Go back to basics to boost your business

By Jon Coles, general manager, dealer development, Suzuki

While different areas of the Suzuki business – such as sales, aftersales, service, etc – run themselves, in dealer development we have an overarching position, working with each of them. We look at network profitability as a whole and work with our colleagues in those departments to see where we can make improvements.

The approach we take when trying to improve is very much ‘back to basics’. We’ve seen lots of initiatives come and go over the years but our strategy is around trust and the elements that build trust. For example, we can see a direct correlation between retailers who have the best results for trust with their customers and the best profitability within the network. We have an analogy of a three-legged comprising people, place and process. If any of those three fall off, so will you.

For example, we’ve seen staffing issues recently, such as technicians during COVID, who seemed to move into other roles and there was a big salary jump through them working more on electrification. And, while we don’t have an EV product at the moment, we’ve got high voltage systems and standards in place to make sure that these are safely operating. With that comes salary increases for technicians, which has a big impact on retailer profitability. You can’t pass those costs onto the customer, so you have to build the value into the job you’re doing. We launched our service-activated warranty programme about a year ago, which relies on customers booking the scheduled services after the initial three year warranty. And from the data we have, we can see that we are selling more parts and hours, so it is a win-win situation.

Right people, right place

We work with the IMI – our standards are that each retailers should have an IMI level four technician to be able to work inside the battery. It initially required a specific campaign to achieve that, but it’s working. We provide all of the training and give the retailers funding to train the technicians, which makes them feel more comfortable about getting it done. We’ve also got our apprentice programme, which we think is still the number one way to overcome the skills shortage.

Improving the sales force

We’ve got lots of training courses that you would expect to see at an OEM but, again, we have a ‘back to basics’ approach. For every customer that comes in, we have six ‘non-negotiables’: a warm welcome; take the customer details; give them a static presentation of the car and talk about the features and benefits of owning a Suzuki; offer them a test drive; agree what your follow-up is going to be – and give them a story as to why they should buy Suzuki.

The last point is an important one, because so many of our retailers are great with people and have a good history of trust. We could get into a conversation with any dealer principal and ask if there is one of those six things they wouldn’t want their salesperson delivering every time and you would have no arguments. We still have a mystery shop programme in place that measures these six factors and were at about 90%. That’s still a drop off and too big for us, but we’ve improved. Going forward, the focus is very much on getting the fundamentals right.

Your action plan

• Keep things simple

• Get the right people in your business

• Communicate with your customers

• Listen to their story

• Make life easy for them during the process