Dealers laud GM's Engle for retail skill

DETROIT — It's typical for General Motors dealers to get a call from Barry Engle on a random Saturday, just to check in or ask about sales and showroom traffic.

"He's always trying to come up with a solution," said California dealer Inder Dosanjh. "He's very approachable. You text him, he texts you back. You call him, he calls you back. And he's a very good listener."

In a little more than a year heading GM's North American operations, Engle has earned the respect of GM dealers by offering solutions to help their businesses today and involving them in GM's plans for the future. Especially during the coronavirus pandemic, dealers say Engle has been quick to react, meeting with dealer councils multiple times a week and accelerating the development of GM's online sales tool.

Engle, 56, was a dealer himself in the late '90s. He left Ford Motor Co. to buy a Chrysler store near Salt Lake City with megadealer Larry Miller in 1997.

His three years running Barry Engle Chrysler-Plymouth-Jeep gave Engle the retail street smarts that help him relate to dealers' challenges and inform his response to the crisis that has upended their business.

"He knows when we're talking our lingo," said Dosanjh, dealer principal at Dosanjh Family Auto Group, which has 17 dealerships in the San Francisco Bay Area. "We have other manufacturers, and these guys have no clue what goes on at the dealership. From A to Z, he does understand it all, from how we greet the customer and what the process is."

Engle signed the front of many checks as a dealer and has experienced the pain of thin retail margins firsthand, said Keith McCluskey, owner of McCluskey Chevrolet in Cincinnati. "He cares about improving the General Motors dealers' net on sales, return on sales," he said. "It's not just talk or hoping it happens. It's helping the margin, reducing expenses with some substantive things that are going to be very, very beneficial to the GM dealer body as we move forward into the future."

He also challenges the norms and encourages peers to break out of long-standing habits, said Mike Bowsher, owner of Carl Black Automotive Group in Kennesaw, Ga. "We've seen things that he's jumped into move a little bit faster in a really good way," said Bowsher, who chairs the Chevy dealer council.

For example, Engle came up with the idea to take preorders for the midengine Chevrolet Corvette. Chevy received more than 45,000 preorders through its website that likely will take more than a year to fill.

After the pandemic hit the U.S. in March, Engle, his team and a committee of dealers set out to transform Shop-Click-Drive, GM's 7-year-old online shopping tool, into a tool for sales. Shop-Click-Drive can't yet handle a transaction from start to finish, but dealers expect an enhanced version to be ready this summer.

Visits to Shop-Click-Drive have increased 40 percent during the pandemic, CFO Dhivya Suryadevara said last month. About 3,500 GM dealerships have access to the tool, an increase of about 800 since the crisis started and many dealers converted to virtual sales.

"Shop-Click-Drive was a really good lead source, and it was a little bit more than a lead source. It got you some information on the customer," said Dosanjh, who works with three third-party digital retail vendors across his dealership group. "Where it's headed, it will be probably one of the best transactional tools in the market."

The push to enhance Shop-Click-Drive came from dealers, said GM spokesman Joe Jacuzzi. And Engle and his team took note.

"It seems like we had years and years and years of takeaway, takeaway, takeaway. That has stopped," Bowsher said. "In a lot of cases, Barry has been very helpful with that. We're now partners again. I have to credit him for a lot of that."

Engle joined GM in 2015 as president of South America. He was promoted to president of all international operations in 2017 and took charge of North America when Alan Batey retired last year.

GM was the only one of the Detroit 3 to increase North American profits in the first quarter, earning six times as much as Ford Motor Co. in the region and more than quadrupling Fiat Chrysler Automobiles' results. Its U.S. sales declined 2.2 percent in Engle's first 12 months, a period that included a 40-day strike by the UAW and the early weeks of the pandemic.

At his first National Automobile Dealers Association Show franchise meeting as GM's North American president in February, Engle and other GM executives went through a list of dealer challenges, including expense control, floorplan assistance and cash flow, with proposed solutions.

"What we heard was that in too many cases, it's difficult to do business with us," Engle told Automotive News last month. "Even some of the basics at times we can do better, like vehicle delivery, parts delivery and just helping dealers get what they need at the right point in time."

Many of the solutions were relatively simple, Engle added. "It was just listening to our dealers, understanding what bugs them, what makes it hard to do business for them and then together identifying what the fixes are," he said.

The solutions were strategic and thoughtful, said McCluskey, and dealers were "refreshed by the transparency and the commitment to help us become more successful."

Many conversations with dealers have been centered on the future of auto retail as the shopping experience becomes more digital and as GM moves forward on plans to launch 20 electric vehicles globally by 2023.

GM in November created divisions focused on customer experience and dealership operations and innovation. The new organizations were established to "listen and work together with our dealers to move quickly and improve the business," Jacuzzi said. "These teams and their leaders were put in place thanks to the leadership of Barry."

GM plans to better collaborate with dealers to be prepared for the next phase of auto retail, Engle said. "We view the dealers as our partners in the business, so whatever changes we make need to be changes that are good for both them and us," he said.

Brian Sweeney, previously head of the Chevrolet brand, is leading the dealer organization. Sweeney is extremely popular among dealers. Moving an executive with so much clout into the dealer operations post shows the importance that Engle, CEO Mary Barra and other GM leadership place on the future of auto retail, McCluskey said.

"If it was someone else working their way up the ladder to that position," he said, "I don't think it would have gotten the same attention of everybody at GM and all the dealer body."