How to Make the Most of Your Labor Day Weekend Labors

Whew! Another big Labor Day weekend in the books. You’ve crossed t’s with your customers, dotted i’s with your sales team and may have even had a few brief moments for recovery in between, but the opportunity to use this big holiday weekend improve your dealership is just beginning.

The Labor Day weekend rush can provide more for your dealership than a spike in sales. Taking a few extra follow-up steps can lead to big returns for your business.

Debrief with your team.
Gaps and breakdowns in processes are often most apparent during your busiest times. Grab a couple of minutes with your team to debrief. Ask them to get specific about what worked well, what didn’t work well, and where they see opportunities for process improvement. Find out which Tier 1 or Tier 2 incentives drove customers to come in. Listen to what your team tells you, and compare their feedback with key metrics in your CRM to identify ways to make small adjustments with big impact.

The benefits of taking the time to debrief with your staff is two-fold. First, hearing feedback from a variety of perspectives often uncovers issues challenging your whole staff – not just one person. Second, this invitation for feedback makes your employees more engaged with your business, and highly engaged employees are 87 percent less likely to leave their company.

Dig into the data.
One of the most important yet often forgotten steps of running a marketing campaign is evaluation. Dig through your Labor Day campaign data to see what customers responded to, and think about how you can use the results of this campaign to inform your next one. To get even more from your customer data, think about implementing a data mining tool like TargetPro.

Touch base with the service department.
It’s no secret that fixed ops revenue to critical to dealerships. On average, fixed ops gross profits contribute 48.5 percent of a dealership’s gross profit. So don’t leave your service departments out of the loop on big sales weekends! Check in with them to see how sales translated to service appointments.

If service results aren’t quite what you hoped for, consider implementing a tool that makes it easier for your salespeople to connect with service. For example, Connect CRM integrates with service scheduler Xtime, so service appointments can be made straight from the CRM with just a few simple clicks.

Create an action plan, and follow through.
All the information in world won’t help you if you don’t act on what you learn. Take time to map out the key opportunities for improvement, prioritize the ones that are most important to you, and create a specific, action-oriented plan for making changes. Keep the flow of communication open with your team so they can hold you accountable, and get ready for the best big sales weekend yet!

Ready to start preparing for the next big holiday sales weekend? Give us a call at 866-578-8152 to learn how our suite of integrated Connect products can help.