From the Editors

A sales staff salary issue … that shouldn’t be an issue

Nel PascaleI’m ready to pick a fight. Well, OK, a figurative one.

Please tell me why your sales staff’s pay is somehow, someway not connected to their successes or failures in building the dealership’s consumer database.

How is that possible?

We’re in the midst of gathering data from dealers on lead management and CRM in preparation for a Webinar and one of the questions is:  “Is your sales staff’s pay plan tied to the lead management or CRM system?”

I’m not going to give away the results of that survey — you’ll have to attend our Aug. 4 Webinar to find that out.

But I can tell you that I can’t see any reason why sales staff’s salaries shouldn’t be connected to lead management. We all get deluged with product info on a routine basis from our favorite retailers — why can’t we add dealers to that list? How is it possible that I get a daily reminder on what the sandwich store down the street is serving today but I can’t find out what’s happening at area dealerships?

Care to figuratively fight back? Offer some reason why sales staff’s pay shouldn’t be tied to lead management?

Click here to take part in the national lead management/CRM survey.

Click here to register for the seminar.

Related Articles

2 Comments

  1. Neil,
    I completely agree with you. I’m an industry dealership operations expert and work with hundreds of dealers across the country for the past 14 years. My professional certification is in the field of human resources and my undergraduate work was in accounting. You combine both of those two fields with a little psychology and you have discipline of human performance improvement.
    Now, on that note, it comes right to the basic task assessment that every position must go through to get to the “real job description” that we use to recruit, train, perform reviews, and ultimately discharge an employee over for performance reasons. Included in that task assessment there needs to be “Collects cutomer data from 100% of the customers 100% of the time”. If you cannot perform this task, you cannot work here? I know that is hard core however, being a general manager for a large multi-line dealership in the past, makes me wonder what else cannot that employee do. The task of providing useful and relevant data to the CRM system should be mandatory. As far as being tied into compensation by doing the assessment and enforcing the policy you are building it into their pay structure. Times have changed and our industry is using outdated job descriptions that were borrowed from other dealers decades ago. These job descriptions can provide potential legal issues and are usually out of date and not useful or relevant.

    Uncle Forrest

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Check Also
Close
Back to top button