Setting your dealership’s annual F&I profit goals is often easier than identifying the small, everyday steps your team needs to take to meet those goals. The key to connecting your overarching profitability targets and your team’s day-to-day actions is to establish a process for measuring your performance consistently, starting with benchmarking and moving through to regular check-ins and training that’s aligned to your team’s areas of opportunity. If you’re struggling with creating impactful benchmarks that align with your big-picture goals, you aren’t alone.
Use the Right Performance Metrics for Your Dealership
Dealers have a lot to consider if they want performance standards that will ultimately increase profits. The main reasons it’s so difficult to create these standards comes down to two factors: data and time. You need to research market share opportunities. You need to regularly evaluate how successfully other dealerships are performing in your region. You need to understand where you fit in to your local competitor set and how your ranking changes. And you need to process all of this information – and more – to create impactful performance plans that drive profitability. Then you and your management need to support those plans. This is a tall order to complete, yet it’s necessary for maximum profit gains. Many dealerships are too busy, don’t have the right resources or simply aren’t in the habit of analyzing all this information regularly. That’s where Assurant’s expertise and proven approach to performance benchmarking comes into play.
Great Dealership Performance Comes Down to Your Benchmarking Process and Your Follow Through
As your dealership looks to build performance standards to meet the year’s profit goals, you should analyze and incorporate multiple factors as you put together your plans. And you can’t analyze these areas once: you must regularly evaluate them and adjust your standards as needed. Here are a few of the data pieces you’ll need to get started:
External Market Factors
- Regional market insight and an understanding of your market share compared to other local dealers
- National and global economic forecasts
Dealer Competition
- Forecasting sales and attachment rates in your town and region
- Your current ranking against your peers
- How that ranking has changed for your dealership and for your competitors year over year
Inside the Dealership
- Profitability analysis and opportunity index
- Weekly performance snapshots for each team member
- Comparing year-over-year progress
- Dealership scorecards
Combining these insights enables you to establish clear, achievable performance benchmarks for your dealership that are actionable for your team. But that’s still only the first step. It’s how you use these benchmarks throughout the year to consistently drive your team’s performance that really makes a difference. As a performance partner with more than 50 years’ F&I expertise, Assurant helps dealerships across the country set up actionable performance benchmarking standards and follow through on the measurement and training plans needed to achieve their long-term profitability goals.
At Assurant, we apply a proven methodology for driving dealership performance that includes:
- Evaluating your reports and PVR composites to set performance benchmarks specific to your size, region and past performance.
- Leveraging our 50 years of expertise and resources from all across the country to analyze every factor needed to build clear, actionable performance plans for your sales and F&I teams.
- Using proven processes and technology to help you continually evaluate your team’s performance throughout year.
- Creating tailored plans that provide skill-based, one-on-one F&I training that map back to the performance plan.
- Our experience working with dealership leaders to help build management buy-in and support so performance is driven from the top
Take a look at our next Insider Tip, Actioning the Scorecard Report, to learn more about how we measure team performance against a dealership’s performance benchmarks.
