Kelly’s Korner: Define Sales Business Manager
Q. How do you define a professional (F&I) Sales Business Manager?
A. A professional sales representative is first properly licensed and then actively pursues continuing education. They have a desire to provide a full-service facility to their customers. The true professional realizes that their customer’s level of satisfaction is in direct proportion to their paycheck. This relationship is constant since customers who receive value return to the dealership to purchase again; and they bring friends who also buy products.
A professional sets goals and uses logs to track their progress toward those goals. They analyze the data, always asking themselves, “What can we do to improve?”
A professional seeks a forum in which to exchange ideas with their peers. They participate in the future. They plan, take action, and evaluate growth, keeping in mind that the customer is still in the driver’s seat of the economy.
Q. How is the Internet changing training?
A. The Internet has brought subject matter to the student on demand. It can be self-paced and saves travel expenses. The trade off is surrendering the body language trainers use as a gauge to determine how well trainees receive information. Studies have shown that 55% of all communication is non-verbal. When we elect to use the web as a source of delivering training, we give up the non-verbal medium as a significant measure of receptiveness.
Internet training requires that participants take increased responsibility to glean information, ask questions, and seek clarity from the trainer’s message. They must also take the initiative to role-play with someone other than their customers. It has never made sense to practice a presentation on your paycheck. Yet, the practice occurs every day. When we elect the computer classroom, we may give up role-playing opportunities. We also give up the opportunity to discuss current challenges with our peers face to face.
Even though access to the ‘Net has increased, not everyone has access. Even with access, many simply cannot make the time at work to complete Internet courses. Family obligations also limit the private time available to complete continuing education.
As wonderful as technology is now and will become, it cannot take the place of human relationships. If you are in sales, you are in the business of building relationships. Sales trainers build people, through sharing, caring, mentoring, and yes, occasionally playing on the participants’ emotions. We need to see the blue, greens, and browns of your eyes.
And we need feedback from general managers and owners on post-training production. Kelly Enterprises measures training by monitoring post-training productivity. Unfortunately, some of our training participants fail to submit their month-end production figures. Others simply do not maintain logs. If they do not keep logs, how can we measure growth? How can we plan for the future without having a clear picture of the past? As interactive, computer-based training becomes the norm, dealership senior management needs to emphasize logs, goals, and the plan at large.