Follow these five ways to leverage your staff and rev up your tire and service sales:
1. Hire salespeople on the basis of their sales ability, not on their knowledge of the tire industry. A good salesperson can almost always learn about the products you sell, but a person who knows a lot about tires may not necessarily be a good salesperson.
2. Communicate regularly with your sales staff. Because they interact with customers on a daily basis, they may have ideas about how your business can increase sales.
3. Consider basing your salespeople’s commission on
profit margin, not just sales revenue or volume.
4. Make sure your business operations effectively support all sales activities. When salespeople need quotes, they should get those quotes quickly. When salespeople need to speak with technical experts to get answers for customers, those experts should be easily reachable, etc.
5. Review your sales staff’s ‘sales to sales-expense ratio.’ A salesperson may make $3,000 in sales during a month, but spend $1,000 in phone calls, travel and other expenses. Another salesperson might also make $3,000 in sales, but spend only $300. The latter is more profitable to your operation.
