Upcoming Events: All About Webinars

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It’s that time again, here at Learning Without Scars.  It is time for a new post on our upcoming events and this week it is all about webinars.

Next week, beginning on Monday, June 8, 2015, we are continuing our Product Support Selling and Parts & Service Marketing Program.

We will be hosting webinars on Monday through Thursday, at 9:00 a.m. PST and 11:00 a.m. PST.  All Product Support Selling webinars are at 9:00 a.m. PST, while the Parts & Service Marketing are at 11:00 a.m. PST.

In Product Support, we will have a one hour webinar on each of the following: Presentation, Overcoming Objections, Customer Retention, and Territory Potential.

In Parts & Service Marketing, we will offer a one hour webinar on each of the following: Market Coverage, Customer Retention, Compensation Programs, and Territory Management.

This will wrap up the spring webinar series in its entirety.  We will return in the fall of 2015.

Don’t miss your opportunity to finish your coursework with us!

The time is now.

Parts & Service Marketing – Market Segmentation

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Parts & Service Marketing – Market Segmentation

Marketing is the process of identifying and satisfying customer needs. That process becomes impossible with the thousands and thousands of customers that you have in your assigned area of responsibility (AOR). As a result of that truth, it becomes important to be able to find out what the customer needs and wants, and then to be able to find common elements of their business that will allow you to group them with other customers of common needs and wants.

That is the aim of market segmentation. Market segmentation is the process by which marketeers divide potential customers into smaller groups that are looking for similar benefits from a product or service. The goal is to isolate a group that prefers these features and benefits, and to develop a sustainable differential advantage that satisfies their needs. All of the methods and processes that are required to perform this are covered in the webinar.

We cover the industrial focus, the individual demographics, and the psychographics. We also have to assess the dealer strengths and weaknesses, as well as reviewing the same strengths and weaknesses in the competition. All of this and much more is covered in this comprehensive webinar.

The time is now.

Parts & Service Marketing – Basic Marketing

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Parts & Service Marketing – Basic Marketing

Our Parts & Service Marketing series of webinars begins this Thursday, May 14, 2015, with the introductory course: Basic Marketing.

Marketing is a broadly misunderstood sector of business. It is much more than mailings, promotions, and tradeshows. It is all of the aspects involved in influencing the customer to purchase your products or services.

Marketing is the science of choosing target markets through the use of market analysis and segmentation. This webinar exposes all aspects of marketing: Relationship Marketing, Business Marketing, Social Marketing and Internal Marketing. In Relationship Marketing, we focus on suppliers and customers, and the goal is to build loyalty. The Business Marketing is all aspects of the traditional marketing functions: advertising, promotion and communications. Social Marketing looks at everything that impacts society. For instance, the impact on the environment from the use of clean engine technology. Internal Marketing, is the broad communications to all employees of everything that we are doing in the business.

This webinar covers all the basics of marketing: from the four P’s to the more current addition of SIVA. We cover it all. Without creating the environment where your product or service is understood, you make the job of selling much more difficult. This webinar aims to provide you with the tools to use to make selling more successful.

Service Management – Maintenance Programs

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Service Management – Maintenance Programs

Everyone knows about the repair and rebuild business. That is where the excitement is for technical people. In the product support business, we have two major goals: reduce the owning and operating costs for the machine owner, and protect the residual value of the machine. The first step to understanding how to reduce owning and operating costs is to understand the importance of the maintenance service recommended by the OEM. Most customers view maintenance as the necessary evil of changing fluids and filters. There is much more to it than that. How to develop a maintenance program to reduce those operating costs is the theme in this webinar.

There is a fundamental conflict that has to be dealt with in the labor management group. Maintenance is boring, anyone can do it. In fact the OEM dealer has less than 6.5% of the maintenance market. Nearly 90% of the maintenance is done by a customer mechanic. Yet survey data indicates that nearly 90% of the customers would give the maintenance business to the dealership if their price was less than what the customer currently pays.

This webinar will discuss the methods and processes to follow in order to be able to meet that price and performance need.

Learn How To Make It Matter!

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On Tuesday, 5/12/2015, we are presenting our two “Make It Matter” webinars.

At 9:00 a.m. PST we have PTS-WE-U13: our Parts Management – Make It Matter program.

At 11:00 a.m. PST we have SER-WE-U13: our Service Management – Make It Matter program.

These webinars address the two most important questions we must answer in our Capital Goods Business: What do you provide?  What do you do?  The answers are not as simple as they appear to be.  Everything we do has a profound impact on our customers, suppliers, coworkers, and other stakeholders.  This webinar will present information on how to differentiate yourself within your business, and for your customers.

In other news, we have just released our second Self-Study program, this time for Service Management.  Please learn more about these programs under the Self-Study tab on our website.  The Foundation is now available for both Parts Management and Service Management.

The time is now.

 

Leveraging Assets – SER-WE-U12

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Leveraging Assets – SER-WE-U12

The service department is known to provide repairs, rebuilds, and maintenance services. We manage the labor function to have the highest possible labor efficiency and quality. High performance in a Service Department must maximize efficiency, maximize quality, and satisfy customers.  The first step to understanding and accepting what we have to do is to understand the assets at our disposal. From the technical skills of the mechanics, to the bays and vehicles we work from, and the specialized tooling there is a lot to consider. How to leverage these assets is the theme in this webinar.

Individual employees want to do a good job and they want to be able to provide the highest level of skill possible. We have a responsibility to maintain those skills with professional training programs. From the OEM’s, to specific training within the dealership we will explore all that training entails. It starts with the skills set inventory for each technician, and then a training plan for each person can be developed. We are expected to make money on our labor. What is less understood is that we are intended to be able to recover our costs on all of the tools and technology we use. In this webinar we uncover methods to be able to recover these department costs in a manner that is fair to customers and the company.

Each employee can show off their skills and knowledge especially well if we provide them with the comprehensive training and tools necessary to deliver world class service. We must provide leverage on these assets. This webinar is an important piece of their learning.

Sign up today for this learning opportunity.

The time is now.

Basic Management – PTS-WE-U11and SER-WE-U11

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Basic Management – PTS-WE-U11 and Basic Management – SER-WE-U11

There are some fundamental truths about people and their work: everyone wants to do a good job, everyone can do more than they think they can, and everyone is fundamentally lazy. In management and leadership we have to deal with people and processes. That is the job. You lead people and you manage the process.

The job of the manager or supervisor starts with the basic job function description and moves on to standards of performance. Everyone has to understand what is expected of them, as well as accepting that what is expected of them is both achievable and important. The various aspects of management as exposed in this power webinar.

In dealing with people, you also will need to be able to communicate with the employees.  In this webinar, we explore two of the main forms of communications: praise and criticism. This part of interpersonal relations can be learned. These are skills that can be learned by following a simple plan. We discuss this plan in detail, which has many common elements with both praise and criticism to provide you with better ability in working with your employees.

These webinars are geared towards the management and supervision of the Parts Department and the Service Department (respectively) of the Capital Goods Dealership.  Each one hour program offers the fundamentals of leadership, tailored for each department.

Please join us for this exciting learning opportunity.

The time is now.

Webinars for 7 April, 2015

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Tomorrow morning we kick off our spring series of webinars.

We begin with an hour long webinar for the Parts Department on TeleSelling, at 9:00 a.m. PST.

That is followed by a webinar for the Service Department on Inspections, at 11:00 a.m. PST.

Please register at www.learningwithoutscars.org to begin your training program with us tomorrow morning.

The time is now.

Parts & Service Marketing

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Our Parts & Service Marketing seminar will be taking place in Dallas, Texas on April 13-14.

Back by popular demand, this course is geared towards sales personnel looking to make a difference.

Material will cover:

  • Defining Customers
  • Market Coverage
  • Customer Loyalty
  • Measuring and Managing Success

This seminar offers the fundamentals of Parts & Service Marketing for any personnel that deal with your customers.

For more information, and to register for the seminar, please visit https://learningwithoutscars.org/classes/parts-service-marketing/making-a-difference/.

The time is now.

Training Tidbit – for the Service Department

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Service has changed. Have you? Are you staying current? YOU must maintain your skills and knowledge. That is accomplished through reading and attending learning opportunities. We have management seminars in Dallas in a few weeks. Don’t miss out. The following might provoke some more thinking on your part.

I recently viewed a show on YouTube from BMW showing a technician replacing a radiator core. Nothing very fancy, right? Well, this technician walks up to his tool box and puts on a pair of glasses. Makes adjustments and pushes on them to start. He is standing in front of the car and an image is transposed over the engine compartment and shows in color the items to be worked on and then tells him vocally what to do. When he has completed a step he says “next step.” What a wonderful use of technology. As our world becomes more of a remove and- install of components and things, the technical skills needed from mechanics is reduced; at least for some categories of the work.

One of my many complaints about the operations of a service department that many of you have read over the years is that we have a peanut butter mentality to the work. We charge the same price no matter the skills of the technician, nor the tooling required, nor the degree of difficulty of the work— did we spread it equally, like peanut butter. We don’t schedule labor but we do give completion dates to customers for much of the work. How do we do that when we have variable skills required for the work and variable skills available from the technicians? Peanut butter. This is why we rarely meet completion dates and have lost so much of the available labor market.

We now have new technological tools and new uses of longstanding technology. Who will buy this technology and have it available for use?

We now have new technological tools and new uses of longstanding technology. Who will buy this technology and have it available for use? Hopefully it will be the authorized dealers and distributors.

In another direction, we also have technology roaring to our assistance but it isn’t loud enough yet, as I don’t see many dealers rushing to implement it. It seems that the rental industry has leapt ahead of the authorized distributors in how they treat their technicians. How so?

Well, the technician can stay in the bay and look up on a computer terminal and determine their parts requirement. Okay, some of you are saying that you already do that. Now, let’s start from the make, model and serial number of the machine they are working on and automatically go to a library of schematics and select the appropriate one that will allow them to select the parts they need. Do you do that, too? Oh, and they do that with a touchscreen. You do that, too? Well, then the parts list, which is in a “shopping cart,” is processed as an order in their computer system and prints a pick ticket in the warehouse, their store, so that the parts group can pick the part and deliver it to the technician in their bay. Do you do all that too? I didn’t think so.

It is long past time that we start putting technology to better use. These two illustrations are examples of where and how we can improve labor efficiency on the job. My estimate is that this will increase in labor efficiency by 30 to 60 minutes each day for each technician. Yes, that is right. The time that a technician spends each day walking back and forth to the parts department wastes that much time every day. If you think I am wrong, go watch the floor for a while. In the field it is worse because the technician has to drive to get the parts. And all that time the technician is on the clock.

I think we better get serious, and what better time than now?

The management of a service operation is aimed at two specific major elements: labor efficiency and quality. If we can keep the technicians in the bay where the work is done we can improve their labor efficiency. If we can deliver current accurate schematics from which they can order the necessary parts we will improve the quality.

Are you ready for that? This is not a question of if you will use technology effectively; it is a question of when. This is coming to us and we don’t have any control over it. In this market and these conditions I believe the sooner that we implement these technologies the better. The choice is yours.