By Chris Dominis, Manager of Customer Success & Enterprise Engagement, Motility Software Solutions, an MRAA Platinum Partner
When you sit down to prepare for the upcoming year, you may be tempted to focus primarily on financial targets, sales goals and budgets. While these aspects of your business are important, this is also a good time to examine how your dealership operates to pinpoint any challenges you want to address.
Going into MRAA’s Dealer Week with a plan will help you identify ideas, technologies or potential improvements that resonate with your business goals.
To help define these goals before the event, ask yourself these questions:
1. Where Is Your Team Losing the Most Time?
When identifying inefficiencies and operational pain points at your dealership, think about the following processes:
- Manually entering information multiple times across disconnected systems
- Physically tracking down information across departments and teams
- Tracking customer information and leads in separate spreadsheets
- Making copies of packets and mailing them out
If any of this work sounds familiar, your team may be losing valuable time you could redirect elsewhere. Once you bring these process gaps to light, you can go into Dealer Week with a clearer framework for evaluating potential solutions.
2. Can You Trust the Information You Use to Make Decisions?
Determining whether you have reliable visibility into your business procedures and outcomes may not always be easy when you’re focused on day-to-day operations.
Evaluating your visibility may look like assessing any reports your dealership runs to ensure they’re based on accurate and current information. It may also involve asking whether this information can help leadership understand performance, spot problems and identify opportunities. For example, if a sales report you run is built on inaccurate or missing numbers, leadership may try to solve problems that don’t exist or miss problems entirely.
Accurate data is important not only for leadership, but for every team member at your dealership. For example, consider how outdated parts data can misinform service technicians about what parts they need to order and when they need to order them. This misinformation can then stall repairs in your service department.
3. Are You Getting the Most From the Technology You Already Have?
If employees are handling tasks outside the technology you’ve already invested in, you may want to consider providing additional training to help them change these habits.
Let’s say your employees are using your dealership management system (DMS) to track inventory and keep customer records, but they aren’t using other DMS functions, such as service scheduling and sales management. These habits may lose them opportunities for providing more efficient customer service and quickly determining which vehicles in your sales department need the most attention.
In this situation, supporting your employees with extra training could improve their overall performance by cutting down on any tasks costing them extra time day-to-day.
4. What Technology Has Your Dealership Outgrown?
Your current systems not only need to support your business today but support its future growth, which is why it’s important to align them with your new goals. For instance, you may use a stand-alone customer relationship management (CRM) system to track your customer base, but it may not be connected to the rest of your dealership’s systems and data. As a result, it can be harder to see the full picture of a customer’s journey and track additional insights. Using a fully integrated DMS instead can improve customer relationships moving forward.
If you find your goals have outgrown the tools you currently use, come to Dealer Week for ideas and solutions that can propel your dealership into next year.
Turn What You Learn Into Action
When considering your business goals and what you want to do better by the end of 2027, a few larger process improvements may come up. Keep this list in mind as you prep for Dealer Week. Having specific priorities will help guide what solutions you explore and the questions you need to ask. The most important thing is whether the solution solves the right problems for your business.
By walking into Dealer Week with a clear plan and set priorities, you’ll have an easier time determining what will work for you. After the event’s over, you can figure out the next best step.
If you have questions for the Motility team or would like to discuss your dealership’s needs in person, stop by booth No. 483 Dec. 6-9, during Dealer Week in Tampa, Fla.
About the Author
Chris Dominis has over 20 years of experience in software and support across the specialty vehicle industries. As Manager of Customer Success & Enterprise Engagement for Motility Software Solutions, he brings extensive expertise and valuable insights to the marine dealer space. He collaborates closely with Motility’s largest dealers, helping them maximize the capabilities of Motility’s DMS to drive business growth and improvement.
His previous roles include serving as the information technology and national parts manager for a large, multi-location bus dealership and working as an independent IT consultant for multiple dealerships.
Editor’s note: MRAA publishes partner-contributed articles to provide marine retailers with practical education, subject-matter expertise and industry perspective. MRAA maintains editorial oversight of partner-contributed content and may edit submissions for clarity, relevance, AP style, search visibility and alignment with MRAA’s dealer-first educational standards. Recommendations should be considered alongside each dealership’s goals, processes, team capacity
