Presented at the 2015 Dealership Minds Summit in Cincinnati, this collection of acronyms provides easy-to-find in-house resources to move a dealership forward on best practices.

Part of the special workshop session by ChannelMasters’ Tom Owen and Nick Mast at the 2015 Dealership Minds Summit focused on best practices. And in turn, where to find the metrics that can guide the business.

The image above shows a collection of acronyms that Owen says are there for the dealers to turn to. Following are his words on how to use these easy-to-find benchmarks.

Strategic Business Plan (SBP) — “Get one in place, get it reviewed annual and get your entire team on it.”

Dealer Management System (DMS) — “You want real time information access so that all your parts guys can make decisions in all of our locations immediately. You want to be tracking technician productivity.”

Certified Public Accountant (CPA) — “Do you have a CPA auditing my statements? If you haven’t invested in that yet, start now. Eventually, the inevitable is going to come and you’re going to need these audited statements for 3 years.”

Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) — “Do you have a set of standard operating procedures, written out, followed out? It’s important for new talent and it also addresses talent development.”

Forward Month Sales (FMS) — “Do you have processes in place where you’re tracking inventory. And not just tracking inventory and pricing inventory used, but when it is turned. When do you take the write down? What discipline are you putting in your operation to control inventories? We like to talk to dealers in terms of forward month sales and look at those trends.”

Share of Market (SOM) — “This is the horror story of chasing share because the OEM wants it and it’s not profitable. What we’re seeing and hearing from a majority of the OEM stakeholders we’ve talked to is that it’s all about profitability. OEM share of market though is something you need to consider...Are you still viable and sustainable in your own local market?”

Parts & Service (P&S) — “Parts and service, absorption, fixed operations — is it covering 90 to 100% of your total rooftop fixed expenses or not?”

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) & Web — “Do you have a content manager on my website, somebody in the dealership that can go on and change the website anytime there is news or something new to report? Are you involved in social media in your local market? That’s what we mean by web.”

Customer Satisfaction Indexing (CSI) — “Are you tracking how happy your customers are with the parts sale, with the service on the combine, with the new product, with the set-up of that product? And are you tracking satisfaction in an unbiased manner, where you take those results and share them with the staff? Is there a mechanism where if there’s a bad complaint, it gets handled and communication gets back to the customer?”

Share of Wallet (SOW) — “Are you only chasing market share on combines, or the smaller tractors and livestock equipment too? Are you really going out to that farm and getting every darn dollar that that customer can spend? Whether it’s equipment or some adjacent part of that what you could provide him as a dealer, there’s a share of wallet that you’re getting from that farm operation?

“This is what we look for in terms of the simple things that you can do now without a lot of capital investment to increase the valuation and to put in place the mechanisms that the next generation is going to absolutely need,” Owen says. “Because that’s where the business is going.”