What's the Score?

Just imagine. It’s a glorious fall night and you’re the quarterback, racing for the end zone. Lungs aching from the run, you finally make it: touchdown! You look at the scoreboard to see the score: -/-. What?

That’s right. Nothing. No score. All that work, and no idea how much it may have affected your team! Did you win? Are you losing? Without results, you have no idea.

Don’t know the score? Then, you’re losing the game

Far too often, I’ve found that dealerships leave their staff in the dark when it comes to performance. Not only is it confusing for your personnel, this tactic makes it hard to determine a clear strategy for success.

Monitoring the current state—and sharing it daily—gives you concrete data to guide your decisions and clear metrics by which to hold your staff accountable. It’s only when they see the reality of their performance that they can improve it.

Prepare for victory

First, let’s consider how you can use a scoreboard to help with advisors. Things I like to track include, customer repairs and customer pay dollar sales in both labor and parts. It’s also good to monitor the closing percentage on both menu opportunities and additional service requests, follow-up sales, number of warranty repair orders and customer satisfaction numbers.

Next, let’s score the technicians. There’s a lot you can track here. You definitely want to know the daily number of repair orders, how many hours were billed and productivity per tech. Other things to consider are how many additional service requests were generated from multi-point inspections and the number of comebacks. Lastly, and maybe most importantly, monitor customer satisfaction numbers.

Moving on, I also like to look at parts and service holistically. The key to this is tracking fill rates. After all, isn’t there a much greater chance a customer will say yes to the advisor when the part is in stock? I’ve even found dealerships that pay incentives to parts personnel based on technician productivity, because service can be negatively impacted by time wasted at the parts counter.

But don’t base parts’ score just on others’ performance. You want to note both total parts sales and also the gross profit margin of parts sales both individually and as a group. And, like I mentioned before, keep an eye on the fill rate for parts requests. It may also be beneficial to track the dollar amount of special order parts in the special order bin because those parts mean both parts and labor sales.

Make your own playbook

Don’t be limited by my suggestions! If you want to improve numbers in your dealerships, start tracking them and developing an improvement plan. If there’s a number in the dealership that you want to improve, just track it and it will change.