Software platform uses analytics and data science to predict who will succeed in dealership roles.
Finding the right candidate for a sales, F&I or service advisor role can be hit and miss.
Someone might have all the right credentials, do well in a job interview, but be a complete bust when it comes to closing deals and generating revenue for dealerships.
A new software technology platform says it can help dealerships take the guesswork out of hiring by delivering an accurate prediction of who will excel and who will be a disaster.
“We’ve been working on developing a technology for the past seven years that enables dealers, dealer groups and dealer management to really get a handle on what it is about an “A” player that allows them to be a great sales consultant or a great service advisor or leasing consultant,” said Brett Morris, Chairman and Co-Founder of the Perception Group. “That enables us to get really below the skin and peel back some of the guesswork that goes on with figuring out who to hire.”
Morris says the company’s PerceptionPredict technology platform uses data and analytics and a dealership’s own performance data to determine the key attributes for success for a particular brand and in a particular region. They then create a pre-hiring evaluation process to test candidates to better predict their performance.
“It’s a predictive capability. But to get there, we actually use dealer and dealer group data. All these dealers, and dealer groups are sitting on a goldmine of data,” he said. “But when it comes to making decisions about people and who to hire and who to promote — the use of data is almost non-existent.”
Morris said traditionally dealers and their managers who make hiring decisions use their own experience, or a gut feel on hiring an individual. But by analyzing the personality traits and skill sets that the most successful individuals exhibit, then they are able to predict outcomes at scale. “So we might measure it to a hundred different attributes in a sales consultant selling a particular brand, be that at Toyota or Mercedes-Benz, and understand in surgical detail, what are the attributes that produce that performance?”
Morris said the company’s software technology is able to codify those success attributes and create what it calls a “performance fingerprint” that can then be applied to the hiring decisions the dealer management team makes.
The software goes a step further. It not only predicts whether a candidate will be successful in a sales role, but it produces an actual number that predicts the number of vehicles that candidate will be able to sell.
“The prediction is actually based on the quota of your particular brand for your group in your location. So it’s very forensic in terms of how we go about doing that,” he said.
Morris said the software platform also can predict how many customer paid dollars per repair order a service advisor will be able to produce, or the average gross margin per retail unit for an F&I consultant.
Morris said when he tells dealers he can predict sales success in that detail he’s often met by skepticism. “Of course it’s not magic,” says Morris.
The platform combines talent science with data science and converts it to intelligence to make predictions, he said.
“The key thing that we’re trying to drive is sales efficiency. We think dealers and dealer groups have a huge opportunity to really amp up their sales efficiency,” he said.
