Plan Now, Profit First: What to Do During the Dealership Slow Season

When we first published this in April 2020, its message was: don't waste downtime, use it to rebuild. That holds every year. Most powersports stores have weeks when the floor is quiet, the phones are slow and the service bays have gaps. Those weeks are the only time the team has hours to fix the things that slow it down all season.

This guide is for the dealer principal, GM, sales manager and service manager who want a concrete list. It covers the internal rebuild projects. For marketing to your customers in those same months, read our guide to off-season marketing for powersports dealers. If the slowdown is wider than the season, read dealership marketing during an economic downturn.

Slow-season projects at a glance

Here are seven projects, with our planning estimates of the time each needs. Your hours will depend on store size and how much has been done before.

1. Write down your processes

Busy-season habits live in people's heads. When the best salesperson leaves, the process leaves with them. Use the quiet weeks to write down how the store actually works: lead handling, the sales steps, the delivery checklist, service write-up, parts special orders and the hand-off between departments.

1. Pick the five processes that cause the most problems when they go wrong.
2. Have the person who does the job best talk it through while someone writes it down.
3. Cut it to one page with numbered steps and who owns each step.
4. Test it by having a newer team member follow it.
5. Store it where everyone can find it, and put a review date on it.

Our guide on how to get good processes in place by writing them down goes further on the sales process.

2. Clean the CRM

Every campaign, follow-up and report next season depends on the customer data you have now. Slow weeks are when staff have time to fix it.

• Merge duplicate customer records. Our guide to finding and merging duplicate customer records shows the method.
• Remove bounced emails and dead phone numbers. See how to clean a dealership email list.
• Attach each owner's unit: make, model, year, VIN, purchase date and last service date.
• Close out old leads with an accurate disposition: sold elsewhere, not interested, still shopping or unreachable.
• Record consent by channel, with when and how it was given.

If the cleanup shows your CRM cannot do what you need, the slow season is also the time to compare systems. Our guide to choosing a powersports CRM lists what to look for.

3. Train and role-play

Training is the project most stores agree on and few finish. Two 2017 Powersports Business columns, one by a dealership parts and service manager and one by an agency executive, make the same point: use the slow months for OEM and other online training and certifications, and to prepare staff for the season ahead. One also suggests cross-training, with staff spending time in another department to understand how the store works.

Make it practical with short, regular role-play sessions:

1. Inbound phone call asking for a price on a unit in stock.
2. Internet lead that has gone quiet for three days.
3. Trade-in conversation where the customer's number is higher than yours.
4. Service write-up for a customer who arrives without an appointment.
5. Delivery walk-around, including accessories and the first service.

Record each scenario's best answer and add it to your process pages. If your store arranges customer financing, also check whether you must provide security awareness training under the FTC's Safeguards Rule (see vendor reviews below).

4. Fix the website and listings

Shoppers start researching before the season starts. Make sure what they find is right:

• Google Business Profile. Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, and advises making your business information as complete as possible, including business hours and special store hours. Update seasonal hours, add current photos and reply to reviews.
• Inventory. Replace stock images with photos of the actual units, check prices and remove sold units.
• Website basics. Test every form, phone number and link. Check pages on a phone.
• Listings elsewhere. Make sure OEM locators, marketplaces and directories show the same name, address, phone and hours.

5. Plan service capacity

The first warm weeks often bring more service work than the department can take. Plan for it now:

1. Count available technician hours per week for the first eight weeks of the season, after time off and training.
2. Apply your own productivity rate to get billable hours.
3. Divide by your average hours per repair order to see how many jobs a week you can take.
4. Compare with last year's same weeks. If demand was higher than capacity, move work earlier with preseason service offers, or plan extra help.

An illustrative example: three technicians at 40 hours a week is 120 hours. At 80% productivity that is 96 billable hours. With an average of 2.5 hours per repair order, the department can take about 38 jobs a week. If last spring brought 50, you know the gap now, not in April.

Use the same weeks to check special tools, lifts and parts on hand for the season's most common jobs.

6. Review vendors

List every vendor and subscription: website, CRM, marketing services, lead sources, software, phone system and outside services. For each, write down what it costs, what it produces, who uses it and when the contract renews. Look for tools nobody uses, two vendors doing the same job, and contracts that renew automatically before you can review them.

This is general information, not legal advice. If your dealership arranges customer financing, ask counsel whether the FTC Safeguards Rule applies to you. Where it does, the Rule requires you to oversee service providers by selecting ones capable of maintaining appropriate safeguards for customer information, requiring those safeguards by contract, and periodically assessing them based on the risk they present. A slow-season vendor review is a good time to do that assessment.

7. Plan next season's events

Events that work are booked months ahead. Plan open houses, demo rides, owner clinics, club rides and community events now:

• Review last year's events: attendance, contacts gained, sales traced to each.
• Confirm OEM demo programs and co-op rules for the coming season.
• Set dates, owners and budgets, and add them to the one-page annual marketing plan.
• Decide which marketing channels will promote each event.

Finish what you start before the season returns

Most slow-season advice is a list of ideas. The problem in most stores is not ideas: it is that projects start in a quiet week and stop on the first busy Saturday. What makes slow-season work pay is finishing it.

• One owner per project. A name, not a department.
• A definition of done. "Clean the CRM" is not done; "duplicates merged and every owner linked to a unit" is.
• A before-and-after number. Count duplicates, bounced emails, documented processes or tested forms at the start and at the end.
• A weekly 15-minute check-in. Each owner says what is finished, what is next and what is blocked.
• A hard stop. Pick the date the season starts for you, and finish the projects, or cut their scope, before it.

A 12-week slow-season plan

Run role-play sessions two or three times a week across all 12 weeks. If your slow season is shorter, combine weeks rather than drop the check-ins.

Where PSX Ascend fits

Several of these projects come back to the customer record and the sales process. The PSX Ascend AI-powered CRM connects customer data, sales workflows and lead follow-up, and gives managers a clearer way to coach execution. Quality data comes first: the cleaner the records you build in the slow season, the more every follow-up and automated message can do with them.

When the season returns, AMP, PSX Ascend's marketing automation, uses customer stage, inventory interest and behavior to shape communication, and ALMA, the Automated Lead Management Assistant, takes on the repetitive work of re-engaging stalled prospects so salespeople can spend their time on live conversations.

You can also see the same AI-powered powersports CRM on our sister site, PSXDigital's AI-powered powersports CRM page.

Sources

• Google Business Profile Help, "Tips to improve your local ranking on Google"
• 16 CFR 314.4, FTC Safeguards Rule elements (Cornell LII)
• Powersports Business, "How to avoid the winter blues" (12 Sep 2017)
• Powersports Business, "The success of the future depends on the success of today" (28 Sep 2017)