The Aftersales Manager Playbook — written from the ramp, not the chair. Twenty-one chapters and a dozen interactive tools on running service and parts: productivity and recovery, the cost of a comeback, red & amber follow-up, the changing car parc, and leading from the floor where the money is actually made.
Aftersales is where the dealership's profit is quietly made or quietly lost — in the idle minute nobody clocked, the amber line nobody followed up, the comeback that cost the customer as well as the margin. Most guides treat it as a spreadsheet. This one treats it as what it is: a leadership job wearing a spreadsheet's clothes, written from inside the department by someone who’s run it. Why these exist →
Productivity, efficiency and utilisation made plain — with a per-technician calculator that values every point of drift and the idle time nobody sees.
The signature loss in aftersales, quantified: model your repeat-repair rate and see the annual leakage most sites never count.
Function, benefit, if-left — the honest upsell frame, a follow-up value tool, and objection handling that converts without pressure.
Fill the perishable diary before the day arrives empty — with a capacity-fill calculator and the sources that close the gap.
Safety, standards and the auditor's walk, plus an editable workshop roster and the honest customer-experience check.
The ageing parc and the EV shift — longer service intervals, high-voltage readiness, quarantine space, and what it means for volume.
Learning the department on the job, with nobody to hand them the manual.
Owning the labour and parts gross and everything that quietly drains it.
Who need to read the aftersales department as sharply as the showroom.
Opens in your browser, twenty-one chapters across tabs, with a dozen live tools — calculators, checklists, trackers and a handover generator. Nothing to install; works offline on an iPad.
A dedicated "Day one" chapter with the three KPIs to start with and a first 30/60/90-day runway — so a new manager has somewhere to begin, not twenty tabs to drown in.
These aren't theory. They're the manual nobody handed me — written from three decades on the dealership floor, one hard-won lesson at a time. The questions worth asking and the answers worth keeping, organised at last, by someone who worked it out the slow way so you don't have to.
Aftersales runs on numbers — and the manager who knows where to pull them and what they mean leads, rather than memorises. The free SMART AI guide library builds the judgement — Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence — you can carry into any tool.
Explore the free guides →