There are all sorts of employees working in dealerships throughout the world – Good ones, bad ones; cooperative, stubborn, commissioned, salaried, successful, slacker… no matter the type you hired, they’ve all got one thing in common: they’re expensive.
Sure, they may earn money for the company, but when you dig into it, are they really earning their share under your current circumstances? Let’s take a look at your payroll employees for starters – if they were hired at $60,000 annually, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Buried below that chunk are all the other employee costs associated – including benefits, employment taxes (federal, state and local as well as Social Security/FICA, Medicare and unemployment taxes), equipment costs and software licenses. And if that employee ends up leaving? Don’t forget to add in the employee exit costs, too… You’d think that once they left, the costs would stop there, but that’s never the case.
Now, we know what you’re thinking… “I don’t have all those problems, my sales team is commissioned.” Not so fast, buddy. If you have a really effective commissioned salary program, great; you may pay less per sale than if you don’t have a commissioned program. The sad truth? Most commissioned programs don’t work as you’d hope, and you end up paying more for your employees per sale. This is because most programs push employees to sell more, but more sales doesn’t necessarily mean more gross profit – which should be your main focus. You may have all these employees out there selling, selling, selling; but, low and behold, your gross profit is going down and it’s costing you more in salary dollars. That’s what we call disconnect.
But what if you were able to add one more employee who would cut additional costs and add efficiency and visibility? What if this “new hire” also gave you many ways to measure the success of your sales team – and allowed you to easily monitor gross profit by employee? You want access to closing ratios by person, too? They’re on it…and will also show you service cost by job. So, now you can monitor why Sally has higher closing rates than Jimmy and get him up to speed. Without these added insights, Jimmy could come to you as a commissioned employee and say he’s not making enough…but you can now see that the reason is because he has too many service orders, he’s doing something on the front-end that is cutting into gross profit. Now you can fix things because your new employee sees all.
Introducing the perfect new-hire
Sounds great, but who is this perfect employee and how much is this going to cost me? Well, the “who” is actually a “what” and the “employee” is actually Equilibrium Operational Management Software. The cost? Let’s just say – it does more than many employees combined and can cost less than 2% of what you pay them; without ever asking for a sick day! Think of it as an assistant for every employee that actually keeps your best interest in mind.
Stop spending more than you have to. Gain visibility, increase gross profits, keep everyone in line and streamline everything from quoting and ordering to scheduling and more.
