5 Keys To Building And Keeping A Team Of Top Service Advisors

So I get a lot of questions and emails asking, hey, what do you do at Chris Collins Inc. I love your videos, I watch them all the time. But what do you guys do? And I'm not really good at bragging or talking about what we do. And so I just want to tell you right off the top what we do is we have the new stuff for service managers and service advisors who have the best service manager training in the industry. It's unlike anything else out there. We have a service manager 20 group coaching group that we run and we have the best service advisor training out there, at least in my opinion. Although there is good service advisor training done by other people. But we like ours the best because of course it's ours. But that's what we do. We help solve the puzzle of fixed absorption and we help service managers get the resources they need to become the best leaders and managers that they can and to train their advisors to be top dog service advisors. So that's what we do here at Chris Collins Inc. Now in this video I want to talk about how you can get the best advisors and maintain them. We call them the top dog service advisors. But what you want is those advisors that are really, really good with customers and really, really good with sales. So I'm going to go through the five keys with you in this video. Now the first key for you as a manager is you need to set higher expectations for, for your service advisors. Because if you are going to stay where you're at right now and not get better, then that really isn't a recipe for success. If we want to get better, we need to set higher expectations. So I want you to look at, take a couple minutes and print a rap report or an advisor performance report and look at your service advisors and look at the numbers they're doing. The starting point or the jumping off point is $30,000 in CP for a service advisor. Service advisors a minimum should be doing 30,000 DOL in CP. If your advisors aren't at that, then you really need to think about training your advisors and upgrading your team. If they are at that, then you need to set a number higher. But you need to up your expectations. Now when you up your expectations, you need to up your expectations of advisors coming in that you hire also. So whenever I interview a service advisor, I ask them to bring their numbers in with them so I can see where they're at compared to my advisors and I also want to see if they're the number one or number two advisor in the current service drive. That they're working because the best judge of future performance is past performance. You're not going to take the last place service advisor out of six at the Ford store across town and turn them into your top advisor. So number one and number two in their current service drive, if they're not that, I'd rather take a waitress that gave me really, really good customer service and trained them to be an advisor, then think that I can take last place somewhere and make them my number one advisor. So up your expectations is number one. Number two is know who's good in your market, who are the top advisors in your market. It surprises me that a lot of times I'll meet a service manager and a dealer and they're in a little market with maybe 10 dealerships in that market and they don't know who the other good advisors are in town. You need to learn who they are. One way you'll learn who they are is when you're asking advisors to bring their numbers with them. You'll start to see from the rap reports who the other top advisors are in the market. But you need to know who the best advisors are in your market and then you need to try to recruit them. Number three is you want service advisors that are people collectors and technician collectors. If they're a really, really good advisor, they're going to have a customer base of customers. They're going to follow them no matter what it is and they're gonna have technicians that are gonna follow them because technicians want to work for the best advisors. So you want advisors that are collectors of technicians and of customers. And one thing in our industry, we know it's hard to find good technicians. A really good way to find good technicians is good advisors. Technicians love to work for good advisors. The number four key is pay plan. Don't change your pay plan. If you've been in this industry more than a few years, you should be able to devise a service advisor pay plan that you don't have to change. One of the biggest gripes I hear from service advisors when I'm interviewing them, trying to steal them from the competition is, oh, they just changed my pay plan again for the third time this year. If you're trying to manage through your pay plan, you need to get on service manager university and learn how to make a great pay plan. But learn how to manage your advisors not by pay plan. You can't constantly change your pay plan every time you want your advisors to do something. You need to have a good balance of customer satisfaction and of performance in your pay plan but you shouldn't have to change it for years. And that's a great recruiting tool with the best advisors out there because they don't want their pay plan changed. If you think about it, most of the best advisors are family oriented and they have kids and they like security and so they don't feel secure when you're constantly changing their pay plan and they're constantly trying to figure out how much they're going to make. So one key is get good at pay plans. Have one service advisor pay plan and don't change it and talk about that and tout that because it's a great recruiting tool for your dealership. And then the last one is create a culture of constant improvement. One thing that I've learned over the years is that the best advisors attract other great advisors. And the best way to have a team of really, really good advisors is to train them, have training that they're going through and you offer them and, and create a culture where once a week you have a meeting where you talk about what the top guy is doing to have the best customer satisfaction, what he's doing because he sells more alignments than anybody else. But you need to create a culture of constant improvement and you need to offer training to these advisors. They're like athletes, they need to be on the tip of the best stuff and they constantly need to be motivated. It's really hard as an advisor to go out there every day, right customers and face rejection and customers expectation and this new consumer has really, really high expectations and not have tools and motivation to face that. So you want to offer them great training, great motivation and be a really, really good leader that really inspires constant improvement in your service drive by them sharing with each other and by offering training now I'm going to do something for you. Most of the time I just send out one of these videos a month. What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a video for you right after this and I'm going to email you in a couple days. That's going to be a training video just for your advisors. And in that video I'm going to talk about the keys to being a successful advisor. And it's customer collecting and trust. I'm going to go through some great things, but I'm going to send that to you as a gift that you can plan an advisor meeting to start this off and start this constant improvement. I suggest that you have a meeting at least once a week that you get on my virtual interactive system for advisors and play a video every week and talk about it and role play it and create that constant improvement. But I want to get you kick started so I'm going to make a video for you that you can play for your advisors and kind of start this conversation about what it is about to be a really, really good service advisor. So thank you for watching. I hope this was motivation for you and go out there and do a great job on your service drive and if you need anything, we're here for you. Thank you very much.