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Your product support department is filled with talented, hard-working individuals who have the greatest amount of contact with your customers, generate the most transactions, contribute the lion’s share to the dealership’s gross profits – and probably receive the least amount of recognition and development.

Product support employees are underappreciated. There’s no “sizzle” in parts or service operations. It’s easy work done by people who make mistakes. Parts and service departments usually are way, way down – almost at the bottom of – an equipment dealership’s pecking order. They’re almost never as visible, or as important as, as the equipment sales or rental departments.

Why? Have those of us in product support allowed ourselves to be defined as a necessary evil? Or is it because other people don’t understand what we do and how much we contribute to the bottom line?

Perhaps it’s time to re-examine the role product support plays in a distributorship. Let’s take a page out of other businesses’ playbooks.

How about having the equipment sales reps work the parts telephones and counter one day a month? How about having other department managers and executives working the counter?

Oh, that’s right – I remember. That means we’d have to train them.

Speaking of training, how good is the training most parts and service employees receive? Usually there’s no one at the dealership capable of training the parts or service customer service jobs. Is that because the dealership hasn’t invested in training for their product support professionals?

I’m not talking about training a mechanic on a new machine or system, in case you were wondering.

When was the last time you had training in methods, systems, processes, features and benefits of products or services, selling methods, overcoming objections, closing sales, problem resolution – the list goes on – for parts and service employees? Who trains your product support managers?

Both you and I know that your dealership’s training allowance is very thin, particularly in these trying times. But that is a mistake. We need to make sure that all employees have access to the latest and greatest sales methods and skills possible.

The AED Foundation embarked upon a path a few years ago to encourage dealers to provide 40 hours of training for each employee each year. Imagine what that says about our industry, that a trade association has to encourage its member businesses to provide one week of training each year for each employee.

Just one week.

But let’s get back to the concept of your equipment sales reps, managers and other executives working the counter and telephones.

Intuit, the software company, has been using this technique for years. They believe it keeps their managers and sales reps in tune with the operational realities of the business. They believe it sensitizes these employees to the nature of the in-store job.

It would lead to a much better understanding about parts and service operations on the part of your other managers.

I don’t make this suggestion frivolously.

So try it. See how many of your equipment and rental sales reps and managers would actually do it. Then have them do it. Not for a day or two; embed it into the dealership’s operational culture. Sales reps, managers and other dealership executives should be more than willing to participate in this part of the business. Your culture should demand that every employee is sensitive to customers’ needs and desires.

Many of your employees will resist you, some because they feel it’s beneath them. And that’s part of the problem. Never forget that the customer is the boss. Everyone who serves customers is critical. A problem for many dealerships is that they do not understand the critical job that the parts and service employees do every day with their customers.

And that’s much more than a problem. That could be the beginning of the end.