The December '08 issue of the excellent Auto Retail Bulletin newsletter (see www.auto-retail.com if you haven't seen it before) has a summary of a pilot survey carried out by Trend Tracker this year - the first ever independent survey of UK franchised auto retailers' satisfaction with the short sales training courses offered by carmakers.

This pilot survey revealed a 20 percentage-point gap between the best and worst performers, and most importantly, indicated where each manufacturer is most in need of improving specific aspects of their sales training provision.

We hope to carry out a full-scale version of this initial survey during 2009, and will be inviting manufacturers' training departments to join a syndicate programme to fund the work. And then, we hope to be able to conduct a similar survey of aftersales staff training programmes. For those who pay more than lip service to the principle that competent people are the most valuable resource of a retail network, we believe this research should provide valuable insights that haven't so far been available to benchmark performance in the field.

You can download the Auto Retail Bulletin summary here.

Toby Procter
December 2008