Stephen Polk senses a slow return to normal for the automotive industry as the coming months and years progress.
It’s just that “normal” is going to come with a new definition.
Polk is the chairman, president and CEO of 1,400-employee R.L. Polk and Co., a provider of information and marketing solutions to the automotive industry. He has had a front row seat as General Motors and Chrysler declared bankruptcy and were forced to undergo massive internal restructuring. He’s watched as countless auto suppliers have gone bankrupt or been sold to interests outside Michigan.
But it won’t always be this way. And when things do begin to rebound, businesses all across southeast Michigan will need to function in a new, post-recession environment.
“With the energy we’ve seen so far this year, we’re starting to see a return to normal,” Polk says. “Not to the normal of five years ago but to a new kind of normal. I’m optimistic about the future. Our forecast for 2011 is 12.9 million vehicle sales in the U.S., and I’m confident we can achieve that.”
What will the new normal be? Polk says it will center heavily on every company’s ability to develop and maintain close relationships with customers. Businesses will need to give the employees at the customer interface points the tools and the sense of purpose that will allow them to build those relationships. Corporate leaders will need, more than ever, to stay in touch with customer wants and needs and the ongoing changes in the marketplace.
The coming years won’t be a time to assume. It will be a time to listen and react and to remember that the success of your company’s relationships will determine your long-term success.
“It’s about the success we’ve had in staying close to customers, understanding what their needs are as the world has changed,” Polk says. “While the OEMs, the manufacturers, represent a piece of our business, there are a number of other customer sets we’re dealing with, [such as] the agencies trying to promote products, the dealers trying to sell products. We need to align ourselves with where they are in the world today.”
Commit to your people
In any economy, if your customers are consumers, you have to keep them buying. If your customers are other businesses, you have to keep them selling.
Polk’s company falls into the latter category, so the job that he and his team will have moving forward is to support clients in the auto industry so they can keep producing products that find their way into new car models and, in turn, into consumers’ garages.
Your role as supporter is critical when your customers are going through hard times. It’s something Polk recognized early on, and as the industry emerges from the deepest part of the recession, he anticipates being able to reap the benefits of the support and loyalty his business showed.
“Our commitment was to serve those immediate customers so they could continue to do day-to-day work as they went through the whole bankruptcy phase and came out of it,” Polk says. “Some of it was on our own nickel, as we realized that during the bankruptcy proceedings, we weren’t going to get paid for some things right away. But we were able to maintain a continuity of service, and that helped our customer to continue to sell throughout the recession. There was some recognition that we were there when they needed us.”
In order to commit to your customers to that extent, you need to commit to your employees. Your employees need to be supported by your leadership if they are ever going to be able to support your customers through trying times.
And the key element of that support system is a soapbox — many of them, actually. You need to give your employees a means of being heard by you and your leadership team. If your employees on the front lines feel empowered to relay what they’re hearing from customers, if they feel like management is actually going to listen to them and use their information to make decisions, you’re going to have a staff on the front lines that will engage customers, ask questions and remain aware of their changing needs.
“A lot of it is just listening and training your staff to make sure they’re listening to what the customers’ needs are,” Polk says. “You communicate what you want, really try to build it into your meetings and various avenues of communication. Then you listen back, make sure everyone knows what is important, everything from performance evaluations to planning for the year, it all has to revolve around some kind of customer metrics.”
