When coaching is mentioned, it’s usually related to sports. However, businesses across all industries are realizing that coaching isn’t exclusive to sports teams; it applies to everyday business as well. It applies to your business — and it makes profitable sense.

Coaches inspire, build up skills and develop an actionable plan their team can execute.

An OEC Performance Coach is no different. An OEC Performance Coach doesn’t come in and tell you what to do; they show you why you should do it. A trainer would come in, tell you what buttons to click and then leave. A Coach takes the time to educate your team on best practices, identify strengths and weaknesses and lay a foundation for sustained success and continued growth in your parts department. Most importantly, a Coach fosters departmental growth and personal development. Your success is a Coach’s success.

At OEC, we pride ourselves on our definition of the term, “Coach.” Because that’s exactly what OEC Performance Coaches do – they coach. You may often hear us correct dealers who call us “trainers” or “consultants”, because they’re so much more than that. Our Coaches are in the weeds with you, fighting the same fight. No trainer or consultant is going to have that kind of investment in your success.

Everybody needs a coach once in a while. Heck, even Tom Brady has a quarterback coach, someone who analyzes his technique and provides insight on how to change things up to make him a better player, a better teammate, a better winner. That’s the difference between coaching and training.

Will coaches be a distraction to my counter staff?

Our goal is to work alongside your parts counter staff. Our experience in hundreds of dealerships across the country means we know when to provide advice and when you need to work. When time allows, we discuss and strategize how to get your dealership selling more parts. If your counter staff is working, taking orders and talking to shops, we listen and observe to provide real-time coaching.

What do coaches bring to the table that I don’t already know?

We know the OEC solutions inside and out, and likely other programs as well. We work with dealers and shops every single day and implement best practices and success stories that are proven to work.

Lots of companies claim to have “the answers.” They rarely do. We know our customers are smarter about their day-to-day than we are. It’s not necessarily about knowing more than your counter people, it’s about educating them on how to take full advantage of the tools already available to them, and having the expertise to add new tools where necessary.

 

Will my inside and outside sales reps use coaching?
We sure hope so! A warm introduction is always suggested to set the stage of consultative help. Your staff needs to know coaching is for them – to help them grow and to make more money. It helps the staff hear you explain that you are investing in them and their personal development, as well as the parts department’s growth. That being said, we have found the more committed leadership is to this process, the more the department will get out of it.

Coaching isn’t about telling people how to do their jobs. A good coach will be the first to acknowledge and recognize if your team is already good at their job. You bring in a coach to educate your team how to get better use out of the programs already available to them. Bottom line: your coach’s job is to help all staff members work smarter (not harder) and sell more parts.

Even if your team is apprehensive at first, it doesn’t take a coach long to become part of the team. A coach is there to help your team grow in their careers (and make more money selling parts), so you shouldn’t be too worried about them getting along with a coach.

 

What if we are too busy for outside consulting?

If you think your parts department is too busy to get help, then you definitely do need help. Coaching helps your team to work smarter. And regardless of what you are doing, you should always have time to work smarter.

 

 

Make sure whatever solution you look into will help improve your business without including more work for you or your team. You’d like to look for a solution with easy to read graphs, integrates with your current solutions, and ideally has one-click access to all your parts data within a simple dashboard.

For example, PSXLink has easy-to-read reports and dashboards to help you get to know customer’s buying behavior better and make quick decisions on pricing strategies to capitalize on opportunities. With PSXLink, in one-click, you can access all your parts department data to quickly monitor and understand where your business stands at that very moment.

 

Having a proactive approach toward your shops is key to retaining relationships with them. Business Intelligence solutions help to understand their buying behaviors in detail and stay ahead of the competition to ensure that you’re able to sustain and grow your business with them.

Worried about getting your team up to speed since change can be difficult?

Find a solution that integrates with your software you are currently using. By eliminating steps in the day-to-day business, you can work more efficiently and your team won’t need an extensive onboarding process. There are also many resources to push your business forward, for example the OEC Customer Success Team, and OEC Performance Coaching team can help make sure that you and your team are using OEC solutions to optimize your business and succeed.

With all of the different software and solutions available to your dealership, it is hard to think of adding an additional tool. Often dealers are left wondering, “is it worth it?”

If you are looking for a solution to help gain deeper insight into your parts department, then you’ve already made the decision that yes, using business intelligence tools can help, and will be worth the investment for your team.

If you don’t know if you need one – or what even business intelligence is – then it will be worth it to read on. With nearly anything, you need to know how to use business intelligence to get anything out of it (start here if you aren’t sure what business intelligence is). In a nutshell, Business intelligence is a way to have a quick and accessible holistic view of your parts department at your fingertips to help drive business goals.

First you have to understand what you want data to tell you about your parts department. If you aren’t sure what to look for, start here, or just shoot us an email and we can help you put together some data points successful dealers look at every day.

 

With business intelligence, your team can drill down and understand customers more deeply, gain insight into buying behaviors, leading to opportunities otherwise left uncovered. If you’re wondering if it’s worth it, then think of what it costs for you to lose a customer.

If you use CollisionLink, losing one collision shop customer can cost $7,300 each month, if you use RepairLink, losing a repair shop customer can cost $700 each month.

What would it mean to your business if you could avoid losing those customers? Data and analytics from a business intelligence solution can help you uncover those customers before they leave, and help to retain those customers before they stop buying. Earning valuable customer relationship credibility, and saving your bottom line with customer retention is most definitely worth the investment for your department’s growth into the future.

You likely have several shop customers that have true potential for sales growth and your team has spent time developing great relationships with them. But aside from those top shops, does your team has the time or the bandwidth to keep track of all their customers on a highly detailed scale?

Without data, it may seem okay since they are still buying parts regularly, but where is the opportunity for growth? BI is able to dig beneath the surface into buying trends and make sure these opportunities are visible and accessible for you to capitalize on them.

Ask your team, the next time they lose a customer, did they have a gut feeling? Did they know they were going to leave? Unfortunately gut feelings are not key indicators that a customer will go elsewhere. With the power of data in easy to read reports, you can put your faith into the numbers instead of your intuition. Your team can act on the insights, rather than wait until they stop buying to take action. The data that is available within a BI platform allows you to look at the entire picture holistically and see the customer story in detail. This allows you to have in-depth conversations with your customers about their buying behavior and remedy the problem before it becomes too late.

As you know, customer satisfaction is of utmost importance to your business. With a lot of competition in the market, it is important to understand the ins and outs of your shop’s behavior and buying habits — even when they are buying a lot — to make sure you can keep them happy and continually buying from you.

LinkIQ is a solution that has easy-to-read reports to get to know customers more intimately, make quick decisions on pricing strategies, and have valuable information for conversations with your customers. If you are able to be proactive in your approach with your shops, you can stay ahead of the competition and ensure that you’re able to grow with them.

You have a successful wholesale business which means you also have a lot of customer accounts. Due to the volume of accounts, you’re often at risk for potentially dropping the ball with one or more of them.

Even if your wholesale business runs like a well-oiled machine, it’s always best to think ahead about opportunities to grow your business rather than resting on your laurels.

There are systems in place that help you track the parts business with your shops. Dealerships use DMS programs to perform this function, however the reports can be cumbersome to run and you still need to sift through the information and take time to understand what it’s telling you about your business.

A BI solution is specifically built to take the hard work out of the process. Not all solutions are identical, so you’ll have to do your research to see which solution fits best with your business objectives. Choose a solution that enables you to quickly understand your parts data to help meet your business goals without adding more applications or workflows. You don’t want to work harder, just smarter.

PSXLink allows you to quickly pull month-over-month data or have reports delivered to your inbox with all the information you need to make smart and fast decisions for your parts business. PSXLink helps you understand customer buying behaviors and take action before those customers stop buying, or provides the insights so your team can engage with your customers to capture more OE parts business. You get exactly the information you need and want, when you want it, to help increase OE parts sales and keep ahead of the trends to capitalize on more opportunities.

Data tells a story – and it’s a good one. When you have the data regarding your customer’s buying behaviors, you are able to see how to sustain or improve your relationships.

For example, if you saw one shop wasn’t sending over orders to your dealership for over a month, you can reach out and try to understand what is going on, so you don’t lose that business.

Data tells a story – and it’s a good one. When you have the data regarding your customer’s buying behaviors, you are able to see how to sustain or improve your relationships. For example, if you saw one shop wasn’t sending over orders to your dealership for over a month, you can reach out and try to understand what is going on, so you don’t lose that business. Not only do your customer relationships improve because of honest, targeted conversations you can have with them, but you are also able to retain customers before they stop buying altogether. Both of these translate into increased customer retention, and an increase in parts sales.

BI programs should give you easy-to-read reporting showing you the cycles of your parts selling business, and the potential opportunities you can capitalize on. You can see the whole picture to better address problems, whereas without the access to this data, you could only guess why a customer stops buying.

Integration through EPC is beneficial; however, your EPC does not integrate with your online parts selling solutions. Sending an order through your EPC does not get program pricing (if available) through your other parts solutions, and it creates an extra step to respond to your buyers. By utilizing a solution like DMS Connect, you have the correct pricing information available directly within the OEC solution dashboards where you can validate your parts in the EPC and then update in DMS Connect to see availability and correct sale price immediately. This ensures program pricing is in affect and eliminates extra steps.

Your goal in a DMS integration solution is to find one that works with your current parts selling software and has key features that you need to work better. A solution like DMS Connect integrates directly with solutions that you may already be using (CollisionLink, RepairLink, D2DLink, D2D Express, and MarketplaceDirect). With a solution like DMS Connect, you get all of your information within solutions you already use, eliminating the need to train your employees on a new system. The right DMS integration solution:

• Showcases important information such as sell price and quantity-on-hand
• Creates quotes without having to go between your DMS platform and your other parts solutions
• Has pricing flow directly from your DMS provider to your OEC solution so you don’t have to update them separately
• Provides the ability to create a quote directly to your DMS, reducing mistakes from re-keying in parts numbers and saving significant time

With the sheer number of parts software solutions available (and necessary to everyday business), the simple goal of selling more parts can easily become cluttered and complicated. So how do you simplify your parts selling goals to get back to what’s important?

With a DMS integration solution, you can have parts inventory and pricing information available to you without having to go between multiple screens to find it. This can save you time, improve processes and lead to accelerated growth to increase sales.

A good integration between your DMS and parts selling solution automatically transfers updated information between the DMS and the parts selling solution.

Having sell price, quantity on hand (QoH), as well as the ability to send quotes directly from your parts selling solution, are key features that enable a DMS integration solution to make your business workflow more efficient.

DMS Connect is the OEC DMS integration solution that brings those key features to your favorite parts locating, and ecommerce solutions. DMS Connect works with CollisionLink, RepairLink, D2DLink, D2D Express, and MarketplaceDirect to bring key DMS information within familiar dashboards, when and where you need it most.

DMS Connect saves you time by streamlining your workflow to focus on selling more OE parts.