I’ll bet one of the most frustrating things about your job is doing business with people on the service side.
After all, few service dealers have any idea what it takes to get the right part to the right place at the right price and the appropriate time, let alone what problems cores, credits and returns can do to your bottom line. That lack of knowledge can only result in one thing: unrealistic expectations, the consequences of which are misunderstanding, resentment and an inordinate amount of pressure and stress.
Before all of you raise your collective fists to the sky and start shouting, “Yeah!” take a moment to consider how much you know — or don’t know — about your service dealer customers and how that lack of knowledge manifests itself every day in the programs you design, the promotions you offer and their success — or lack thereof.
Last month, I wrote about a meeting I attended that frustrated me beyond words. A suggestion was made that some specifics on how to make a meeting like that a worthwhile investment might be in order.
All you had to do was ask.
First and foremost, don’t make your lack of knowledge or understanding obvious. Don’t demonstrate what you don’t know about what I do and the world in which I do it by the very nature of what you are pushing down the pipeline. At its best, it is insensitive; at its worst, downright dangerous.
Case in point: The majority of automotive repair shops are marginally nowhere near as profitable as they could or should be. One of the main reasons for this is a consistent failure to price parts and labor correctly. Another is the failure to recognize the significant impact productivity has on profitability.
This often results in labor prices that are too low to cover the percentage of overhead necessary to sustain a profitable business. In cases like these, parts profits may be the only thing keeping a large percentage of your service dealer customers in business.
To compound this phenomenon, most service dealers have no idea they are pricing incorrectly. All they know is that they aren’t making any money and too many of them don’t even know that.
When you come to me with a program that slashes my labor rate by 25 percent — all of which would be profit — and then reduce my potential profit on parts to just 25 percent, you reinforce my belief that you either don’t know anything about the world in which I live, or worse yet, that you don’t care.
If you want to be effective, if you want your meetings to be well attended, or more important, deeply appreciated, demonstrate your understanding of who we are and what we do — the problems we face and the challenges we confront every day. Help us to learn something we truly need to know, doing something with us or for us that we are incapable or unable to do for ourselves — at least for now — and/or, help us to become more profitable, not less.
Act as a true partner. Find topics that will benefit us both and then be patient, because it’s going to take a while for us to recognize that something substantive has really changed in our relationship.
