What are you actually tracking on your salespeople?

[DealDeskCoach]

GSM here, been in the car business since '91. Ford store for 21 years, import store the last 14.


I'm curious what other stores are tracking on their salespeople beyond units and gross. Every store tracks those two. I'm more interested in the numbers you use to see a problem before it shows up on the board at month end.


A few I watch:

• Ups to write-ups. If they're talking to people but not getting to a pencil, it's usually a needs or presentation problem.
• Demo percentage. No demo, low close. Simple as that.
• Turn-over rate. Are they bringing a manager in before the customer walks?
• Be-back and sold-follow-up activity. Who's working their unsold traffic and who's waiting on a fresh up.
• Appointment show rate. This one tells me a lot about phone skills.

What's on your list? Is there a metric you started tracking that changed how you coach? And how are you tracking it: CRM reports, a whiteboard, a spreadsheet somebody updates by hand?

 

[carguyfiles]

Good list. The one I'd add comes from the Marketplace side, because a lot of stores now have reps posting units from their own profiles and nobody is measuring it.
Per rep: how many of their live listings still match the car on the lot. The price, and whether the car is even still there. In our data, 22.6% of dealer listings carried a different price later than the one they were posted at, and a Marketplace listing doesn't update itself when somebody changes the price in the DMS. So the rep with the most posts can also be the rep starting the most conversations with an apology.
I'd expect it to show up in your appointment show rate first. The buyer who drove in for the truck at $24,900 and finds it at $26,400 doesn't get turned over, they get back in their car.
The second one is first response time on Marketplace messages, split by hour of the day instead of averaged. The average looks fine and hides exactly when the misses happen.
How to track it: once a week, pull every live listing per rep next to the inventory feed and sort by mismatches. A whiteboard works fine if it's on the wall by the desk.
Against myself: if your store posts from one central account or the BDC does it, this is a process number, not a rep number, and it belongs to whoever owns posting.
Full disclosure, I build software that posts dealer inventory to Marketplace, so weigh accordingly.

 

[Alex Snyder]

One of my favorites was the email response rate. Send a bunch of emails but get single-digit responses, and I know you need training.

What got me into this was a salesperson at our Honda store who had an AMAZING email open rate. Zero response rate. It made no sense. The subject line to every email was "I just want to FU"