Optimize Your Dealership for Future Growth

Agricultural, construction, rental, and material handling equipment dealerships are no strangers to seasonal demand fluctuations. The key to being fully prepared for the next busy season is to focus on efficiency once the dust settles. In this blog, we’ll outline ways to optimize your dealership for future growth during the off-season.

5 Ways Dealer Management Systems Help Optimize Future Growth

1. Evaluate and Analyze

Enhancing efficiency begins with assessing how the busy season went. Dive into your data, track key performance indicators, and identify areas that exceeded expectations or need improvement. Your dealership management system should be a valuable asset in this process, providing you with key insights and reports into sales, inventory, departmental metrics, and customer trends. Viewing these on easily and customizable dashboards makes them readily accessible and monitored. Reports such as:

Service

• • Service Productivity Reports to show hours worked vs hours billed and the recovery percentage for the service department.
  • Technician Profitability Reports to show the margins your techs are producing in service.
  • Service Absorption Rates to gauge the percentage of gross profit from service compared to your overall dealership expenses.
  • Service Gross Margin Percentage to show to track trends for gross margin in regards to the service department.

Parts

• • Inventory Fill percentages to make sure your fill rates are at acceptable levels, by invoice or by individual part numbers.
  • Parts Turnover Ratio to make sure you are not stocking too high or low an overall inventory amount.
  • Parts Sales Margins to track trends and make sure pricing is set at levels acceptable to meet goals.
  • Inventory Obsolescence Amounts to track slow-moving and obsolescent parts for disposal or return.

Rental

• • Financial utilization reports for specific time periods to ensure the rental assets are providing an acceptable utilization percentage based on cost.
  • Time utilization reports for specific time periods to ensure rental assets are at sufficient percentages for on-rent time.
  • ROI (Return on Investment) report to view the entire fleet’s return and utilization percentages by each asset.

Units and Wholegoods

• • Margin reporting by make and model to know your most profitable vendors and models of units sold.
  • Unit sales quantities by model or type to know your highest amounts of specific models or types of equipment sold.
  • New and used unit turnover ratios to ensure your inventory is staying fresh and identify older units to be moved.
  • Units contribution to total sales to track the overall percentage the wholegoods department makes up for all sales revenue.

2. Enhance Customer Relationships

The off-season is the perfect time to maintain and develop relationships, which are the lifeblood of your business.  You can take advantage of the slowdown in your customers’ workload to get their full attention and make sure they understand the benefits and services your dealership offers, as well as how you set yourself apart. Monitor trends in customer sales by department and know your customer’s ranking.  You can focus on customers who are increasing their revenue by department and pay closer attention to those who may need more assistance due to recent declines in their usage of your products and services.

3. Employee Training

Well-trained employees with the latest industry knowledge can make a significant difference in customer satisfaction and overall dealership profitability.  Provide training opportunities for your team to enhance their product knowledge and customer service skills. Check with your dealer management system provider to see if they have resources available to assist your team with utilization and optimization of your software. This can also present different time-saving and profit-enhancing actions within each department and how they understand the software’s offerings.

4. Embrace Technology

Embracing technology in today’s digital age can greatly improve your dealership’s profitability and operations.  Your system might need to be integrated with e-commerce platforms for increased sales and smoother online sales. Other areas can be offering customers new ways to interact with your dealership through customer service, inventory lookup, checking account balances and service history online.

5. Prepare for Maintenance and Repairs

With the busy season winding down, the service department is often busy performing preventative maintenance on customer-owned equipment as well as dealership-owned equipment. To ensure faster turnaround times on maintenance, make sure parts inventory is in stock.

In addition to this make sure you have a well-organized dealer management system for scheduling maintenance and repairs.  Managing the service calendar can help prevent delays allowing you to turn repairs around quicker.

The post-busy season period is an invaluable opportunity to revamp, improve, and prepare for greater success during the next one. Your dealer management system is your trusted companion in this journey, providing the data and tools you need to enhance efficiency and customer satisfaction. Evaluate your performance, see which areas of the dealership you can streamline, and embrace innovation. When done correctly you’ll be well equipped to propel your dealership to greater success.

If you are looking to work with an equipment dealership management system partner that can help optimize your dealership’s future growth, contact our award-winning team today via email at sales@hbssystems.com or call 800-367-6376 for a demo to see why more equipment dealerships trust HBS Systems as a partner for the life of their business.