Hopefully you’ve read part 1 of this cabinet dealer sales training series that gives tips on tasks that your salespeople should not be doing. Tasks that take the salesperson away from the actual job of selling is detrimental to your dealership, and your bottom line.
Now that people are beginning to spend money on their homes or new homes again, it’s time to keep your salespeople in their respective roles and let them do what they do best. Below, we’ve outlined three more things your salespeople should not be doing…ever.
Don’t let them do their own thing or follow their own process.
Often times, kitchen and bath inudstry businesses will let their salespeople have their own way of managing leads, closing, and following up. This can be problematic because management cannot possibly know where a job stands if each of 5 different reps are using their own processes to sell kitchens. Management should know where every prospect is in the process at any given time, and if there is no consistent process, this feat can be next to impossible. In addition, if you allow salespeople to “go rogue” like Sarah Palin, how can you train new reps to follow a certain process. Sure you may have a rep that is a “maverick” and his numbers are dynamite, but how can you get the rest of your team to follow a consistent process if the top sales person is able to do things his way? A sales team must be a cohesive unit acting in concert with each other. This is the only scalable way to achieve higher sales production in the cabinet business. The rogue way may work for a little while, but eventually when you try to expand and add salespeople, the rogue method will be a nightmare.
Don’t let salespeople directly use SPIFFs.
There are many ways in which a salesperson can harm the dealership by using SPIFFs. The first is by selling a cabinet line that may not have the best profit margin for the dealership. The salesperson makes a little extra money, but the dealership is handcuffed into selling a line that doesn’t result in higher net revenue. Second, the money for SPIFFs usually goes directly into the salesperson’s pocket instead of to the dealership where it should. SPIFFs can be a good idea, but a dealership should have a structure in place to disperse the incentives to the right people instead of getting bypassed by the salesperson’s own personal rewards. Additionally, consider the effect SPIFFs can have on a consumer who finds out they’ve been steered into a certain cabinet line because of manufacturer incentives. Consumers are savvy these days and the Internet makes it very easy for them to research facts about buying kitchens. If a dealership doesn’t control SPIFS, they are inviting trust problems into their sales process.
Don’t let salespeople travel to the office to work.
Salespeople should not be coming back into the office to do administrative work. This is a waste of time and a morale killer when salespeople have to return to the office to fill out administrative forms. Dealerships should invest in tools that allow a salesperson to enter any necessary data from a coffee shop, from home, or from the road.
We’ve now offered you six tips for freeing up your salespeople to let them make more sales. After all,they are the machine that keeps your dealership’s revenue flowing. Defining roles within your dealership in such a manner will generate more leads, more business and more dollars.
