Hardball: Are You Playing to Play or Playing to Win by George Stalk

Author:George Stalk
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-08-17T07:37:00+00:00

CONVINCING THE DEALERS TO PLAY

Although the players in the corporate organization were on board with the plan, the Ford growth team still had to face their toughest and most important audience: the Ford dealers. They are a fiercely independent group, most of them highly successful, who love to sell cars but are less than thrilled about selling service. Soon after gaining approval, the growth team decided to make a live presentation to the most influential Ford dealers at a Dealers Council meeting in Atlanta. "We had one shot at them," said a member of the growth team. "We knew we had to present a convincing program and show the dealers what was in it for them."

Well before the meeting, members of the growth team visited each of the key dealerships to gather sales data and other information. Back at the office, they created a forecasting model for each dealership, and used it to calculate how much an increase in customer loyalty would contribute to the dealer's bottom line.

At the meeting, the team talked the dealers through just three slides-the customer loyalty comparisons, the elements of the Honda service approach, and the customer sales and ownership life cycle. They told the dealers that Ford could create decisive advantage if they brought service into their strategy. Ford sells the car to the customer. Ford gets to know the customer and his needs. Ford has the first shot at gaining his service loyalty. Other maintenance providers and garages don't have this advantage. They meet the customer only when he needs a routine maintenance or has a service problem. In short, service is Ford's business to lose.

The lights came up. A Ford executive sat down next to each dealer and, together, they looked at the forecasting model on a laptop and reviewed the dealer's service results. The numbers spoke even more eloquently than the presenters had. The dealers realized they could take in as much as $200,000 more in annual service revenue, with almost no additional expense.

The growth team nudged the dealers toward a decision. "We didn't want to embarrass them," one growth team member explained. "Dealers are proud. We had to get them to say, `I'm crazy not to do this"' By the end of the meeting, the Dealers Council had endorsed bundled service.

With the approval of their most influential dealers, the Ford team presented the initiative to the entire dealer system. "We knew we had to do it fast," recalled a team member. "We had to complete the launch in less than a year or our management would pull the plug on the effort. We also had to be fundamental. This thing really had to work or we were going to be dead meat."

The team grabbed Ford managers from other programs to help, scraped up money from wherever they could, and pushed themselves to the limits of their energy. They took a road show to two hundred locations nationwide and met with some four thousand dealers. They were more successful than they had hoped; more than 3,400 of them signed on.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.