4 Tips to Take Your Dealership Reporting to the Next Level
Dealerships of all kinds and sizes are undoubtedly familiar with metrics and dashboards.
Whether it’s your CRM, DMS or sales platform, a good portion of your day is already spent on reviewing dealership performance reports and information. But is the data you’re reviewing relevant to the decisions you’re making every day? Is the right data being tracked in your systems to provide useful and actionable advice, or are you simply checking to see if a deal closed and moving on?
Marketers across every industry, including OEMs, are increasingly looking at metrics like loyalty rates to drive future success. However, all too often the only figures that dealership leaders and staff use in a dealership performance analysis are auto sales targets and conversion rates.
What if your dashboard didn’t just tell you where you’ve been and where you need to go? What if it helped you understand how to get there and where to start? In this post, we share four tips for taking your dealership reporting to the next level, including:
- Understanding your dealership’s sales
- Identifying service drive opportunities
- Maximizing your dealership’s existing customer portfolio
- Improving your staff’s individual performance
Understanding Your Dealership’s Sales
It’s easy for dealership leaders to get so focused on hitting sales targets that they fail to pay attention to other critical performance metrics that have a real impact on their bottom line. Your dealership is much more than just sales, so for the most comprehensive and useful reporting it’s critical to ensure your reporting dashboards integrate with data from your CRM, DMS and sales platform.
Integrating data from your dealership’s tools (as well as factors like cost accounting, labor cost, inventory, pricing and more) ensures your reporting isn’t artificially siloed into “sales and marketing” and “everything else,” providing more comprehensive insights and critical context when assessing your dealership’s performance.
Some examples of these comprehensive sales metrics include per-sale profit and marketing ROI. These metrics are crucial in ensuring that your dealership excels not only in selling cars but also in doing so with profitability in mind. Integrating your DMS into your sales and marketing platform is essential as your dashboard requires data from both sources to generate these valuable insights.
Mastermind empowers dealers to make informed sales and marketing decisions by taking these insights even further with Market Impact. By combining registration and proprietary data with OEM sales and financial records, Market Impact’s benchmarking and reporting dashboard provides a comprehensive, unbiased view of a dealer’s market and competition.
Identifying Opportunities in the Service Drive
Data integrations and comprehensive analytics are critical for measuring your dealership’s sales performance. As proactive dealerships increasingly look to their service drive to engage potential buyers and acquire in-demand trades, it’s critical dealers track how their service drive is contributing to their bottom line.
To run a profitable service drive in today's automotive marketplace, it is essential to have a high-ROI service-not-sold conquest strategy. Understanding the factors that contribute to this strategy's success is crucial for both sales and service leadership to effectively manage their operations. Ensure your dealership reporting tracks metrics like service-not-sold leads generated in your drive, as well as the profitability of these sales.
When assessing their process for working the service drive, it's critical for dealers to analyze broader factors like the average size of repair orders, year-over-year sales performance, customer loyalty metrics, and service conquest marketing ROI. Considering these additional details will provide dealers with a more comprehensive context to guide their approach effectively.
Maximizing Your Dealership’s Existing Customer Portfolio
With customer loyalty no longer a guarantee in today’s dynamic market, dealerships around the country are increasingly finding value in taking a data-driven approach to maximizing their existing customer portfolio.
To proactively prevent customer defection and build customer loyalty with consistent communication over time, many dealers have successfully looked to their service drive. This approach not only helps generate sustainable service revenue – keeping customers coming back for regular service ensures they don’t end up as conquest customers for your rival.
In fact, Mastermind data finds customers who serviced with a dealer were just over 2.5x more likely to purchase their subsequent vehicle from the same retailer.
To measure the impact of these efforts like these, ensure your dealership reporting includes metrics related to retention, gross and net revenues to help identify opportunities to improve loyalty and project what even small improvements could mean to your bottom line.
Improving Sales Staff Individual Performance
Beyond assessing your team performance, it’s critical dealers report on and review individual salesperson numbers. Are they hitting their sales targets? Are they great at loyalty relationships but have challenges closing new customers? What’s working for them, and what isn’t?
Beyond just answering these questions, powerful reporting tools help you understand why salespeople are or are not hitting their sales targets and where there are opportunities for improvement and growth.
This is why Mastermind’s Performance Insights provide in-depth dealership reporting and sales attribution. Our dealer relations team help our dealer partners deep dive into their sales and marketing performance so their teams can utilize these metrics to achieve their goals. Plus, with access to top-level sales insights from within your market, dealers can set, measure and improve their dealership’s strategy for success.
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In today’s complex auto retail market, making truly data-driven decisions inside the dealership requires more than tracking conversions and noting success in sales.
Leveraging comprehensive reporting dashboards fueled by data from across your dealership and informed by best practices can take your dealership performance analysis past simply looking at what has already happened to a forward-looking view of what’s ahead.
Interested in learning how Mastermind can strengthen the way you run your dealership and manage your team? Request a free Mastermind demo today.
