How to Take Your Dealership Reporting to the Next Level

by automotiveMastermind

Marketers rank high-quality data as the number one factor driving performance success. Have you invested in quality automotive marketing data at your dealership, and in turn, are you taking action based on what the data is telling you about your customers?

Dealerships are no strangers to metrics or dashboards, but all too often the only figures that leadership and staff use in performance analysis are future auto sales targets and rearward-looking figures, such as conversion rates.

What if your dashboard didn’t just tell you where you’ve been and where you need to go? What if it helped you understand how to get there and where to start? In this blog, Mastermind helps take your dealership reporting to the next level with insights into:

How integrating your DMS and sales platform opens new possibilities
Benchmarking improvements by looking at every stage of the car sales process
Comparing your brand and model performance to in-market competitors
Ensuring return on your sales platform investment by evaluating each salesperson’s usage and opportunities for growth
Leveraging predictive analytics to create a forward-looking view of your dealership’s performance

DMS-Sales Integration Drives Insights

We’ve written before about why data-driven sales platforms are critical tools for auto dealers in today’s marketplace:

They deliver new insights about dealership customers and prospects
They help dealers be more proactive in sales and marketing
They make the car sales process more efficient
They improve customer’s dealership experience
They’re a critical tool for growing customer loyalty.

When it comes to dealership performance analysis, auto dealer software like Mastermind’s Market EyeQ provide a wealth of insight into all aspects of how the sales cycle is performing in your dealership. Your dealership is much more than just sales, so for the most comprehensive and useful reporting it’s critical to ensure your sales platform is integrated with your DMS.

Connecting the marketing and sales expertise of your sales platform to mission-critical data factors such as cost accounting, labor cost, inventory, pricing and more ensures your reporting isn’t artificially siloed into “sales and marketing” and “everything else.”

Understanding Your Dealership’s Sales

It’s easy for dealership leaders to get so focused on hitting sales targets that they fail to pay attention to other critical metrics that have a real impact on their bottom line. A comprehensive dealership dashboard ensures some of those metrics are being measured and reported, which encourages teams to work to improve them.

Some examples of these comprehensive sales metrics include per-sale profit and marketing ROI, both of which get to the heart of making your dealership’s operations great not just at selling cars, but at doing so profitably. These metrics also demonstrate the value of integrating your DMS into your sales platform, as your dashboard will need data from both to generate these insights.

It’s also important to generate these kinds of metrics not only for “sales,” but also for loyalty, service conquest and market conquest customers. Among other factors, a reliably profitable and high-ROI service-not-sold conquest operation is critical to running a profitable service drive in today’s automotive marketplace, and insight into those factors helps both sales and service leadership manage their operations accordingly.

Watching the Competition

Motorsports drivers wouldn’t win many races if they didn’t pay attention to where the other drivers on the track were and what they were doing. Just the same, your dealership won’t do very well in a flat sales environment where growth comes at your competitor’s expense if you’re not watching what they’re doing and where they are or aren’t succeeding.

That’s why Mastermind’s reporting tools integrate Market360 reporting, giving you competitive dealership insights into what brands and models are selling in your local auto market. It lets you benchmark against the competition and identify opportunities to capture market share against a weak competitive product or improve your selling against a strong competitor.

Improving Sales Staff Individual Performance

It’s obviously critical to report on and review individual salesperson numbers. Are they hitting their sales targets? Beyond that, powerful reporting tools help you understand why salespeople are or are not hitting their sales targets and where there are opportunities for improvement and growth. Are they great at loyalty relationships but have challenges closing new customers? What’s working for them, and what isn’t?

One key tool Market EyeQ includes in the salesperson evaluation process is a user-by-user analysis of how each of your salespeople is using the data and analysis tools of Market EyeQ, including how well each is tracking to the Behavior Prediction Score®, whether on their own or compared to the rest of your sales team. Are they using the auto dealer solutions you’ve invested in and are they getting the desired results? When combined with reporting tools that break out Market EyeQ-driven sales and profitability, the result is a comprehensive set of insights that make you a more effective manager of your critical sales functions.

Dashboards fueled by data from across your dealership and informed by best practices and predictive analytics can transform your dealership performance analysis from just looking at what has already happened into a forward-looking view of what’s going to happen in the future.

If you’re interested in seeing what kind of insights Mastermind’s reporting tools can bring to the way you run your dealership and manage your team, contact us for a free demonstration.

Learn more about how Market EyeQ can improve your dealership’s operations and sales.