The fastest way to kill a sale is to inconvenience your customers. As McKinsey research shows, customers increasingly expect frictionless buying experiences. Dealerships that can deliver on these expectations will win more car sales. 

For many customers, buying a car is a huge and emotional life decision. The more helpful your staff are and the more efficient the buying process is, the more easily your dealerships will win customer trust. As dealerships face shrinking profit margins per car sale, gaining this trust is crucial in boosting revenue for your car maintenance department and from repeat business years down the line. 

So how does improving dealership cooperation and communication help create frictionless buying experiences?

For one, improving communication is the first step to removing the data silos that severely limit dealership profitability. Data silos are a consequence of inter-departmental rivalries where teams guard or even refuse to share information. Imagine a scenario where one of your salespeople arranges a parts replacement for a client. Your customer arrives for repairs; but due to poor communication between your car service and sales teams, the part they needed was never ordered. This results in an inconvenienced customer who may never return to your dealership. 

Along with eliminating data silos, building efficient deal pipelines helps create a seamless customer experience. From sales and financing to aftermarket purchases, your deal pipeline can involve many departments and revenue streams. To improve efficiency, you need clear sightlines on how a deal moves from one department to another. This can be done by having each team monitor the pipeline and work towards the collective goal of increasing dealership profits. With increased efficiency, your teams will be able to handle more deals while also improving customer service. But getting these clear sightlines and working towards greater efficiency is only possible when your teams communicate. 

As your greatest weapon, your staff perform at their best when they’re engaged, motivated, and want to see your business succeed. So ask yourself: is your dealership a fun place to work? If it isn’t, then you may have unmotivated staff who are likely looking for work elsewhere. 

This is a common challenge for dealerships, where ⅓ of all staff experience a lack of motivation — according to research from Cox Automotive. Their study also found that high staff turnover frequently prevents dealerships from unlocking greater success. This issue is compounded by the fact that younger generations aren’t pursuing automotive careers. 

With a smaller pool of talent, it can be difficult to nurture a team that understands your market and can help improve your processes. Unhealthy competition within dealerships can also make it difficult for employees to ask questions and grow in their roles. 

Poor cooperation and communication lead to another missed opportunity — your employees aren’t combining their expertise to meet customer demands. Sales teams, for example, can benefit from multiple perspectives and points of knowledge when trying to increase their car sales.

Changing your dealership culture is the fastest way to boost cohesion. That’s because your culture defines how your departments view and interact with customers and fellow employees. For example, do your sales representatives see your customers as targets? Or as a valuable customer whose problems they can help solve. By having a customer-centric culture, you can win more customer trust as your teams will focus on providing value and not extracting money. 

Consider basing your culture on a common purpose that can inform all service decisions. Disney’s common purpose is to “create happiness by providing the finest in entertainment for people of all ages everywhere.” This shared purpose unifies Disney employees and serves to guide their behaviour in each of their roles. Armed with a unifying purpose, you can work toward breaking down silos and building healthier and more cooperative working environments.

Once you’ve achieved a cultural shift, the next step is to use business intelligence tools to facilitate communication and cooperation. This piece about leveraging technology is key to motivating younger staff — on the whole, younger generations want to use digital tools to maximise their efficiency.

When looking for a business intelligence solution, we recommend choosing one that can provide the following three benefits:

1. Clear sightlines over deal pipelines — the right dealership solution will give all your teams an unobstructed view of how a deal moves through each department. This makes it easy to coordinate and leads to a frictionless sales process. Guesswork is also eliminated as pipeline updates can be shared among departments. So no one will be surprised if car models or delivery times are changed. 
2. Simple navigation and easy data entry — while many dealerships use Dealer Management Systems (DMS), these tools are complex and make it difficult for staff to communicate on deal developments. For many on your team, dealing with a DMS is frustrating and time-consuming — making it difficult for your staff to both run your dealership and drive success.
   To address this issue, dealerships are supplementing their DMS with other tech solutions. SalesLogs, for example, has communication and permission tools that help your teams manage data entry, share insights and ensure that information is up to date. This also removes time-consuming spreadsheet admin, as each department doesn’t need to replicate data in their individual spreadsheets.
3. Performance tracking — Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) help you track each team’s progress toward achieving shared dealership goals. This data is essential for effective management, coaching and getting the best out of your sales teams. By pinpointing shortfalls, your teams can work together to improve their processes and sales techniques.
   Where KPI tracking measures how individuals and departments drive dealership success, leaderboards can be used to foster healthy competition and cooperation. By recognising team leaders, you can start learning from their successes so that all staff can improve their car sales. 
   
   

Improving dealership cohesion is only one factor in unlocking greater dealership success. The other is to build dealership resilience so that you can survive and thrive through any market shit. We’ve written a free ebook on dealership resilience that includes seven simple steps to future-proofing your dealerships. Download your copy by clicking the button below.

To exceed your customer’s expectations and improve car sales, you need frictionless sales processes that can only be gained by boosting dealership communication and cooperation. This will also help you build and retain a strong team. 

At SalesLogs, we offer dealership intelligence that’s specially made to facilitate and build greater dealership cohesion. Trusted by over 1,000 teams, our tool eliminates data silos by creating a single source of truth to monitor deal pipelines. Our features include DataGrid — our easy-to-learn data capture tool — powerful KPI trackers and accurate real-time tracking for every vehicle in your fleet. 

If you’d like to see how SalesLogs can facilitate better dealership communication and cooperation, then click the button below to book a free demo.

By giving you a clear view of your dealership’s performance, reporting tools help you improve processes and increase revenue. This is the key to unlocking your dealership’s full potential. 

At SalesLogs, we’ve worked closely with over 1,000 teams to build our dealership reporting solution. By pulling together all your data, our tool gives you a single source of truth to understand business performance and maximise profitable decision-making. Our features include real-time feeds for your whole fleet, DataGrid — our easy-to-learn data capture tool — and multi-level permissions to help you control who sees your data and at what point. 

If you’d like to see how the SalesLogs dealership reporting can unlock your dealership’s potential, then click the button below to book a demo.