The dreaded Month End reporting

[john.quinn]

Maybe they went cradle to grave with their ISMs.

Actually, they got rid of salespeople all together except for deliveries

 

[Jeff Kershner]

Maybe they went cradle to grave with their ISMs.

Looking at the poll, there seems to be a lot of folks spending too much time on reporting. The first of the month is the time where you look at planning and marketing.

Doug, you bring up a good point.*

This depends on personnel and resources at the dealership but I agree.*

I would spend much of time towards the end of the month planning out the marketing and then executing at the beginning of the month. Preventing a scramble in the middle of the month wondering what we were going to do that month to drive traffic.*

Last month is over. Keep ongoing reports. And if you don't have the tools to allow you to do this then get new tools. Wrap your loose ends up in the middle of the next month. Or, find someone to do them for you if you need them so bad right at the end of the month.*

 

[ddavis]

Actually, they got rid of salespeople all together except for deliveries

Heresy! The clerks have taken over.

Jeff, I had marginal tools at the last group. As long as you have a spreadsheet, this shouldn't be an issue. Every day, I posted where each of my ISMs stood for the month. Number of leads, shown appointments, sales, closing percentage etc. Anyone walking into the internet department knows the story ...the GM looked at it every day.

Spending 3+ days, at a crucial point of the month, to do reports, wouldn't be acceptable for me.

 

[danoneil]

Thought this was going to be a thread where we discuss how slow December was.

We had a great December.

 

[danoneil]

It surprises me that not one person has said " My software gives me everything I need to have an accurate report". We use autobase and it is impossible to get a report from what is provided without spending 2 to 3 hours going through data.

Any one outside of autobase get a good report with their lead management software ?

 

[EChris]

The most time consuming part for me is analyzing the data and then figuring out the course of action to train the sales people to stay on top of the forecast.

 

[Brian Marchini]

I am going to say about 1-2 days personally as noted above.

We use Contact Management for a CRM and it has some great reports for traffic. The problem with this of course is implementation which seems t be the problem at every dealership. How many times (of the day) have we looked at a customer in our respective systems and just wondered why a salesperson entered it that way when they were repeatedly shown another?

What I generally do is keep everything on a multipage, ongoing spread sheet book in Excel that allows me to compare previous years against current years and so on with ease. I pool everything that I can in terms of the internet into this report that I keep going. The nice thing about Excel is that you can set it up to automatically tally stats, activities and update charts that you create. But in the end, there is still too much to put in there.

Here is what I track in a snap shot:

Internet lead performance
Phone lead performance
Website performance
e-Newsletter performance
Current review ratings
Third party vendor performance (Autotrader, cars, dealix, cargigi....)

I also send out a weekly update to each the department heads and appropriate staff to keep everyone up to date on what is going on. I have been the internet person, then manager, then director for I guess 8-9 years at my dealership (lifetime in this business) and I find a keep part of what keeps you stable in your position is keeping everyone informed of exactly what you are working on. If you don't, they tend to think you sit in your office, make the occasional phone call to clients and surf the web all day.

In my opinion, there is not an all encompassing software aside from a diy excel sheet. I think the closest that I have seen is dealersocket in terms of presentations. But the real problem is that none of them really work correctly in our own flawed, real world scenarios. I even have an issue with bookkeeping not "closing" a deal in our dms until 5-10 days after delivery. oigh. And again, most of us work with too many different things to have an all in one system. Is there any system that pulls in your review rankings for instance?