Day 14

I'm sure this is nothing you need to read about, but my cold has gotten worse, so I'm really draggin' today. But I'm still at work doing my job like a good little boy.

I was reading through my posts and I realized that sometimes it sounds like I may not do a lot of work throughout an entire day. But I actually do. All the things I write about in this blog are of the major variety. All the other things like meetings, phone calls, the variety of vendors I see, meeting individually with the salespeople, etc. I usually don't post.

Today was a slow day for me. I'm waiting for my Appointment Coordinator to come onboard, which will be next week. Once she's here, and I can get her through Autobase training, things will start rocking. Between the leads we get from General Motors, Cars.com, Autotrader.com and now Sam's Club, the Internet Department should be rocking in no time. Then I can begin working on the Business Development Center.

One of my areas of responsibility is to increase our phone-up calls-to- appointment-to-sales ratio. I need to train the salespeople to become more accountable to strive to set appointments on every phone-up, as compared to just giving information. More importantly, I need to be able to track the number of calls that come in, and who's taking them. Autobase can do this, depending on whether the salespeople inputs their information, so I'm not confident that would be accurate. The other way would be to listen to all incoming calls on Who's Calling, which would be very time consuming. So I introduced a two-part phone-up card to the General Manager and he thought that might do the trick. When a salesperson takes a phone-up, he/she records the information on this card, and one-part stays with him/her, and the other part goes into the Sales Managers basket. This way the Sales Manager can follow-up every morning on the previous days business. The Sales Manager liked the concept also, but he wanted a letter size worksheet with more information so he can actually do the deal right on that sheet. So I need to redo it for him.

We had to make a rule with the receptionist today that no vendor gets to see me or the General Manager without an appointment. We've become to bombarded each day by people trying to sell us something, and it's taking a lot of our productive time away from us. That rule's fine with me.

Hope I feel better tomorrow.