Steve Ferrante
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Winning Customer Service

In my October 2015 article “A Winning Workplace,” I wrote about the importance of employee engagement and creating an organization that top talent want to be a part of. In this article, we’ll focus further on the people in your tire business and how to hire to support a world-class customer service organization. Start at

A Winning Workplace

Having difficulty finding talented employees? Take a good hard look at the engagement level of your existing employees first. Spending the last 20+ years in business consulting, the past 10 in my own practice, I have too often heard the plea “we can’t find good people” from business owners and/or management personnel. In fact, if

Habits to a Highly Effective Sales Professional

First published in 1990, Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” is one of the best-selling and most influential personal development books of all time. The Seven Habits themselves are a simple set of rules for life and powerful principles anyone can apply to improve their personal productivity and performance. In this article,

Leveraging SWOT Analysis

As I teach all of my clients, effectively improving an organization’s sales and customer service effort should begin with an honest evaluation of the company’s current performance to establish a baseline from which improvements can be addressed and measured. One of the best ways to clearly gauge current performance is to perform a SWOT analysis.

Rise of the Machines: Competing With Robots and Other Automated Adversaries

It’s fair to say that when most of us in tire/auto service sales business think of competition, we think of real people and not robots. But what if there were a robot that could do your job as well or, brace yourself, better than you? If I were an owner of the business that had

Lessons from Jack Welch

Jack Welch is one of the most successful business leaders of the last century. For those unfamiliar with him, Jack Welch was the CEO of General Electric from 1981 until his retirement in 2001. Over his 20-year tenure, Welch earned numerous awards for his leadership as CEO, culminating with Fortune magazine naming him “Manager of

Are Your Tire, Auto Service Salespeople ‘Winging It’ with Phone Calls?

Each and every interaction your salespeople have with potential customers on the phone is an opportunity to enhance customer relations, the image of your business and increase sales. So, be honest, are your salespeople properly equipped to optimize each and every phone interaction they have with potential customers? If you’re like most businesses, then the answer

The Real Case for Consistency

To gain sustainable and profitable trust, dealers must create customer-focused consistency In his book, “The Trust Edge,” author David Horsager documented consistency as a pillar of trust, saying that without consistency you are not truly trusted. This is an important lesson to remember as a tire and auto service business. No customer likes surprises when

Sell Value or Pay the Price

Tire and auto service businesses lose substantial dollars in revenues and profits each year because their sales and service people do not effectively sell the value of their product and service offerings. Jet Blue Airways is a good example of a company that’s figured out the value equation. The airline focuses on the customer experience,

Sell Value or Pay the Price

Tire and auto service businesses lose substantial dollars in revenues and profits each year because their sales and service people do not effectively sell the value of their product and service offerings. If you have employees regularly interfacing with customers in a sales capacity, it’s a safe bet your business is not immune to this

Finding the Formula

The six essential success traits of top-performing tire and service salespeople.

How Fit Is Your Customer Service?

As is the annual tradition, countless individuals (perhaps you) have made a new year resolution to get in shape. That’s great and as I posted in 5 Resolutions For A More Successful New Year regular exercise should definitely be part of your overall success plan. But what about your business? Have you ever considered the