople for a longer period of time.

Before we had the type of data we have now, we could look at all the opportunities in our CRM, whether they were Internet leads, phone calls or ups on the showroom floor, and do sales match on those opportunities using registration data. The problem with that however, is that registration data is 45 days old and CRM data can be one-dimensional. Meaning, we could see how many opportunities we lost and what they ended up buying, but we had no insight as to where they bought or which salesperson touched the opportunity before they walked out and bought from a competitor…until now.

What’s been fascinating to watch develop over the last couple of years is the ability we now have to look at data in different ways than we’ve ever have before – and one of those ways is at the salesperson level. In the past, salespeople have been judged solely by how many sales they closed out of the opportunities they had in the CRM. So essentially, we could see their closing ratio under a one-dimensional view. But we couldn’t see what they were losing. Today on the other hand, due to innovations in what we can do with a Dealer’s CRM data, we get a much more accurate, three-dimensional view of how our salespeople are truly performing based on the complete picture.

We know not just how many cars each of our people sold, but how many leads they touched that walked out and bought from a competing dealership. And we know if those defections bought from a dealer within the same brand or a competitive brand. We can also dig even deeper into the quality of the leads they’re working to gauge the true performance of your lead providers. Couple that with the performance of your salespeople, and that’s when data viewed through a scientific lens becomes incredibly powerful and prescriptive. That’s when you can start making improvements and executing more efficiently based on what you know, rather than opinion.

When a great salesperson’s defections are almost pacing what they sold, Dealers can see right away when one of their “best” salespeople is actually losing way more than they’re winning, or burning through opportunities. By layering in this defection data on top of the sales data, you can see the true success and failure of each individual player on your team. CRM data is so important, but it’s not three-dimensional in the sense that you can’t see lost opportunities or defections on top of closed sales. Having this information gives you the actual true effectiveness of each one of your salespeople.

Additionally, if one salesperson has significantly fewer opportunities but closes more sales than they lose, that all plays into the overall methodology of how effective they are. It’s just like in baseball when you have a 300 hitter, but he only gets 100 at-bats. He’s not getting regular daily playing time – but this guy is a 300 hitter! So, he should be getting more opportunities up at the plate. Same thing applies to salespeople that deserve to get more opportunities based on their true performance.

We can also track their performance or “batting average” over time to see if it improves or declines. Or, you can test to see if an individual’s batting average changes based on the number of opportunities assigned to them. Whether it does or it doesn’t, the important thing is we now have the necessary information to diagnose where our blind spots are along with a science-based prescription on how to operate more efficiently. Oh – and the best part? Dealers can rest easy knowing they can make decisions and take immediate action based on fact alone.