The Right Structure

Post by: Paul Rogers

The right structure holds you and your people accountable and is essential to your success.

Mark Samuel describes accountability as: “Taking action consistent with your desired outcomes”
The ‘desired outcome’ of any Internet initiative should be to sell more products to more people at less cost. Defining your structure should support this. Your chosen structure needs to focus on the items that directly result in more sales, such as:

- Lead Response
- Prospect Follow-up
- Appointment Setting
- Customer Interaction
- Closing Sales
- Delivering vehicles

But your structure needs to also focus on other tasks that are essential, but do NOT directly result in producing revenue. These might include;

- Web site maintenance (Specials; Pricing; Inventory; Vehicle Descriptions; etc.)
- Pre-owned inventory photos
- Monitoring the Return-on-Investment (ROI) of specific lead sources
- Investigating additional lead sources (Aggregators; Online Classifieds; Links; Search-Engine Marketing; Partner Web Sites; etc.)
- Feedback to upper management so that they understand the effectiveness and value of the Internet initiative

Does your current structure allow for all of these things to occur? Does it hold everyone accountable for their actions? Do the bulk of your (and your people’s) daily activities lead you to achieving your ‘desired outcomes’? Are the results of your Internet initiative continuously improving, even in a down market? Can you specifically point out to your management team improvements in sales, gross profit, return-on-investment, cost-per-sale or response time, and attribute those improvements to your chosen Internet structure?

These are the questions that you need to be asking yourself and make the necessary adjustments, based on your answers.