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Automotive industry insights, tips, and guides

How Top-Performing Dealers Handle Special Order Parts Tracking

The Parts Tracking Problem That Separates Top Dealers from the Rest Back in the 1970s, Chrysler dealers had to maintain massive printed catalogs and a Rolodex ...

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How Top-Performing Dealers Handle Counter Sales Efficiency: A Benchmarking Guide

The National Automobile Dealers Association started tracking parts department performance metrics back in 1989, and one number has remained stubbornly consisten...

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How Top-Performing Dealers Handle Wholesale Parts Growth Strategy

The Wholesale Parts Myth That's Costing You Money Back in the 1980s, when dealerships were opening a new store roughly every other week, wholesale parts operat...

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How Top-Performing Dealers Optimize Parts Department Staffing Ratios

Seventy-three percent of dealers are overstaffed in parts by 20% or more, and they have no idea. That's not a guess. That's a pattern you see across dealership...

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How Top-Performing Dealers Handle the Obsolescence Reserve Your Accountant Asks About

Seventy percent of parts departments are sitting on between $50,000 and $200,000 in dead inventory that will never sell at retail. Your accountant knows this. T...

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How Top-Performing Dealers Handle Service Menu Pricing Strategy

Most dealers are leaving 15 to 20 percent of potential service gross on the table because they treat menu pricing like it's set in stone. They lock in a labor r...

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How Top-Performing Dealers Handle Fluid and Filter Maintenance Menus

How many service advisors at your dealership are actually selling fluid and filter maintenance as a bundled menu, versus just writing ROs for whatever the custo...

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How Top-Performing Dealers Handle Recall Campaign Execution at the Store Level

It's Tuesday morning, 7:45 AM. You've got a recall notice from Toyota hitting your inbox. Fifty-three vehicles on your lot and customer database are affected. Y...

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How Top-Performing Dealers Handle the CSI Feedback Loop in Fixed Ops

How many of your service advisors actually read the CSI feedback your customers leave? Not the ones in the reports your GSM forwards to the group. The actual c...

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How Top-Performing Dealers Handle Declined Service Work Follow-Up

When a Customer Says No to Your Service Recommendation, What Happens Next? Here's a question that keeps service directors up at night: Of the service work your...

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Dispatch Board Discipline: How Top-Performing Dealers Stay Organized

It's 8:45 a.m. on a Wednesday and your dispatch board looks like a highway pile-up. Three technicians are sitting idle because the service advisor hasn't assign...

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How Top-Performing Dealers Benchmark and Optimize Customer Transportation Programs

You're sitting in your service director's office on a Tuesday morning when a customer calls for the third time about their loaner. They've had the car for four ...

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