1. A D i v i s i o n o f I P DV O L . 8 | I S S U E 1 | J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 5
Inside Feature
Principal’s Office
with
Brett Oubre
PG: 24
Communicating
Effectively
IN TIMES
OF CHANGE
PG: 18
THE
STAGGERING
COSTof
Poor Performance
PG: 22
ALAN RAMThinksYOUR
BUSINESS
DEVELOPMENT
CENTER
MIGHT BE KILLING
YOUR BUSINESS
PG: 7

2. Let’s face it; as I write this article, as many
Business Development Centers are failing as are
succeeding to the tune of countless dollars lost.
That’s a fact. I heard another trainer say that there
are as many funerals occurring for BDCs right now as
there are births. There’s actually a cottage indus-
try in the car business built on convincing dealers
that salespeople cannot be trained to handle the
telephone, which could not be further from the
truth. Let me say this at the outset; your people
don’t suck on the telephone because you don’t
have a BDC. They suck because you haven’t
trained them properly. If you had done a proper
job of training in the first place, you wouldn’t
think that the solution to many of your ills is to
subject your customers to discussing the second
biggest purchase most of them will ever make with
what is basically a telemarketer, or even worse,
forwarding your valuable customers to some 19
year-old kids in a “virtual BDC” three time zones
away. With statistics showing that customers only
shop 1.3 dealerships in person these days, opt-
ing instead to decide where they’re going to buy
online and on the telephone, I am openly ques-
tioning who many of you are choosing to entrust
your financial futures to.
Now, don’t take this to mean that I am anti-BDC.
I am no more anti-BDC than I am anti-restaurant.
It’s just that there are good restaurants as well as
bad restaurants and there are good BDC models
as well as bad BDC models. The way many dealer-
ships are “attacking” their phone problem would
be the equivalent of someone grossly out of shape
and overweight immediately opting for a risky
gastric bypass surgery without first addressing the
fact that they have never exercised and that their
diet consists entirely of junk food and soda pop.
An intelligent person might first want to address
the underlying condition. Let’s put the whole BDC
on hold for a minute and focus on the foundation
of dealership productivity. That foundation needs
to be training, supported by processes and ac-
countability. That might not sound all that sexy or
BUSINESS
DEVELOPMENT
OR DETRIMENT?
By: Alan Ram
YOU DECIDE.
Con’t on pg 8

3. 8
be what’s trending, but it is the truth. You need to have
the proper foundation in place otherwise nothing you
implement will succeed long term. If your BDC is reflec-
tive of nothing more than a failure to properly train, all
you will end up doing in the end is changing the location
and source of where you’re losing your customers while
spending exponentially more to do it! It all starts with
real training as I outlined in the November edition of
Dealer Solutions magazine. Please feel free to go back
and reference that article. You have to recognize that
there’s a difference between thinking you “trained”
your people and really training and maintaining your
people. You support training with the right processes,
and then you hold your people accountable. What many
of you are looking for whether you know it or not is a
culture change. You want a CULTURE of business de-
velopment at your dealership. You want your inbound
sales calls and Internet leads converted to customers
on the showroom floor. You want your unsold customers
followed up professionally and consistently. You want
your sold customers followed up and valued as a source
of repeat and referral business. I get that. The reason
that doesn’t happen in many sales departments is be-
cause salespeople and managers have not been prop-
erly trained in these areas and they don’t have a game
plan that they are comfortable with and confident in
executing. With proper training comes confidence. With
confidence comes results. When results are achieved,
your people start doing things not just because you’re
making them, but because they want to. When results
are multiplied, momentum is created and now you are
seeing a culture change.
Doing the right things, you can expect to realistically
see significant change and strong results almost imme-
diately. Instead of adding tens of thousands of dollars
per month of bottom line personnel expense to your
statement in an attempt address your deficiencies, in-
vest LESS THAN 10% of what you were going to spend
and address the underlying issues causing these defi-
ciencies with effective training and implementation
of some common sense processes. The results might
amaze you. Understanding that this is an article writ-
ten to encourage thought (and an attempt to stop some
of you from making a very expensive mistake) versus a
complete game plan for a dealership, let me share a
couple examples of high return processes that any deal-
ership should implement to change the culture.
As a dealership in 2015, I’m sure you have call moni-
toring. Can you honestly say that every inbound sales
call is listened to by a manager? Many of you will say
“we listen to some, but not all”. In the prioritization
of management activities, what in the world is more
important than listening to your salespeople talking to
customers that just called your dealership who want to
buy cars today? Too many dealerships view call moni-
toring as an accountability tool when they should also
be using it as a save a customer tool! As a substitute
for actually listening to calls, some dealers will sub-
scribe to services that “critique” or score sales calls.
These services are not a solution but are instead a weak
alternative that allow dealers to think they are doing
something to address the problem. Here’s what I mean;
you subscribe to one of these services with the result
now being that your managers don’t feel they need to
listen to your calls because it is being done for them.
Days later you might receive a summary of your calls
complete with scoring and critiques. The only problem
with that is that most of these customers have already
gone on to purchase vehicles elsewhere! You know a
week later that Tommy missed an opportunity to ask a
customer that already bought a car from your competi-
tor four days ago for their phone number. Really?! As
an owner or General Manager, I don’t need to hire a
company to evaluate sales calls after the fact. I need
my managers listening to EVERY call throughout the day
and recovering missed opportunities to sell cars. That
customer who called in on a specific preowned vehicle
at 10 AM today will be out somewhere buying a car at 6
PM tonight. If we listen to that call at 8 PM tonight, it’s
too late! That’s why, throughout the day (hourly) your
managers HAVE TO listen to calls and quickly resolve
missed opportunities to do business. What activity is
more vital for your managers to be spending their time
on? This is an invaluable process that incorporates ulti-
mate accountability.
If 18 sales calls came in today, your managers need to
be listening to 18 conversations. That is NON- NEGOTIA-
BLE. They then have the opportunity to constructively
coach your staff while saving opportunities. If your
managers don’t think they have time to do this, you
need to reprioritize their day. What is another benefit
to this? When sales people know they are being held ac-
countable, they naturally tend to take every call more
seriously. You will find that taking these common sense
steps will tend to eliminate your urge to take on the
enormous pure expense in the form of a second group
of people hired to do what the first group should be do-
ing! (Aka most BDC models being pushed today)
Many of the issues we see at dealerships are also the
result of managers who don’t necessarily know how to
manage. While many dealerships might employ good
“desk” people and “closers”, they don’t all have man-
agers with good management skills. We see that be-
cause of the way we tend to select our next manager.

4. 9
One of the main criteria seems to be an ability to sim-
ply sell a lot of cars as a salesperson. Picking managers
that way would be the NFL equivalent of taking the
best player on the team and making them the coach.
The best coaches in NFL history were not necessarily
the best players. Why? Because it is a completely dif-
ferent skill set. Yet, what do we tend to consistently
do as an industry? We take our best players, we give
them very little if any training in how to actually man-
age, and then we’re surprised when they fail. The time
has come when managers actually need to know how
to manage. When I conduct one of my 3-day “Manage-
ment by Fire” events around the country, I am shocked
by how many people we have in management positions
who have received absolutely no real quantifiable train-
ing in how to manage. That might be one reason you
have five salespeople standing around outside talking
about the most recent public sex scandal for two hours
while waiting for one fresh up while your managers sit
inside and hope someone brings them a deal today. No
meaningful change will ever happen at your dealership
despite poor management. Either your managers are
good or you need to get them the proper training to
make them good.
Here’s another high return process. You want your
salespeople focused on generating repeat and referral
business yet your pay plan might reward them equally
for standing by the front door and selling floor ups that
were coming in anyway. That might be why you have a
culture of those same five salespeople standing around
and waiting for hours on end. Gear your pay plans to re-
ward individual business development. In other words,
compensate your staff additionally for generating and
selling actual tracked referrals as well as cultivating
their own repeat business. Again, none of this will hap-
pen without proper training. When salespeople realize
that they earn more by generating and selling repeat
and referral clients, and they have a plan for accom-
plishing that, they shift their efforts to those activi-
ties. This is very similar to the phenomenon seen when
you put a big flat commission on an aged unit. They
may have been walking around that car for the past six
months, but the day after you incentivize it, it’s gone.
Why? Because they’re working the pay plan. You want
them working the pay plan in a way that generates ad-
ditional traffic while at the same time reinforcing the
culture you want to see.
These are just a few things you can do to create and
reinforce a CULTURE of business development. Rest as-
sured there are many more. Before doing ANYTHING
else you need to address the underlying conditions that
got you to this point. At the end of the day, you will
almost certainly find that you don’t need more people.
You simply need the people you have doing a little bit
more. Think about it.
Alan Ram is the President & Founder of Proactive Training Solutions Inc.
For specific questions contact him via - twitter:@TheAlanRam
or by e-mail at alan@dealersolutions.info.