From ‘Remove the Team’ to 229% of Target and $2.9M USD in Gross Profit Opportunity

A Suzuki, Porsche, Jeep, GWM, KGM and Deepal dealership, Trinidad

229%
of target delivered in a single VIP sales event, once real leadership was put behind the team

$2.9M USD
in additional gross profit opportunity moved into the pipeline

The Problem

Lifestyle Motors has been trading in Trinidad for many years, across six franchises: Suzuki, Porsche, Jeep, GWM, KGM and Deepal. The business carries a genuinely strong sales reputation, and its lead brand, Suzuki, sits second in the island’s market share table. Aftersales has told a vastly different story, running well behind the standard set on the sales floor.

Before we arrived, the advice from outside the business was blunt: remove most of the sales team, and most of the sales managers along with them. That advice came from frustration and instinct, not from the numbers. No one had slowed down to evaluate the process, make sure it was being followed, inspire the team to go for gold, and then coach and support them to excellence.

When we did pull the data apart, a different business appeared. Close to half of every booked appointment went unattended before a customer ever reached the showroom floor. Leads were converting to proforma at well under the benchmark the business needed across every team, and the gap between the strongest and weakest sales executives on quote to sale conversion ran from over ninety percent down to zero, on the same leads, in the same showroom, under the same managers.

That is not a team beyond saving. That is a team without consistent leadership, without clear direction, and without anyone taking the time to coach the difference between its best and its weakest performers.

The Solution

• Chose leadership over removal. Rather than dismantling the sales team, we put real direction, structure, and motivation behind the people already on the floor.
• Worked directly with the senior board on a full restructuring of the leadership above the sales floor, so accountability finally matched the size of the business.
• Kept the existing sales team and invested in it instead, backed by continued, firsthand mentoring of the senior management team that carries on today.
• Ran a seven day VIP sales event across every brand, the kind of event that puts a team under real pressure and always exposes its genuine strengths and weaknesses.
• Used the event, appointment by appointment and sales executive by sales executive, to separate a genuine skills gap from a leadership gap, and built the coaching plan around what we found.

The Outcome

It is always easy to believe it is the sales executives’ fault. This business had plenty of leads. What it needed was a senior team willing to give them real leadership and direction.

The VIP event delivered exactly what we needed: proof, at scale. Across Suzuki, Porsche, KGM and Jeep, the team generated 195 combined quotes, proformas, and sales against a target of 85, 229 percent of what had been asked of it. Suzuki activity landed at more than double its target (121 against 60), Porsche more than tripled its target (16 against 5), and KGM ran at nearly three times target (55 against 20), with Jeep, not part of the original target at all, adding three of its own.

At an average GP of $26,743 per unit, that additional 110 units of activity represents $2,941,730 in additional gross profit opportunity now moving through the pipeline.

The senior restructuring is complete, mentoring of the senior team continues, and the business now has a leadership structure that matches the ambition already sitting on its sales floor. Aftersales, which had fallen behind for years, is the next chapter.

I now sit on the board as a nonexecutive, advising on the wider business, and my current focus is working with the aftersales department on customer retention, for the longer term benefit of the brands and the company.

This is the result we look for across the Caribbean: a team written off on instinct alone that, given real leadership, structure and belief, was capable of this all along. If part of your business has been quietly written off before anyone has properly looked at the numbers, let us talk about what is possible.