Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
“The only man who behaves sensibly is my tailor; he takes my measure anew each time he sees me, whilst all the rest go on with their old measurements and expect them to fit me.”
George Bernard Shaw
We talked with owners, general managers, and department leaders at dealerships to answer one specific question: what are they really measuring?
Contents
The real profit on every sale
“What I want to know is whether I’m making or losing money on each sale. To find out, the sales team started loading every expense tied to each unit.”
What the manager was after: knowing whether hitting the target actually translates into making money.
Sales matter, but expenses are what keep you up at night
“It took a real shift in mindset, but we started correctly allocating every fixed and variable expense, by location and department. Today, it’s hard for money to slip through the cracks.”
What the manager was after: staying in control of expenses, instead of the other way around.
I keep being told to buy parts that don’t sell
“I didn’t want to keep tying up more capital in parts inventory, so we started tracking the Months in Stock indicator to see how many months we could keep selling parts without having to buy more.”
What the manager was after: reducing dead stock.
Sales potential of current customers
“My Marketing team started pushing hard on cross-selling, which seemed impossible to me. We started working with sales potential to see, every day, how much money we were leaving on the table, so we could bring it into our business. The first thing we did was a battery sales campaign with a potential of over $500,000.”
What the manager was after: capturing 100% of the commercial potential in the database
Comparisons across locations
“One day I got tired of waiting to receive every report from every location just to analyze results. I brought all the data into one single place so I could compare results, spot trends, and know who the top performers were on each indicator, so we could put those best practices to work.”
What the manager was after: having all the information in one place.
