Is everything working as well as it can? How do you know?

Have you ever gone to a restaurant and had a server encourage you to order something that wasn’t on the menu?

Probably not.

It’s similar when you contact an average media or marketing company. They have a menu of products and services, and they naturally want to sell you something from their menu.

There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s their business.

The question is whether anything on their menu is actually what your dealership needs.

Most dealers have a good idea of what they want to accomplish; but they don’t necessarily know every strategy, tool or opportunity available to help them accomplish it.

That’s not a knock on dealers. Dealers have dealerships to run. They manage employees, acquire inventory, oversee expenses, handle customers and deal with countless other responsibilities.

Sometimes it helps to have someone from the outside take a look.

Carl Sewell, author of Customers for Life and owner of Sewell Automotive Companies, has written about the importance that consultants have played in his business. Sometimes he takes a consultant’s advice, and sometimes he doesn’t.

The point isn’t that the outside advice is always right. The value is in having another perspective to consider.

The value of ‘outside eyes’

One advantage of getting an outside opinion before investing in new strategies or media is that someone without an attachment to the current plan can look at things differently.

I call it bringing in “outside eyes.”

People inside a dealership naturally become accustomed to the way things are done. If something has worked for years, there may not be much reason to question or change it.

And sometimes there shouldn’t be.

I’ve consulted with dealers who have done certain things essentially the same way for decades — in one case, for as long as 88 years.

There can be a strong emotional attachment to those methods, and understandably so. A particular strategy may have helped build the dealership. It may have lifted a family from poverty to financial success. It may be part of the company’s identity.

That doesn’t mean the strategy needs to be thrown out.

Sometimes it simply needs to be looked at from a different angle and adjusted.

The existing strategy may be 95% right. But what if a small adjustment to the other 5% resulted in increased sales, reduced expenses and/or created another opportunity?

A $100,000 adjustment

A Texas dealer we worked with had used profitable strategies to grow their dealership for more than two decades.

The strategies worked.

But they were also expensive.

After taking a deeper look at what the dealership was doing, we made some adjustments. Those changes reduced advertising expenses by approximately $100,000 per year, while sales remained about the same.

There was another interesting result: Leads increased approximately nine times.

At first glance, a retail dealer might wonder why a dealership didn’t simply use nine times as many leads to sell significantly more vehicles.

However, this particular dealership is a buy-here, pay-here store.

For some BHPH dealers, the goal isn’t necessarily maximum sales volume. They may prefer to maintain or moderately increase sales while generating enough opportunities to be more selective about the deals they put on the books.

In this case, the dealership was able to maintain its sales, substantially reduce advertising expenses, and have far more opportunities from which to choose.

The original strategy wasn’t necessarily bad. In fact, it had helped the dealership succeed for years.

There was simply a better way to approach it.

Don’t overlook the $200 expense

Not every opportunity has six figures attached to it.

A Virginia dealer was spending about $200 per month on an advertising platform.

During a consultation, he almost didn’t mention it to me because $200 was such a small portion of his overall advertising budget.

We looked at it anyway.

It turned out the platform was providing virtually no value to the dealership.

Two hundred dollars a month becomes $2,400 a year.

That alone isn’t going to make or break most dealerships. But it illustrates something important: Not everything worth examining is a major expense.

A few unnecessary $200 expenses can become meaningful. So can a handful of small improvements that each produce a little more business.

The opportunities aren’t always obvious.

What might another set of eyes find?

Depending on the dealership, an objective review might uncover:

Waste in an existing strategy or advertising expense.

A small adjustment that improves something already working.

An opportunity the dealership hasn’t considered.

An underused asset already inside the dealership.

Or simply confirmation that the current approach makes sense.

That last one shouldn’t be overlooked.

Sometimes having someone examine a strategy and conclude, “I wouldn’t change it,” is useful information too.

Bonus tip: Successful dealers do this, too

A multi-location dealership in the Midwest had excellent leadership and a strong marketing and communications team.

They didn’t need someone to come in and reinvent their marketing.

What they did value was another perspective.

The dealership invested in a monthly brainstorming session where we could discuss ideas, question assumptions and look for opportunities. Over time, those sessions generated enough improvements to justify their investment many times over.

This is also part of the value of belonging to Twenty Groups.

Dealers get to see how other dealers approach similar challenges. They compare numbers, exchange ideas, and hold one another accountable.

Twenty Group moderators also bring in outside experts who may introduce an entirely different strategy or simply present a familiar idea from a different angle.

Not every idea gets implemented.

It doesn’t have to.

Sometimes one idea is enough.

One more question worth asking

Dealers regularly evaluate vendors, advertising platforms, technology, and new strategies.

Here’s another evaluation that can be just as valuable:

Periodically evaluate what you’re already doing.

Some things may need to be eliminated. Others may need to be improved. Some may be working exactly as they should.

And there may be opportunities sitting right in front of you that are difficult to see when you look at the same business every day.

Whether that outside perspective comes from a consultant, a Twenty Group, another dealer, or someone else you trust, occasionally having another set of eyes look at your dealership can be worthwhile.

You don’t necessarily need someone to tell you what to buy.

Sometimes you just need someone to notice what you might not see.

Kenny Atcheson is the founder and president of Dealer Profit Pros and author of “Marketing Battleground: How to Deploy Under-the-Radar Strategies to Explode Your Profits.” Request a consult or learn more about his company’s marketing and advertising programs, customer service and sales training at www.DealerProfitPros.com.