How Service Advisors Should Negotiate Their Pay Plan

Hi Chris. I'm a 20 year old in a small town and I'm wondering how should I negotiate a pay plan with my local dealer? I was thinking of starting off between hourly and commission, then going to full commission down the line. So I'm more motivated to work hard. I'm ready to jump in and be the best advisor I can be. What kind of mentality should I have in a dealership where some of the advisors and techs are 20 to 30 years older than me? It's a small town of about 10,000 or an hour outside of Kansas City and the dealer sells Chevy and Buicks. Thanks.

You know, people say they pick their nose a lot.

I haven't heard that joke.

No.

Semi funny joke. What do you think about that?

Well, I think the first thing that I would say is If I'm the 20 year old and everyone's 20 to 30 years older, I, I'd embrace the advantage that you have. You speed. Love it. You can run circles around everybody. They won't know, trust me, they'll take.

A long lunch, so take lunch at a different time than they do. Get there earlier. They'll be too lazy to write the night drops. I used to go in on Sundays and write the night drops.

The great thing is that nobody even will notice or care because they're just so set in their ways. You can run the circles around them and they're none the wiser. Like they don't even notice.

I'm not, I'm not quite sure about your experience, but if, if I was going to be a service advisor, I would want the pay plan with, with more commission than a base. I would take the highest commission I could get and less of a base. Now if you haven't written service before or you're really unsure, you might, you might want to negotiate the base. But I want the, I want the commission. And then there's a difference. Some, some service departments are going to pay you on sales, some are going to pay on gross. And you kind of need to understand that. But at the end of the day, most service departments in a dealership want their service advisor compensation to be under 8% of the gross. So you can kind of have that as a rule of thumb. But I wouldn't be afraid to ask for the numbers. Like I always, when I'm interviewing an advisor and they're like, hey, can I see the numbers? I always am like, okay. And then they're like, can I see the pay plan? And they're figuring out they have their numbers because I would never interview an advisor without their numbers. They're looking at our numbers and then they're looking at the pay plan. And so that's probably the best way to do it.

Yeah, I think so too. But that kind of leads us into our topic now.

We're going to talk about the top five service advisor career moves. How can you move into the fast lane as a service advisor? So yeah, the first one is what we were just talking about, which is commission. You want a performance based pay plan.

That's right. You get a report card every month. Your paycheck is your pass or fail. And I think that there's. If you're going to be a top advisor, one thing they have to be able to do is honestly assess yourself and how you've done. And if you've done a really good job and you have a great paycheck at the end of the month and it means that you've done great and if you have a pretty crappy paycheck at the end of the month, what does that mean that you've done crappy? And I think that that's the thing is when it's performance based, you're not using excuses of salary or anything like that. What you're saying is that my results are dictated in my pay. And I think that that's the thing that I'll see consistent with most advisors is that they want that they want the reward, they want all the glory for the perfect job and they'll take the lumps if they didn't because they know they'll learn from it. And that's one of the fast track lanes.

Yeah. And so then understand that the dealership, your manager look at you as a percentage of the performance. So if your performance is up or the department's performance is up, your pay is going to be up, but it's relative to the increase. So you're never really expendable because you're producing what you're getting paid. Plus plus plus.

Right. You're paying for yourself back to, I.

Mean 8% or less usually would go to the advisors of the gross. Number two is quality, not quantity. That was one of yours. I thought that was good. Quantity over quality. It's amazing when we'll do this exercise with service advisors how to maximize your pay plan that most advisors can make more money, have better quality of life, collect more customers, make friends and collect more customers by writing less.

Yep, consistently we see that.

And so whether you're a service advisor or a manager, shop owner, whatever the magic number for advisors is 12 and sometimes in high line we'll have them write 8. Like just imagine the customer experience if an advisor is only writing eight customers a day. How they can over communicate over deliver. I mean it's, that's what customers expect.

Yeah. And it's certainly what they deserve too. And I think that that's a big thing. I was just in a store last week and we were talking about, you know, petting the dog and then like what, what the next level is and elevating that. And I think that when you've got eight ros a day and you've got an 11 hour day, like you do the math, you can spend over an hour per person. You know that not every RO is going to take an hour of your time. So on the really, really challenging ones where the customers aren't used to getting all the information, you can over communicate with them.

And hey, if you have a little extra spare time, make some TikTok videos and send us the links.

I love it. We got videos to watch for sure.

Number three is sell cars for two months.

How would you advise them to go about that?

I think that the, the thing that I would want to work with that is I would want to do it fairly early in my advisor career and I came from the sales a service and I think that one of the things that I will tell you is that the first thing that I understood is that being a service advisor wasn't a sales job. Just selling cars lets you see, okay, so this is sales, right. This is what happens and you have to overcome 5 nos, right? To get somebody to buy a car from you and everything like that. And you're like wait a minute, you appreciate the relationship that you have to build and service in the long term. And then it also lets you to. I think it's really important as a service advisor to see what customers look like when they're in the ether and understand what their expectations are when they buy a car, what their service experience is going to be like. So I think that having that perspective makes you a better service advisor if you understand what the sales department goes through. It's also a little bit about the silos too. Right. Because there's usually an adversarial thing between sales and service and if you've done both jobs you have just much better perspective.

I think too one thing is to appreciate salespeople that for the most part they have to go get customers where your customers are coming in.

It's way harder to sell cars, way harder just mentally because you know, most of the time your commission and oh.

My gosh, talk about varying paychecks. Yeah, that's crazy.

Okay. Number four is think like the owner of the dealership. Nothing will move you ahead quicker in your career than to think about the company and not yourself. Put the company first. Think about the customer's perception of the company, think about representing the company and you will become invaluable for the company. But I think a lot of advisors and even the tone of some of the questions we get is me, me, me, me, me, me.

So I think the big thing is that if you're starting to think like the owner, eventually you could become the owner.

That's good. And then the fifth one.

Avoid parts.

Oh, parts.

You probably weren't going to end up in parts anyways. But I have seen career paths go to parts.

Not a lot of parts managers become general managers.

I don't know if I've ever seen it.

I'm sure it's happened, but it doesn't happen a lot. So if you want to move up and your goal is to be a.

Dealer someday or general manager or whatever.

Sales is kind of where you want to be. Somebody who's more interested in sales than parts, right?

Yeah.

Now I would say if you're a parts manager, you're in parts. Go write service and go sell also. And because it's very rare. In fact, Gary was one of the only parts managers I ever worked with that had worked in service, worked kind of in sales and understood from a parts manager's point of view, the whole picture. And that's why he sold so much in his boutique and was so progressive with what he did was because his, his context wasn't just parts, it was marketing and, and displaying things. And you know, he really pushed the envelope on all that stuff. So number one, be performance based commission. Number two, quality over quantity. Number three, go sell cars for a couple of months. Learn the the other side of it in the circle of life. And number four is think like an owner. The number five is avoid parts. It's a good list.

Thanks so much for watching this clip of Service Driving Revolution. We're uploading new stuff every day, so. So make sure you subscribe and click the bell icon so you don't miss out. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on the show, call 8333-ASK SDR and we'll answer your question on the show. That's 8333 Ask SDR for special deals on our books and training head over to offers.chriscollinsinc.com now that's offers.chriscollinsInc.com I hi, I'm Chris Collins, and I'll see you in the next video.