Do you spot check your employees?

Do you spot check your customers?

If you are confused about what I am talking about then read on...

Too many times when a manager asks their people if they did something they get an answer and they take their word for it.  In some cases this happens because of too much trust or just because the manager is too busy to check the situation themselves.  The same happens in a car deal when working with customers.  I am going to use the example that I saw about a week ago when I was onsite doing consulting at a dealership.  The General Sales Manager at this dealership is one of my mentors who I used to work with years ago where together we fixed a dealership.  I was watching him work the desk on a Saturday.  He gets a credit application and runs the credit.  He then looks over the application and the credit report to analyze how to work this deal and the banks.  In this particular situation, the customer stated that they make $10k per month yet on their credit report it shows that they have an open mortgage for over $1 million.  He saw really quick that something is not making sense.  He had the sales person go out and verify income only to find out that the customer makes way more money and gave them a figure to use that they can get away with so they do not have to show all of their income.

The point I am trying to make here is that it is important to verify everything before moving forward.  This is how successful managers build success while maintaining compliancy in the dealership or any business out there.  We have all heard the saying in the car business, "stop taking shortcuts".  The saying applies exactly to this post.  Always inspect what you expect.