When you advertise, offer deep discounts in coupons and do all the normal things that the convention of past business have taught you to do, you are effectively, buying more business. Industry averages for direct mail campaigns indicate a response rate of 3% to 5%.

Assuming a customer base of 10,000 names at a cost of fifty cents per mailing, you will spend $5,000 in order to attract or reactivate 300 to 500 customers. Simple arithmetic tells us that you have spent between $10.00 and $16.66, depending on response rate per customer. For the purpose of general thought provocation, and because every dealer cost base and gross profit level is different, I will simply ask you to calculate your own results from past experience in direct mail. Of the people who did come in with the mail piece in hand, what was the additional average $ per RO generated?

I’m hopeful that you have special operation codes for the purpose of tracking direct mail effectiveness so that you may determine what your mail piece is generating for you. In most cases, you will have attracted the customer through some form of coupon for oil change special, etc. If this is the case, you likely have near zero gross on the coupon item; therefore, you must be able to track the additional work, beyond the coupon, to know what was generated to offset the expense of the campaign. Alternatively, let's look at spending those same dollars on effective and proven salesmanship training with the following traits:

• The dollars spent in process-oriented training do not expire or have shelf life like a coupon mailer would.
• You are not trying to draw people in from the cold who might only respond to coupons; but are more interested in doing a better job with the people who are already your active customers.
• The cost recovery of the same investment is much faster. Please read below for a demonstraton of this statement.

I will demonstrate using very conservative figures, the advantage of training with only an increase of .2 (2/10) hours per RO.

Cost recovery of training

Labor rate - $80.00
Gross profit percentage - 72%
Increased Hours per RO - 0.2
Number Of CP RO's per day - 30
Daily Increase in Sales from training - $345.60
Investment in growing your business - $5,000.00
Number of days to recovery investment - 14

Contact Us today to start learning how the power of training can work for your business.