40 Under 40

Eryn Haugen's life from age 2 revolved around singing and dancing. She trained in ballet for 17 years, sang everything from Pat Benatar to Italian arias at dinner theaters and worked with a group prepping for a Radio Disney tour.

At age 21, a torn knee ended Haugen's stage career. That's when a family friend offered her a job at a centralized business development center for Ira Motor Group, which became part of Group 1 Automotive in Massachusetts.

Haugen loved the fast pace and had a passion for cars — a Dodge Viper GTS poster hung in her room as a teen. After the job at Ira Motor Group, she started selling cars for McDaniels Automotive Group in Charleston, S.C. From there, she became a finance manager and sales manager at Kelly Automotive Group in Danvers, Mass., where she launched a centralized business development center and found her passion for training and developing people.

"Every dealership faces different challenges," Haugen said. "Finding the pieces to the puzzle and how they can fit together and what's that missing piece that really can bring this dealership to the next level? I absolutely love that."

In 2014, Haugen joined Penske Automotive Group, working with 17 Arizona stores to train salespeople and managers on customer relationship management. A year and a half later, she took her current role as sales performance and training manager for Penske Automotive Group's West region.

Haugen was on the road about two weeks each month, traveling to nearly 60 dealerships in Arizona, California and Texas. In 2017, Haugen's boss proposed cutting Penske's West region travel and expense costs for customer relationship management and sales training by switching to video. Haugen suggested making it live.

"It needed to be as close to a classroom as possible," Haugen said.

In early 2018, Penske's West region created two training studios in Arizona and in Boston, where Haugen lives. Each has an 80-inch touchscreen for Haugen to interact with and a 70-inch screen showing her the people she's training in real time. She went from four scheduled training classes on the road to 16 different virtual classes — adding courses for phone, Internet and video communication, sales processes and manager training.

Going virtual eliminated the $5,000 to $10,000 in monthly travel and expense for Haugen to teach on-site. From January through mid-June, nearly 2,000 employees from Penske's West region attended her virtual training.

— Gail Kachadourian Howe