Nothing is more important to your immediate and long-term success in sales and profit, than developing high achievers in your sales department. The value is pure math — average and below average salespeople are your biggest financial drains. If you have a $30,000 ad budget with 10 salespeople, you’ve given each underachiever a personal ad budget of $3,000 to blow.

For your investment, you’ll put close to 75 people (three a day) in front of your eight-sale guy every month. In turn, they will screw around most of the day, and refuse to give 60% of your prospects a demonstration. They will never follow up an unsold customer, prospect on their own or try to retain a sold customer. The statistical total loss is four lost sales to one delivery. But the real loss just from their poor skills and habits, is an eight-sale guy actually repels 16 buyers who would have purchased that month from you.

High achievers on the other hand, are your most valuable assets. They come to work to work, they continually develop their skills, they deliver 20 to 30 sales by selling to repeat customers and their own prospects, which in turn drives down your costs per sale because they don’t use or need your $30,000 in ads every month. They don’t need ‘ups’. But to develop high achievers in sales, your management staff, your daily training, your salespeople’s work schedule and their pay plan, all have to be effective or it can’t happen.

Step 1: Make one critical decision.

Your first decision is to decide who you want working for you. Do you want people who can sell, or people who can’t? This is a choice that managers make every day, and most choose to work with underachievers. Why? Because they’ve convinced themselves and anyone who will listen, that anything else is impossible, too much trouble, too expensive and it’ll never work.

It doesn’t take a calculator to figure out if you choose ‘people who can’t sell’, you cannot have a record year next year, or any year. You just can’t buy enough traffic or Web leads to turn a below average sales group into a selling machine. You will always spend too much, sell too few and lose too much gross.

Step 2: Choose a group and a plan.

If you choose a sales force of below average salespeople who can’t sell (or refuse to), who waste your resources, cost you sales and refuse to improve, follow this plan:

DON’T send your managers to training to develop their skills so they can develop High achievers in your dealership. It’s too expensive.

DON’T send your salespeople to class or use daily training, it’s also too expensive.

DO put in a lousy pay plan, to try to save more money each month.

DO keep managing salespeople the old school way and just look the other way or hum Disney’s “It’s A Small World” when someone tries to explain the cost of turnover or the cost of lost sales.

If you decide to go with High achievers, however, follow this plan:

DO train your managers so they can hire, train, manage and develop more high achievers in your dealership. Then hold them accountable to implement the training and develop your sales team.

Your managers control your success, but to be successful, they have to hire the right people, establish effective procedures in sales, train everyone daily, manage their selling activities, set clear goals, implement effective tracking and accountability and they have to know how to lead your team to the top. They aren’t going to get all of this important management training in house. They need management, desking and trainer workshops to develop high achievers.

DO get your salespeople to classes and daily training. Even if you have in-house training, you will shave more than a full year off the time it takes to develop their core skills with the right classes.

Maybe you really can’t see your guys selling 30, and that’s okay because I know you can see the 8-sale guys selling 10, and that’s your first step. Just that one first step, eight to 10 average, adds 240 more sales next year and that’s $600,000 more in gross and about $400,000 in net profit.

If you’ll honestly commit to training properly for just one year, I guarantee you’ll never regret it or even look back (except to laugh at those who don’t).