Extreme Micro-Management and Favoritism
Pros
Friendly, casual work environment. Honest business practices/ethics with regard to customer treatment. Solid sales process allows efficient workflow and minimizes costly error. Training provided is useful for new personnel with no prior sales experience.
Cons
Extreme top-down micromanagement focusing on irrelevent and incorrectly compiled performance metrics, over real-world skill and success. Situationally applied disciplinary rules and iconsistant ethics based on favoritism, sexism, ageism, and individuals involved. Store level management is largely inexperienced in car sales, and/or retail in general, therefor incompetant when coaching and assisting experienced sales professionals, handling difficult customer scenarios, dynamically managing personnel head-count to match customer traffic, and generally incapable of performing basic sales/purchase functions required by all subordinate Sales Consultants. Training cirriculum is script-based and elementary at best, geared to creating mindless clerks, not creative, professional, sales consultants. So-called 'open door' policy that guarantees anonymity of employees who file formal complaints against management's violations of company policy and stated code of business conduct is, in reality, completely false and consistantly results in retalliation, including termination. Huge lack of trust between consultants and sales managers, between managers themselves, and between department leaders, creating unnecessary hostility and general stress. Sales Consultants are graded in large part by customer survey statistics that include metrics that are beyond the control of consultants themselves, eg: wait time, pricing comparison, vehicle quality, etc. General Managers and Regional Directors emphasise creating a perception of success, at the expense of actual success, for the sake of the stockholders, whose concerns and interests clearly take priority over those of employees and customers.