Dealerships have never lacked effort when it comes to improving performance. Over the years, leaders have looked at different approaches as a roadmap for growth — growth that can turn insight into a real competitive advantage. But there’s a catch. When new approaches are adopted without being built strategically into your processes, they can hinder your team’s productivity and even worsen the problems they’re meant to solve.
Take our industry’s long-standing productivity problem. For almost three decades, the average salesperson has sold roughly nine new cars per month, a figure that has barely budged. Meanwhile, in the service department, technician productivity benchmarks have started to slip as of late. This is happening even as processes have been improved, training has become more prevalent, and technology has continued to advance. So,
what’s hindering productivity, and which approaches are truly driving progress versus slowing it down?
Which approaches are preventing peak productivity?
The industry’s productivity problem doesn’t stem from cutting corners or poor follow-through. It’s actually the opposite. Many dealerships have taken steps to adjust their teams and processes, but those changes haven’t always yielded the desired outcomes.
To counteract this, many dealerships have tried:
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Hiring More Staff Over the last 15 years, dealers have
hired 46 percent more people to try to combat stagnant or declining productivity — but there’s been no noticeable change. Without connected systems and streamlined workflows, adding headcount often just adds complexity and more chances for errors.
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Adding More Tools
When adding more people fails to boost productivity, the next logical step is often to add more software tools. But these tools are usually introduced in silos to solve isolated problems, forcing employees to juggle multiple systems and data sets in a single workflow. Instead of saving time, teams end up verifying, correcting, or reentering information — ultimately wasting time.
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Using Smarter Tools
When hiring more staff or adding more tools isn’t the answer, the trend to follow seems to be utilizing smarter tools. But this isn’t necessarily the answer either. AI may be the smart tool of the future, but its success hinges on the information it has access to. If smart tools like AI have access to incomplete or inaccurate data, it can lead them to the wrong thing, limiting efficiency rather than enhancing it. AI tools need complete, unified data to effectively perform tasks and increase overall productivity.
While these common approaches may seem like the answer to the industry’s productivity problem, they’re unlikely to deliver the outcomes your dealership is looking for.
The solution to follow? AI powered by a unified data layer.
As operations get more complex, the solution isn’t more tools or more people. Driving productivity comes from a single, comprehensive data set that enables your tools and your team to work efficiently. Leveraging AI tools
powered by a unified data layer can free up your entire team to focus on high-priority tasks, while AI works accurately in the background on time-consuming jobs.
What makes a unified data layer a breakthrough in productivity is that it delivers trust in your AI tools. There’s no risk of missing, inaccurate, or duplicate information because everything is pulled from the same correct data set. With a unified data layer backing your AI, those tools have access to precise information, communicate across departments, and ultimately do the right thing. When this happens, your employees’ capacity increases dramatically.
Let’s put this into perspective: Take the nine-car average of salespeople over the past 30 years. Increasing responsibilities for dealership employees limits how long a salesperson can actually spend selling. This may be due to entering information into the CRM or tracking leads, but the result is the same: There aren’t enough hours in the day to optimally sell or close a deal. By offloading the more repetitive, day-to-day tasks to trusted AI, this opens the door for salespeople to engage customers, nurture interest, and sell more — increasing sales productivity.
The industry may have a productivity problem, but with dealerships implementing the right tools, it’s unlikely to stay that way. More and more dealerships are adopting AI to streamline operations and boost productivity. Those who have implemented a unified data layer have gone a step further to prevent bad data from undermining the efficiency of their AI tools. Ultimately,
a unified data layer is the solution to follow as it enables AI tools to reach their full potential, facilitate productivity, and ensure your customers have an ideal experience.
