How Does Your Sales Staff Measure Up? Benchmark Your Best Against Industry's

Good dealers can name their best salespersons without thinking twice. They can also tell you what the best and worst mean to the bottom line.

Top performers, they say, are more productive, as well as being good stewards of company assets and values.

Conversely, salespersons at the bottom are a constant roll of the dice.

Good dealers can tell you all this after watching their sales staffs over time. But what if you could identify those “best” and “worst” before putting them on the payroll?

Ward's Dealer Business, in conjunction and partnership with Scheig Associates, Inc. is conducting a benchmarking study of dealership sales staffs.

You're invited to participate. All assessments are administered online and there are no fees or travel required.

Participating dealers will have access to their own proprietary results as well as access to the industry-wide data. General results will be published in aggregate only. (Of course, if you want to brag about your own sales staffers' ratings that will be entirely up to you.)

Here's how the study will work:

1. Pick up to five salespersons to take the online assessment.
2. Call 800-477-6635 to sign up or learn more. Participating dealerships will get instructions and confidential, secured access to the online assessment their staff will take.
3. The assessment forms require about 30 minutes to complete. Shortly after your salespersons finish the program, their supervisor will have access to the results.
4. At the conclusion of the study, the industry-wide data will be provided to participating companies first.

Scheig (www.ischeig.com) developed and validated the job-specific, performance-based assessments for this benchmarking project in conjunction with groups of recognized top-performing dealership sales personnel.

The assessments are designed to measure an individual's responses against the responses of those top-tier groups.

Typically, the assessments are used as a pre-employment screening tools to help dealers focus their training investments on those candidates most likely to succeed and perform well.

Because they are entirely performance-based, they also provide insights into where more training or supervision might be beneficial.

“We're excited about it, and anxious to benchmark the ‘best of the best’ to see how they compare,” says Scheig President Mark Tinney. “It will be valuable information.”