Breaking Down Silos

Why Leadership, Vision, and a North Star Matter in Every Dealership

A Paper by John Dowling

Walk into almost any heavy equipment dealership and you’ll see it: the parts department is scrambling to fill backorders, the service department is behind on work orders, sales arechasing the next big deal, and rental is hustling to keep machines moving. Everyone is busy, but not everyone is aligned.

The invisible barriers between departments – silos – are costing dealerships more than they realize. They’re destroying customer experience, demoralizing employees, and leaving millions of dollars of profit on the table.

Research backs this up: Harvard Business Review calls cross-silo leadership “devilishly difficult,” yet essential to performance. Salesforce reports that 70% of executives say silos are the biggest obstacle to delivering great customer service. And PwC estimates that silos waste the equivalent of a full workday every week for most organizations.

But here’s the truth: silos are not a technology problem, or a scheduling problem, or even a staffing problem. Silos are a leadership problem.

Silos = Bad Customer Service

Great customer service is never the product of one department. It only happens when parts, service, sales, and rental work together as one dealership.

When communication breaks down, customers feel it:

• They’re asked to repeat the same information to multiple employees.
• Repairs stall because one department doesn’t know what the other is doing.
• Sales promises one thing, while service or rental delivers another.

At that point, the customer doesn’t care how busy your teams are or how hard they’re working—they see a dealership that’s fragmented and disorganized. And fragmented dealerships lose customers.

The Root Cause: A Leadership Blind Spot

Most silos are created not by employees, but by the culture leadership allows—or creates.

• Short-term obsession: When owners and executives care only about this month’s profit instead of the dealership’s 5- or 10-year trajectory, departments turn inward. Everyone protects their turf instead of investing in long-term customer relationships.
• No vision, no alignment: IBM found that 72% of employees don’t fully understand their company’s strategy. In dealerships, this is often because there isn’t one—or at least, it hasn’t been clearly communicated. When leadership fails to define success, each department makes up its own.
• Profit over people: When ownership signals that dollars matter more than customers or employees, managers will do whatever it takes to make their numbers—even if it undermines other departments.
• Compensation and KPIs that reward silos: If managers are paid on departmental success alone, they will naturally optimize for their own scorecard. That might mean service inflates recovery rates, parts hoards margins, or sales dumps machines without considering lifecycle profitability.

The result? Departments become competitors instead of collaborators. Turf wars erupt. Communication shuts down. And culture turns toxic.

The Business Cost of Silos

The impact of silos isn’t just “soft.” It hits the bottom line hard.

• Productivity Loss: Studies show employees waste 7–12 hours a week hunting down siloed information. That’s over 350 hours per year per person—a full day of productivity every week.
• Customer Churn: Salesforce research shows customers expect consistent, connected experiences across every department. When you can’t deliver, they leave.
• Missed Revenue: Siloed communication leads to missed upsell opportunities—service doesn’t know sales is quoting a machine, parts don’t know a customer is frustrated with turnaround times, rental doesn’t know service has a chronic repair issue.
• Employee Morale: A toxic, fragmented environment drives away your best talent. And in today’s labor market, replacing them costs more than ever.

What’s Really Holding Your Dealership Back

In my book What’s Really Holding Your Dealership Back? I argue that the true barrier to dealership growth isn’t the economy, the OEM, or even the labor shortage. The biggest obstacle is internal drag—the inefficiencies, poor processes, and cultural walls we allow inside our own four walls.

Silos are the most obvious symptom of that drag. They waste time, erode trust, and kill the very thing every dealership needs to thrive: a culture of collaboration, accountability, and customer focus.

Breaking Down Silos: A Leadership Playbook

So how do you fix it? It starts at the top. Leaders must:

1. Cast a Clear North Star

Every dealership needs a commander’s intent—a simple, plain-language vision of what winning looks like. Not just “make money for the owner,” but a compelling goal: deliver best-in-class service, grow absorption, and become the most trusted partner in your market.

Without a North Star, people make up their own. And when everyone is following their own compass, you end up with silos.

2. Align Goals, KPIs, and Compensation

If your comp plan rewards managers for protecting their department at the expense of the dealership, you are literally paying people to build silos.

Redesign the compensation so that 20–30% is tied to dealership-wide outcomes, including absorption, customer retention, first-time fix, and on-time invoice. Create shared KPIs across departments—when service wins, parts wins, and sales wins, too.

3. One Customer, One Record

Stop treating CRM as a sales-only tool. Every customer-facing employee—parts, service, rental, whole goods—needs access to the same information. Everyone should be able to see open work orders, equipment history, and account status.

When you share data, you eliminate blind spots. When you eliminate blind spots, you eliminate silos.

4. Build Cross-Department Communication

Create weekly “Production Councils” where sales, parts, service, and rental managers meet to share issues and priorities. Hold daily store-level huddles. Establish monthly account reviews for your top 25 customers.

Conflict will come up—and that’s a good thing. Healthy conflict is how you solve problems. But leaders must model how to surface and resolve conflict instead of letting it fester into walls.

5. Celebrate Inter-Department Wins

Culture is shaped by what leadership celebrates. If the CEO only praises big sales, don’t be surprised when sales ignore everyone else. Recognize when service, parts, and rental collaborate to deliver for a customer. Reward teamwork, not turf wars.

Why This Matters More Than Ever

Dealerships can’t afford to operate like a collection of fiefdoms anymore. The labor market is tight, customer expectations are higher, and margins are thinner.

Your dealership is only as strong as its weakest department. If sales are flying high but service is broken, customers leave. If service is humming but parts are out of stock, customers leave. If rental is strong but sales is siloed, customers leave.

The only path forward is unity: one vision, one set of goals, one dealership.

My Call to Leaders

If your dealership has silos, that’s not your employees’ fault. That’s a leadership problem. And leadership is the only solution.

Breaking down silos isn’t easy. But I’ve seen it transform operations, improve absorption, strengthen cultures, and most importantly, deliver best-in-class customer service.

That’s why I wrote Service by the Boxes—to help leaders see service departments not as chaos, but as structured systems that can be managed, measured, and improved. And it’s why I wrote What’s Really Holding Your Dealership Back—to expose the internal drag that kills profitability.

If your dealership feels stuck in constant firefighting, if you’re tired of babysitting turf wars between departments, or if you’re simply not seeing the profitability and customer satisfaction you know is possible, I want you to know—you don’t have to stay in that chaos. I’m here to help.

My passion is helping dealerships increase revenue, build stronger teams, and create fulfilling careers for their employees. The first step is simple: set up a free consultation with me. Call me directly at 979-337-4339 or email me at jo**@***************es.com.

Let’s talk about what’s really holding your dealership back and build a plan for success. And as a bonus, for a limited time, you can also download my new book What’s Really Holding Your Dealership Back? for free here: https://servicebytheboxes.com/download-ebook/ .