4 Tips For Leading a Sales Team After Automotive School
There is room for many skill sets in the automotive industry. If you’re a car lover with excellent people skills seeking a leadership role, you may find an automotive sales manager career quite fulfilling. Sales managers working in dealerships are responsible for supervising and motivating members of a sales team. They perform regular managerial tasks like hiring, scheduling, training, setting goals, budgeting, and strategizing. To succeed in this role, excellent customer service skills are also necessary, and your ability to communicate effectively with anyone is a major asset. Many best practices will help you run a profitable and united sales team after automotive training. Read on to learn more.
1. Be Thoughtful About Hiring After Automotive School
Even with the best leadership skills and automotive expertise, you still need a competent team to drive sales. Before interviewing, always list the qualifications, skills, and disposition, you’re looking for in the ideal candidate and hire accordingly. When recruiting, don’t forget to consider team culture and ensure that prospective team members will fit in at your dealership. Hiring based on skill and culture fit ensures that candidates share company values. Turnover due to poor culture fit can cost an organization 50-60% of an employee’s yearly salary, so your thoroughness during the hiring process after automotive school can contribute significantly to a dealership’s financial well-being.
2. Foster Healthy Competition
Sales is an inherently competitive field. Though working as a cohesive team supports the success of a dealership, success rates rely heavily on individual efforts. Because of this, it’s essential that each salesperson feels motivated to refine their techniques and improve their numbers. Though competition can sometimes feel uncomfortable, as an automotive sales manager, you should do your best to resist the temptation to neutralize this natural element of sales and instead aim to foster healthy competition. How can you do that? Many sales teams find leaderboards, rewards for high performers, and fun challenges helpful to foster competition without creating a toxic atmosphere.
3. Encourage Your Team to Leverage Relevant Technology
In recent years, the workplace has undergone a technological shift that has transformed the sales process for managers, team members, and customers. To stay competitive, managers should have a thorough understanding of customer relationship management platforms, sales automation tools, and data analytics technology. Salespeople should be tech-savvy enough to master these tools to understand their buyers, warm up leads, and use data to build their sales strategy. After automotive sales training, using technological tools will provide insight for your team and help the organization improve its individual selling skills, which, in turn, helps the whole team succeed using a united approach.
4. Set SMART Goals
While each salesperson should make it a duty to set individual objectives, as a sales manager, you must set short and long-term goals for the team. The most effective goals are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART). Leading regular meetings where you share reasonable and ideal objectives with your team gives them a helpful point of reference for where they should focus their efforts. This practice also motivates salespeople, especially when paired with incentives.
Are you excited to begin automotive training and become a sales manager after graduation? Here at CATI, our training will also help you to familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of the industry, with support from experts in the field.
Ready to explore auto careers?
Contact CATI to learn how you can get started.