It’s hard to nail down a timeline of where things started to go wrong; however, there had been a palpable shift (in my department at least) to more negative vibes and discontentment with the current day to day operations of the company.
There are probably many factors at play, but I really think the root of it all starts from hypocrisy. The company, and by extension my dealer-facing team, preaches certain “core values”. At the same time however, our job involved either breaking these values on a daily basis, or experiencing these values not being put
into action by CarGurus itself.
Two of these “Core Values” are Transparency and Integrity. Let’s talk about those.
Internally - I’m still not sure how the commission plans totally work. The language can change on a monthly or quarterly basis. We also moved away from using a professional compensation planning program, to receiving our data through an Excel sheet or Google Doc. I would expect this at a small startup, not a $4 billion public company. The commission data is often not released to us until we are several days away from the actual pay date. We also need to crawl our book of business revenue each month, to make sure we are being commissioned correctly.
Enhancements or product tests have been run without informing the dealer-facing job functions, leading to poor customer service situations when we don’t have the correct answers or the latest information.
Externally - we have run a renewal model over the last several years that relies on raising dealership subscription rates so they are more in line with “market rates.” The tough part here is that we have no clear guidance into what the “market rate” should be and why. We might use one metric as a pricing threshold in certain instances internally, but then are encouraged not to use this metric when speaking with clients.
There is also no consistency with pricing across the internal teams. Reps. discounting leeway changes daily, depending on their (and the team’s) monthly revenue needs. This leads to frustration on the customer’s end, as they are told different reasons each year as to why their rate is changing. Reps. are also forced to juggle a comp. plan that is split between attaining maximum incremental revenue, while limiting churn. Adding to the complexity- it is CarGurus, not the rep., who determines which subscriptions will be renewed, essentially forcing churn if the rep. is unable to renew them. They will inevitably be brought back on as “new business” several months later.. and the cycle continues.
Ultimately, I had no problem raising subscription rates, or dealing with irate customers, but I wanted to know there is justification in doing so. Really- give me any reason that makes sense. Maybe that’s where this all started. When CarGurus finally did reach those “market rates” for most customers. Instead of a plan for what was next, we decided to just keep squeezing. Each rep. is feeling less and less runway for themselves. For a Sales team, this is not an ideal situation, and stems from mismanagement at the upper level.
