Excuse me Mr. GM of the big Honda Dealership down the street, if I asked you right now how you were performing against all of the other dealerships in your region could you tell me? What if I told you that you were receiving (on average) fewer phones leads per day than other Honda dealerships? Would that concern you? How about if I told you your website was converting well below the average for stores in your dealership group? Would that be useful information? I think it would. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could see how your store is performing when measured against your peers whenever you wanted?
Wired Magazine recently published a fantastic article titled Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops detailing the power of measuring performance data and providing immediate feedback and context to the user. The idea being that by doing so, you encourage a desired behavior from that user. Well, that sounds a lot like what most car dealerships (and any sales organization for that matter) do on a daily basis. They measure everything that happens in their dealership from appointments scheduled, to cars sold, the data is measured and put up on a big board for everyone to see exactly where they stand. It has been proven again and again, that people don’t like to see themselves “below average”, especially in public. When Bob the salesman sees that he is behind for the month, he is more likely to make a few extra phone calls or be a little bit more willing to get out and roam the lot in the heat with potential customers. The amazing thing is that this is true whether or not Bob is having a good month or not. Even in a good month, if Bob is trailing his peers that fact alone will prompt him to get busy selling more cars. Why? That’s just how we are wired. Centuries of human behavior demonstrates that our brains are motivated by goals achievement and measurement. Car dealers learned to tap into that a long time ago with their salesman.
What about the GM though, where does he go to see himself on the big board? Typically, there is no “Big Board” across dealerships. Instead, the GM is just constantly assaulted with random statistics all day. If he sees that his website conversion rate is 3% that might seem just pretty good. No reason to get excited about that. But if I told him the average for his dealer group was 5%, all of the sudden he has something to get excited (and not in a good way) about. On the flipside, he may see that his guys placed 300 outbound calls on Thursday and think that they are slacking off. But, when he sees that the average Honda dealership is only doing 200, he can go home happy for the evening. The effect is the same, by simply showing the GM where he stands amongst his peer group; it provides context, and believe it or not, it will cause him to try to improve that standing. If he is behind, you can bet that he will light a fire with his guys to fix it. If he is ahead, he will want to extend his lead. It is the way our brains work. We are scoreboard watchers by nature, even when ahead. Yes, I like seeing the Longhorns win by three touchdowns, but I like seeing them win by four touchdowns even more. Winning is fun, losing is not. Therein lies the power of the Benchmark Comparisons Report.
By providing a very simple visual indication of a dealerships data compared against his peers, we are able to unlock the power of the feedback loop that Wired Magazine details. It looks like this:
Your data is compared against those in your selected peer group. It is your dealerships data charted against the anonymized data of all of the other dealerships sharing that group association. The orange line represents your performance over the selected time frame while the blue line reflects an average across the remainder of the group. The data provided is anonymous and spans over a thousand different dealerships from around the country. You now have the power to see where you stand on a daily basis and take action accordingly. What kinds of groups are available for comparison? We will provide you the option to select from groups like dealership group, region, and franchise. Want to know how you stand against hundreds of other Honda dealerships? You can do that here. Want to know how you compare to the other 10 or 50 dealerships in your automotive group? You can do that here. We are excited about this report, because we think it taps into the brains innate desire to be (way) better than average! How does it do this? Easy, it captures your attention and puts actionable data in the hands of the people who need it. That is what Century Interactive is all about, so we hope you like it as much as we do. Want to see where you stand? Give us a call.
Tags: call analytics, call tracking, CRM, manager