How you recruit and hire your dealership Sales, Internet and BDC professionals, sets the performance “tone” for your entire dealership. A few months ago I wrote “Change Please – Who We Hire and How We Hire“. In that article I introduced to you the concept of an effective Employee Life Cycle System (ELCS) – something very few dealers have in place to consistently refer to when recruiting, hiring and managing their employees. An ELCS is a systematic objective process that once implemented will help you to:

1. Attract better qualified job applicants
2. Decrease your recruiting time
3. Conduct more effective interviews
4. Effectively motivate, develop and manage your dealer employees (in less than 2 hours per year per employee!)
5. Decrease the cost of your recruiting
6. Decrease your turnover and the high costs associated with it…….

My four part series will provide you a comprehensive Employee Life Cycle System you can implement in your store immediately. In this first article I will address Recruiting – how to attract qualified sales and customer service professionals to YOUR jobs!

Lets get started!

Recruiting for your Dealership

Consistently recruiting top talent does not depend solely on luck. It takes planning. To “plan” a more effective recruiting campaign there are four key areas that need to be followed to dramatically improve your likelihood of attracting a higher caliber job applicant. These areas are:

Why does buying a vehicle have to be such a disappointment? My last two car shopping experiences have been less than pleasurable.

Three years ago my Acura TL was coming off lease and it was time to start shopping for a new car. Since my previous two vehicles had been Acura’s, I was ready for something different. My experience with Acura had always been top notch, so I guess you could say I was spoiled.

I had the itch for a convertible and decided one Saturday morning to stop by a Ford dealership. I told the salesman who greeted me that I was interested in checking out a GT convertible. He proceeded to walk me outside where he pointed out several on the lot. I informed him I would like to drive one to get a feel for the car and see if it was something I really wanted. We went back inside and he ventured off to the sales tower. When he came back he informed me that they did not have any to drive since the three they had were sold. I told him it didn’t have to be a convertible; a hard top would at least let me get a feel for the car. Back to the sales tower he went, when he returned I was informed the GT’s were sold out as well. I told him, “thanks anyways” and left. Needless to say, I was not happy about that experience.

When speaking to traditional car people they make analogies of the Internet being a pesty animal that crawled in through the back door when nobody was looking. The funny part about this critter was that it didn’t come alone.  It didn’t just walk in through the back door either.  It came through every crevice in your house on the back of every individual on this planet!  To continue calling it a creepy little pest is just sad.  If you’re one of these people I feel sorry for you.

To make matters even worse, you’ve lost control of everyone because of the Internet.  Your customers are free to say what they want to hundreds if not thousands of people in as little as 140 characters.  Your employees are friends with all of your customers while displaying photos of themselves smoking a cuban cigar and drinking rum on a vacation in Costa Rica.  What a Public Relations nightmare!

How do you get everyone back to the good old days? You don’t.

Without control we’re scared little business people, but we’re missing the bigger picture.  It is a new world where the rules still have not been defined.  Sure, we can write company policies that prohibit employees from using facebook at work or stopping them from participating on blogs, but what does that really gain?  People are always going to find a way to do what they want.  I say nurture it!

Instead of throwing the Fourth Reich at people, why not implement the Second Declaration of Independence.  Teach your staff the best way to communicate online.  Help your happy customers find the review sites and facebook pages that best let them tell their great story about you.

We are very fortunate in the automotive business to have sites like DealerRefresh and companies like GOSO, DealerRater, Pasch Consulting, and many others who will help us find the best way to nurture people into advertising machines for our business.

If you think you’ve lost control, this is how you get some of that control back.

Running from Training?

Just as some top athletes train by running, many senior managers in the automotive industry run from training.

Perhaps it’s due to the way most managers came up in the car business; or maybe it’s simply a fear of technology, but it seems that more often than not, Dealers, GMs and other senior managers avoid even the mention of digital marketing or Internet sales process training.

From the free webinars offered by companies like Cars.com to the informal in-store vendor visits to the full-blown Internet workshops and conferences, it is rare to ever see a General Manager or Dealer Principal in attendance. Are they really too busy to learn what’s happening in the medium that attracts at least 90 percent of their customers?

“When were you hoping to purchase one?”

On the phone or in person, I hear salespeople ask this question all the time.

I am going to share a story in which I was able to learn a valuable lesson early on in my career…

After having spent the last week mystery shopping dealers, I am going to go on record and say that the auto responders currently being sent are a complete waste of the customers’ time. I have yet to see one that really impressed me.

Generally there are two scenarios one would send an auto responder; the “on-hour” and the “off hour” auto responder. If your CRM is incapable of differentiating between the two, then I would demand this feature from your CRM vendor, or consider finding a new CRM vendor.

Let’s start with the “on-hour” responder. Is there really any need to send one of these? Your sales team or Internet rep should be able to respond to a lead in a timely manner, thus who needs the auto responder. That first real message from the salesperson is the auto responder. For those of you saying “what if we can’t get to them right away?” well I would say that’s hogwash. There is no reason why a dealership shouldn’t be able to respond to an Internet lead within 15 minutes. If you can’t, then some process is broken in your dealership. This is a customer visiting your dealership in the form of an electronic transmission. Would you let somebody stand out on your lot for 30 minutes before going out to help them? Then why should an Internet lead be any different.

When was the last time you thought about the way you greeted a customer?

The greeting is so simple, but often overlooked. I am not just talking about in person, but on the phone as well. It takes just five seconds for a person to form a positive or negative impression of you and your business. In person, the customer will not only form that impression by what you say, but also by your physical appearance. On the phone your only tools are words and tones.

While on my way to train a dealership recently, I had a personal experience that really drove home the power of the greeting. It was late at night and my flight was four hours late arriving. After picking up my luggage,

A dealer called me to ask what I thought of his new website the other day, and it looked like he only spent time working on his home page. The rest of the site was canned.  You guessed it, the most obviously canned page….the About Page.

Why would you stick to the templated About page when you know everything about yourself?  Don’t you sell yourself every day?  Sell yourself, the house, and then the product…right???

The “change” we as an industry are experiencing is going to require us to step it up with how we hire, who we hire and the way in which we manage our Sales, Internet and BDC personnel. In the past we have not given the attention needed to attracting, hiring and managing our sales and customer service people effectively, we have done it by the seat of our pants.

We cannot afford any longer to over look these critical areas in our stores, it’s costly, time consuming and frustrating to everyone involved, management, employees AND the customer.

How we hire and recruit our Sales, Internet and BDC professionals, sets the “tone” for the entire store and how it performs as an employer and a place to do business.

I can walk into a store anywhere in the country and in less than 30 minutes, be able to identify -with uncanny accuracy, if the store has a hiring and employee management process in place that management religiously follows (Employee Life Cycle Management System). Here are the clues:

During periods of major loss or change, individuals and businesses experience a number of stages in response to the loss or change. Everyone has to go through each of the stages in order to recover and the speed at which you get through them will determine how soon you recover.