The Benefit Ball is an exercise in learning the features and benefits of a particular vehicle model. It can be a great addition to your team's sales meetings or training sessions. Here's how to play:

A submarine has individual compartments to protect itself from disaster. When attacked, the crew moves through each compartment, closing the hatch of the previous compartment behind them. Selling requires the same procedure: moving completely through each compartment, or step of the sales process, to arrive safely at a successful sale. We all know salespeople who skip steps to get to the close faster, without shutting the other hatches behind them. And chances are, their sale ended up dead in the water.

Managing your sales team in the age of CRMs, DMSs, ILMs, and other dealership technologies can be both difficult and rewarding. On the one hand, many of your store's processes can be automated, which saves time by decreasing redundancies. On the other, these programs can be expensive, hard to learn/implement, and, as is the case with most technology, can unintentionally build a disconnect between your managers and salespeople. In many cases, managers rely so much on technology that they begin to "manage by wire."