Want to Snag a Management Role After Automotive School? 4 Tips to Remember
Managing a sales team in an automotive dealership can be challenging. As a manager, it will be your responsibility to oversee your team and ensure that they perform to the best of their abilities. The training you will receive in automotive school will equip you with managerial skills and an understanding from a salesperson’s perspective. This will help you manage them effectively and give them and yourself the best opportunity to succeed.
If you’re interested in becoming an effective manager after automotive school, read on for some tips you’ll want to remember.
1. Set Goals and Expectations For You and Your Team
In a managerial position, you need to be incredibly clear about the goals and expectations for both your team and yourself. You know from automotive sales training that giving individuals a goal to chase helps ensure they work to their peak ability. A great tip for this is to work with SMART goals.
- S – Specific
- M – Measurable
- A – Achievable
- R – Realistic
- T – Timely
Work with your team to help create SMART goals that align with them and cater to their abilities.
2. Create Reports and Discuss Them With Your Team
By setting SMART goals and tracking employees’ important figures, such as cars sold or leased, you can track their success ratio. Create reports from these important figures and utilize these to discuss with team members where they can improve or where they are doing well.
In automotive school, you learn to work with your own figures and stats. Creating reports is not much different and is done on a larger scale than one done only for you. Using programs like Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel makes the report-creating process seamless. This easy-to-interpret data will equip you to track, understand, and improve sales in the company. If you don’t know an individual’s sales numbers over a specific period, how can you ask them to improve?
3. Motivate Your Team After Automotive Sales Training
Motivation is one of the cornerstones of being a great manager. Motivating your team and ensuring that they want to work hard and make sales is vitally important. What motivates people is different from person to person. You need to develop an understanding of your employees and chat with them about what motivates them.
Motivation also comes in the form of supporting team members. If they are experiencing anything difficult or have had a tough sales month, you should be there to support them. Team members who feel supported are more likely to be motivated and produce better results. Create staff meetings, and have one-on-one chats with them to ensure they know you are there for them.
4. Ensure Product Knowledge is High Amongst Your Team
Customers can find out information whenever and wherever they need it. This means that you and your team need to maintain product knowledge of any and all vehicles currently on the lot. When a customer asks for information or has questions, ensure your team can answer them quickly and accurately. A great way to implement this, as you’ll learn in automotive sales training, is to have your team walk the lot daily and learn about any new vehicles that may have come in. Information sheets should also be available to each team member to assist them if they forget any specific details.
During your training, you’ll learn that helping a customer at every turn and being able to provide information on a specific vehicle or several vehicle options is great for ensuring that they choose an option from you. While some customers want specific vehicles, others are more flexible. Being able to present immediate information and a sales pitch on a vehicle may be the difference between them shopping at your dealership and another.
Are you interested in pursuing a career in automotive sales and management?
Contact CATI school to learn how you can get started.
