Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/711372
www.PowersportsBusiness.com SOLUTIONS Powersports Business • August 15, 2016 • 41 The conversation of theft is a sticky one, as there are only two types of deal- ers: those who have been stolen from and those who will be stolen from. I suggest that every sin- gle dealer read- ing this article has already been stolen from — through procedural theft. Back in my Lemco days, Ed Lemco used to give a seminar titled "99 Ways to be Stolen From." Unfortunately, we figured out we were actually educating GMs on 99 ways to steal from their owners, so we nixed that seminar. For this installment, I'm referring to the theft that occurs as a result of not holding employ- ees accountable to policies and procedures. If you saw an employee grab $20 out of the cash drawer, I'm assuming you'd cut him/ her loose immediately. The reasons would be plentiful, up to and including the newly found lack of trust. But what if an employee rolls in five min- utes late? What if he honors a discount that wasn't really applicable? How about then? Would you cut him loose for those offenses? I haven't seen it. I promise you the dealer- ship will lose more money every year by an employee coming in late every day far more than that same employee stealing $20 out of the drawer. Here's a great exercise to run. Take the amount you spent on advertising last year and add your payroll to it. Then take that dollar amount and divide it by the number of names that made it to the traffic log. What you will probably get is a number between $100 and $250, depending on the product carried (met- ric, Harley-Davidson or Euro). What that tells us is that every customer put on the traffic log (or CRM) costs the dealer $100, at minimum. As a result, every name on the traffic log is worth $100, just as every name NOT on the log costs the dealer $100. It's as if the customer has a $100 bill stapled to his head as he walks through the door. If the customer didn't get logged, and you have a policy to log all cus- tomers, your employee just "stole" from you. And no, I'm not actually saying that steal- ing $100 from the drawer is on par with not logging a customer. But I am saying the net effect to the dealer's bottom line is exactly the same. One scenario is outright overt theft, which happens with intent. But the other is procedural theft, and the dollars are the same. So why are we so quick to pun- ish one and not the other? Why is, "He was just looking" an acceptable answer for the sales department's "cash drawer" to be short $100? If the parts department drawer were short $100, I'd bet you'd count it again and again, holding everyone up from going home until that money was found. Let's go a step further, as I've noticed three gaping chasms with dealers and opportunities lately. The first chasm is with OEM lead follow up from the dealer. We can debate the quality of those leads all day long, but the bottom line is roughly 20-30 percent of the leads are get- ting followed up with. Customers get on the OEM site to check out a product in our world and are interested enough to give an email for more information, and only 25 percent of them get followed up with? How good does the lead need to be to actually get a follow-up call? With 2.88 percent of the country playing in our space, I'd think we'd be more interested at the slightest interest in out product. That's chasm No. 1. The second chasm starts with a premise of that lead actually making it into the door of the dealership, which itself can be challenging. But let's say it happens nonetheless. Once inside the dealership, only 8.2 percent of door swings actually make it to the traffic log. What? 8.2 percent? That's from our Garage Composites National Averages, which is actually up from previous years of 7 percent trending. Feel free to tell me that your swing-counter counts the customer going both directions — entering and leaving — so my number should be dou- bled. Fine. So 16 percent of door swings make it to the log. Feel better? That's still ridiculous. And that's chasm No. 2. The third and final chasm is how many of those logged actually get a follow-up call. If the price and the financing are the same, many salespeople don't know what to follow up on, so they simply don't. As a result, they simply hope the customer comes back and opt out of actually causing the customer to come back. As a result, they never expedite getting that customer through the industry's 20 touches to the purchase. Welcome to chasm No. 3. It all starts with logging every customer through the front door. Every customer deserves the opportunity to have his or her life changed. Anything shy of that is an exercise in overt theft. Why would we ever expect a dealer to spend more on advertising to drive traffic, when we are so deficient at logging customers already there? PSB Sam Dantzler is the founder of the training site, Sam's Powersports Garage, and the president of Garage Composites. He can be reached at sam@garagecomposites.com. With procedural theft, dollars are same as overt SAM DANTZLER HEADROOM "What that tells us is that every customer put on the traffic log (or CRM) costs the dealer $100, at minimum."