Balancing Professional and Personal Wellbeing at Dealership
As they say, with great power comes great responsibilities. The job of dealership personnel is the one that demands the ability to work long hours and sometimes seven days a week. It requires a high level of patience, skills to sell more products to meet financial objectives, and negotiate and create leverage with as many lenders as possible. Additionally, the Sales and F&I teams are also responsible for safeguarding the auto dealership from compliance issues and liabilities. With this in mind, balancing the professional and personal wellbeing at dealership needs thoughtful consideration.
Meeting financial goals is just the beginning of your responsibilities toward your employer and yourself. May, recognized as Mental Health Awareness Month, serves as an ideal opportunity to reflect on and enhance your mental, physical, and professional well-being. The relentless pressure to excel in sales, enhance customer experiences, and manage paperwork efficiently can greatly affect both your personal and professional health. Let’s delve deeper into some practical strategies to improve your professional and personal wellbeing at dealership.
Nurturing Your Mental Health: Essential Practices for Your Wellbeing
Staying positive is essential for a healthy and happy life. However, amidst your daily responsibilities and stress, you might easily overlook your mental health. Consequently, it impacts your growth, productivity, physical fitness, emotions, and even relationships. Giving due consideration to improve or maintain your mental health would let you thrive in your personal as well as professional realm. Following are some of the valuable tips to try: –
1. Bring out your artistic side:
Experiment with trying new things such as painting, writing a poem, or trying new cuisine. Besides helping you find your calm, it would help you broaden your horizons, gain a new perspective, and increase your imagination or creativity. Think of a situation when you meet a difficult customer. Would it not be valuable to connect and engage with your customer with a fresh outlook and common ground? You never know what could resonate with your prospective consumer. It could just be something as simple as a new recipe you tried from their home country.
2. Take a break:
A change of scene or a change of pace is essential for your mental health. It could be a five-minute pause from your routine paperwork or a break before you start your next meeting. It will give you time to revive and collect yourself to begin afresh and perform your best.
3. Meditation or relaxing techniques:
In the digital age, not everything is nerve-wracking. Some useful podcasts and apps such as Headspace and Calm could bring a library of meditations at your fingertips and help you manage stress triggers. The quick dose of 15 minutes might make a huge difference throughout your day by keeping you composed and productive.
Enhancing Physical Strength and Persistence
1. Being physically active:
Exercise improves your mood, reduces stress, and helps you stay energetic whether you are with the customers or conducting a meeting with your team. Not to mention, improved memory, prolonged cognitive stamina, and high creativity are some of the benefits that will show direct advantages in your department. Those benefits would let you better assess customers’ needs, create needs awareness, and manage sales objections.
2. Fitness regime to make smart decisions:
Your demanding job often needs quick and regular decision-making related to your customers, teammates, or suppliers. Hence, adding a regular exercise regime would let you keep your thought-process, learning, judgment, and decision-making skills sharp.
Strategic Approaches for Professional Advancement
1. Invest in yourself and your team:
Investing in your and your team’s professional development through comprehensive training could make a tremendous difference in performance. The Sales, Service, and Finance and Insurance (F&I) Managers work directly with consumers, so their role is vitally important when it comes to understanding consumers’ needs, encouraging them to buy valuable products, and at the same time maximizing the dealership’s profit. Therefore, professional training is of utmost importance for the success of your store. Mistakes in one of those departments could cost you more than a sale. It could potentially impact customer satisfaction, loyalty, increase acquisition costs, and severely affect your reputation.
2. Connect with industry leaders and experts:
Staying in regular touch with experienced and optimistic people or companies can influence your perspective positively and help you get valuable recommendations for personal and professional development. Additionally, connecting with consultancy such as ours could help you stay ahead of the curve, stay informed of the latest and beneficial F&I products and custom packages, and considerably drive productivity and growth.
3. Use technology to your benefit:
Find your customers where they spend most of their time. The answer is not a hard guess, the internet. With more young shoppers, your digital presence is critical to your success. Adapting the technology for your benefit is a smart move. We have been working with an advanced tool that can offer dealers real-time insights into who has started shopping, stopped shopping, or continued shopping in the past 24 hours. The AI-powered tech monitors 90% of internet-connected devices across more than 61 billion URLs specific to automotive, including the 3rd party classified sites, all dealership websites, every OEM website, automotive research sites, and automotive google searches. Get in touch with us to learn how we can help you implement this tool at your dealership.
4. Stay updated about the regulations and industry trends:
While the dealership’s finance and insurance procedures may not vary a lot, administrative changes often impact the regulations, enforcements and shape the future of the auto industry.
For example, under the new administration, more restrictive regulations, including automotive financing and greater scrutiny, are likely on the horizon for the auto industry, which could have a considerable impact on the dealers. So, to navigate the challenges, you would need to be primed and updated. Being in the company of like-minded, informed people would support your efforts to stay abreast of the facts. You may also take advantage of our ‘Ask us Anything’ free consultation program to be in the know.
We can support your success:
The PRO Consulting team believes that the change is possible. We have helped dealership teams with practical strategies and comprehensive training for significant productivity and profitability improvements. Furthermore, our strategies and training programs have shown proven results in raising efficiency and increasing sales. Let’s connect to discuss custom solutions to grow the profitability of your unique dealership.