The four buckets of responsibility placed on automotive retail managers

Welcome to the latest episode of Straight to the Point with host, Frank J. Lopes. In this segment, Lopes continues his conversation with automotive sales training expert and founder of the Auto Training Academy, Damian Boudreaux. Boudreaux has trained automotive managers and sales leaders across the world, and he is also the sales coach for automotive sales record-holder, Ali Reda. 

In part one, Boudreaux shared three aspects of becoming a high-performance salesperson. These aspects included understanding how they do business, who they are at their best, and a clear direction for their career path. In part two, Lopes shifts the conversation with Boudreaux from salespeople to a focus on automotive managers.

Boudreaux opens by talking about the differences between managers and coaches. According to Boudreaux, managers have four buckets of management in which they are simultaneously responsible. 

The first bucket is productive activity. This bucket generates income and holds people accountable. This bucket is measurable based on performance, data, and tangible outcomes.

The second bucket is unproductive tasks. This segment of management covers time-consuming meetings, resolving divisions, or tackling various problems. Managers are responsible for this bucket even though its elements don’t bring value to developing others or towards selling more vehicles. 

The third bucket is education, training, and certification. Educating team members can be extremely challenging for managers because many of them weren’t taught how to educate others. Dealers will often promote their top-performing salesperson to the position of manager based on their performance instead of their ability to lead and teach others. 

The fourth and final bucket involves putting out fires and babysitting. This is another unproductive segment that falls in the laps of managers. Lopes makes the observation that automotive managers often need the same skill set as a second-grade teacher. Boudreaux agrees and says that managers must be willing to manage team members differently based on specific needs and personalities.

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