Evaluating your dealership’s sales team performance may seem as simple as looking at the bottom line, but in today’s market, it’s actually a very complicated equation. The top competitors are utilizing every tool and strategy at their disposal to maximize revenue, including sales scripts, BDCs, and extending vehicle sales conversations to integrate other services and drive return business. 

Because of this complexity, dealership owners and GMs need to use many metrics to evaluate how well the business is performing. In fact, it’s increasingly common to bring in dedicated specialists who can take a deep dive into the sales side to develop coaching strategies that take advantage of every opportunity. 

But what are these experts seeing that you might be missing? Here’s what to look at to evaluate sales team performance and keep your people working at peak efficiency. 

THE HARD DATA

While there are many nuances to modern sales strategies, anything that can be measured should be. Every GM should be familiar with the relevant data sets, what they mean, and—most importantly—what you can do to improve them. 

Vital KPIs

The following list includes the main metrics that can be used to monitor various aspects of your dealership’s sales strategy. They are the starting point for any consultant’s work and point them in the right direction to find possible gaps in skills or issues in sales scripts. 

• Dollar metrics
• Inventory turnover
• Per-vehicle revenue targets
• Used/new vehicle sales ratio
• Sales per employee
• Call-appointment ratios
• Lead follow-up times
• Conversion rates

Of course, many aspects of these numbers are related, and it takes a keen eye to understand exactly how they’re influencing your overall sales goals. 

Analyzing Trends

The next step is to use the information these metrics are telling you as a baseline for evaluating particular aspects of sales team performance and setting goals for improvement. This is where a dedicated training partner can make a big difference, both in terms of time and results. After all, an expert who knows what they’re looking for will find the problems immediately, whereas in-house processes often have a steep and expensive learning curve.

An automotive sales consultant will use this information to:

• Evaluate work efficiency
• Predict customer behavior changes
• Identify unmet customer needs
• Accurately evaluate employee strengths and weaknesses
• Support key strategic decisions
• Identify emerging trends 
• Help you get out in front of potential challenges
• Suggest effective product selection and marketing channels.

And this is just the beginning. A good statistical analysis of your sales team performance data is absolutely required in this day and age. It gives you the edge over the competition, helps you accurately understand employee needs, identify hidden strengths, and uncover trends and problems before they become serious liabilities.

EVALUATING SOFT SKILLS AND PHONE STRATEGIES

Once you understand the numbers, you’ll be ready to take a look at your team. This includes reviewing all your materials and observing their actual performance on the job. Ideally, you should use techniques that let you do both at once and you’ll need to review how your training procedures will address the issues. 

Mystery Shoppers

Human beings have a natural tendency to change their behavior in the presence of observers. In this case, that means you or your management team. So, the mere attempt to directly measure your employees’ skills will cause them to react differently than they would with regular customers.

This is where mystery shopping comes into play. A mystery shopper poses as a real customer on the phone to obtain a highly realistic impression of your sales team’s performance. These calls can be extremely revealing and often highlight concrete reasons why certain KPIs are underperforming. For instance, do you know why so many dealerships have low appointment rates? Their sales reps forget to ask. 

Whether it’s a script omission or just a performance issue, mystery shoppers give you the information you need to quickly correct every instance of an employee accidentally talking your dealership out of an opportunity to sell. It’s so important that many of the top dealerships in the country have dedicated business development centers (BDCs) that do nothing but handle and route customer calls. 

Examine Training Quality

To reach high levels of quality and consistency in your customer service, your coaching partner will need a training strategy that translates evaluations to real-world sales team performance improvement. Here’s what you should expect to see from a top consultant:

• High-quality, engaging instruction and materials.
• One-on-one mentor relationships that emphasize coaching.
• Training module that limits direct instruction to six-minute training segments, separated by interactive activities and discussions that encourage engagement.
• Long-term strategies that space out the learning to maximize retention.
• Verifying the training with mystery shoppers and following up to ensure skills stick.

PHONE NINJAS CAN HELP

With the hurricane of responsibilities owners and GMs have to wade through every day, most of these processes are beyond the reasonable scope of what you can achieve alone. A great partner can be an invaluable asset when judging sales team performance.

At, Phone Ninjas we’ve spent years analyzing sales teams in the automotive industry, and we have a long track record of boosting underperforming KPIs that make an impact on your bottom line. Our clients routinely see appointment rates double and triple, and that’s just one of the many ways we can get your sales department firing on all cylinders. 

Maximizing sales team performance starts with the best automotive sales consultant in the game, and no one does it better than us. Drop us a line for a free demo including two mystery shops so we can show you exactly how we’ll transform your salespeople into superstars!