Day 3 (I won’t post every day):
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but I have an incredibly inexperienced staff. My partner has only been in the dealership world for 3 years now. She’s not sold a car before. My sales manager has been in his role for 3 months. He was in sales for less than a year. He had never sold anything before this job. My finance guy has only even at the dealership for a month now. He was the fill-in finance guy at his last stop. Mostly did CAC deals. I have one salesperson with 10 years of experience who has been back at the store for a week. The second most experienced rep has 5 years, but he’s been at the store for less than two months. 3rd rep has been there less than 2 years. 4th is less than a year. I have too many salespeople.
So far, about every finance deal is being returned or held because of errors. I’m now requiring multiple set of eyeballs on each deal.
Some good news: two of the reps have shown themselves to be industrious by at least making an effort to contact people selling cars on Facebook Marketplace. Are they just trying to impress me? Maybe.
Strange thing: buying cars is easier here. Although it’s a small town, there is a little around it and more dealerships. So it seems to me that the market values are higher here. There seems to be about an almost 5% difference between pricing in my last location and this one. That’s a huge difference!
A new challenge I could use help with. Because of our size, we only have one detail person. Obviously they probably won’t want to work 6 days a week. What are some ideas for a workaround? Currently, salespeople are washing their own cars. The detail guy is probably used to having Saturdays off, so even if I had someone cross-train and do detail, that person isn’t going to want to work every Saturday either.
