Success is not a mystery. Success leaves clues, patterns, strategies and philosophies to be studied, emulated and practiced. Failure has it’s own story. If you study both, you begin to get a clear picture of how to be successful and how to avoid failure. One component of all successful dealerships is the leadership practicing the 3 C’s – Coach, Counsel, Cut.
The more frequent and more effectively you coach people, the less you have to work and worry about deals. When you begin to more effectively coach people, you move your dealership’s culture from transactional to transformational. Transactional dealerships are bogged down in continually working deals with a poor process delivered in a poor fashion that delivers a poor customer experience. The leaders in these dealerships are focused on managing things rather than leading and transforming people.
All dealerships succeed or fail based upon the 4P’s – People, Process, Product and Positioning. Unfortunately without the People portion of the 4P’s being right, the other 3P’s will not matter. Your people are the equity in your business. Equity is either grown or lost. You do not grow equity by just managing deals.
Managers must remove themselves from their desks. Too many managers have become chained to their desk either working deals in a transactional manner or conducting duties that are worthy of a minimal wage person. There are two places a manager should be primarily spending their most precious capital of time – In front of their team or in front of customers.
In the marketplace of the future, managers will greet the customers in the beginning instead of a T.O. (turnover) at the end of the sales process. You win or lose most of your customers in the first two minutes. Why not use your most highly paid and valuable team members in the beginning of the process. Practicing manager introductions coaches salespeople properly and introduces to the customers the experience they will receive.
The excuse made by managers is that they are managing deals and admin duties. Therefore, no significant change is made in the process and it’s like ground hog day with every deal. The same mistakes are made. The same deals lost yesterday will be lost today for the same reasons. Human capital is lost. Effective use of time is ignored and status quo reigns.
The same excuse is made when it comes to training. Good coaches coach and make their team better every available second they have. In the transactional approach, training does not occur, turnover is rampant and the dealership is in a never-ending cycle. The more you coach people, the less you have to work deals.
When leaders give their team members clear expectations and training for their job duties and results then they have earned the right to counsel. Underperforming team members deserve and need counseling to let them know the boundaries and tolerations of the organization. Otherwise, your team members are left to chance. Your team is left with ambiguous messages about their success, failure and progress. Imagine a football player playing having really bad games over and over and the coach never coaching him on his mistakes or giving him counseling to the consequences of his mistakes.
The third C is Cut. If you are not willing to cut underperforming or bad team members, you are tolerating bad behavior and creating bad expectations. At that moment, your fate is sealed. “You get in life what you tolerate both good and bad.”
If you are not willing to cut bad poor performers or team members with prevailing bad attitudes, it’s like knowing there is cancer in your body and you can be saved by cutting it out but you keep it, let it grow and hope it will change on it’s own. It won’t! Cut it out
Too much turnover on your staff but turning the bottom poor performers or bad attitudes is good. It creates a higher level of expectations for everyone. “The goal of employee retention does not mean tenure.”
You must always look to improve and upgrade your team. In professional sports there is a draft each year for new players. The environment and expectation is to perform or be replaced. This is nothing more than natural selection and Darwinism in action. This keeps team members on their toes with an attitude of wanting and needing to continually improve. This should be the goal of any business.
Create a stronger and perpetually growing dealership with a culture of winning. To create that winning culture, practice the 3 C’s.