Today's Up To Speed article is contributed by Dave Anderson, president of Dave Anderson's Learn to Lead, an international sales and leadership training and consulting company. Prior to beginning Learn To Lead, Dave enjoyed an extensive and successful career in the automotive retail industry

Self-esteem is defined by the dictionary as: a realistic respect for or…

Rarely do we come across a dealer today who claims to have a sufficient number of vehicle sales personnel. When adding the word “quality” to “vehicle sales personnel,” the dealers’ claims of staffing success turn pretty ugly. Why is it so difficult to attract quality people for automotive sales positions?

Several years ago, I was working with a client in Southern California and conducting one of my rare sales training meetings. The subject of the meeting was "Developing and Engaging…

At the NCM Institute Center for Automotive Retail Excellence, the training that we provide in our Service Management courses focuses primarily on strategies and tactics. However, we have discovered that the effective execution of the strategies that we teach is most often hampered by an important missing ingredient:…

Are going to be able to sustain the momentum you established in your used vehicle departments in 2012? Or perhaps your used vehicle department performance wasn’t so good, and you’re promising to do better in 2013?

At NCMi we just finished a record year in terms of the number of classes we taught and the amount of dealership personnel we were able to help educate to better understand the true workings of their…

Back when I first started desking deals, the “seasoned” salespeople would tell me, “Let’s do this deal; we’ll make up the gross on the next one. It’s easier to get iron than customers.” I believe there was a change in that attitude in 2008. Four years later, Buy-Here-Pay-Here (BHPH) dealers are still facing the challenge of finding enough choice inventory for their business model while maintaining portfolio performance.

In my last BHPH operation we operated a little different than…

One of the questions on the NCM Institute post-class surveys is, “Which of the trainings presentations or topics were the most useful to you?” One of the most prevalent answers we see is “Time Management.” This is interesting because the subject seems to be of a lot greater importance to dealership managers than those of us involved in retail automotive thought leadership have always believed. The quandary I’m…

Since it is that time of year, here are some ideas for commitments you may wish to make for 2013. As you’ve heard me say many times, “If you measure it and then scoreboard it, performance will improve!” Many of you are probably measuring and scoreboarding some of the following key performance indicators, but I doubt if any of you are measuring all 11 (a “lucky” number) of them:

1. Actual flat rate hour Productivity per Technician against objective on a daily,…