A national campaign launches on Monday. The materials are approved, the audience is defined, and every dealer has been briefed. Three weeks later, the CRM manager is still trying to find out who actually went live, which dealers changed the campaign, and whether customer responses received any follow-up.

Meanwhile, another programme needs attention, regional managers are asking for updates, and the 2027 budget has less room for central coordination.

This is where cost reduction becomes an execution problem.

If head office is expected to operate with fewer people, the coordination work has to shrink too. Automating routine follow-up, making dealer execution visible, and removing unnecessary reporting cycles creates capacity. Asking a smaller team to keep chasing the same activities does not.

The cost pressure is no longer theoretical

On 4 November, Reuters reported that BMW had cut its financial targets for a second time this year. Its forecast automotive operating margin for 2026 had fallen to between -0.5% and 0.5%, against a long-term target of 8% to 10%.

BMW’s restructuring programme includes approximately 8,000 job cuts in Germany. More tellingly, CEO Milan Nedeljkovic wants reductions in management functions accelerated.

Volkswagen and Mercedes-Benz are pursuing their own substantial restructuring programmes.

These are manufacturer-level developments, but the implications deserve attention from every National Sales Company preparing its 2027 operating plan.

The dealer network isn’t getting smaller or easier to manage simply because central budgets are under pressure. Vehicle launches, lead conversion targets, retention programmes and campaign calendars remain. Dealers still need support, local circumstances still differ, and management still expects evidence that national initiatives are working.

Something has to change in how that work is organised.

The work that never appears in your budget

Look at a typical national campaign.

Head office prepares the content and targeting rules. Dealers receive instructions and are expected to activate the campaign locally. Regional managers check progress. The CRM team collects updates, resolves inconsistencies and eventually produces a management report.

Then the results arrive, and everyone starts asking questions.

Why did one region outperform another? Did every dealer actually launch? Were the targeting rules followed? What happened to the customers who responded?

The answers often require another round of emails, calls and spreadsheets.

The same pattern exists in lead management. Customers who cannot be reached are called repeatedly. Leads without a showroom visit disappear into the archive. Local teams follow slightly different routines, and someone at head office eventually tries to work out what happened.

Every individual action seems reasonable. Together, they create a significant coordination burden.

What makes this expensive is that much of the work has to be repeated. Every campaign, every new batch of leads and every rollout creates another cycle of reminders, status checks and manual intervention.

Adding another report won’t resolve that problem if someone still has to chase the underlying work.

Ford Netherlands: changing the process instead of adding effort

Ford Netherlands faced a practical version of this challenge in its Retail Contact Center.

Too many incoming leads remained unreachable. After repeated call attempts, potentially valuable prospects ended up archived. The team had invested time trying to make contact, but the process depended on reaching customers when employees happened to call.

Ford introduced automated follow-up through WEBSOLVE Flows.

When a prospect could not be reached, the system sent a personalised email offering the opportunity to schedule a contact moment. Leads that had not resulted in a showroom visit could be re-engaged later through an automated campaign.

According to the published Ford Netherlands case, the share of leads successfully contacted increased from 57% to 72%, while 14% of archived leads subsequently scheduled an appointment.

The Manager Retail Contact Center at Ford Netherlands describes the change:

“Leads that used to drop off now automatically come back.”

The case also reports less manual work and more focus on conversations with engaged prospects.

The important lesson goes beyond the improvement in contact rate.

Ford changed what required human intervention. Employees no longer had to initiate every follow-up themselves. Customers could indicate when they were available, and previously inactive prospects could re-enter the process without someone manually retrieving their records.

For an NSC, that is a more interesting form of efficiency than simply asking contact centre employees to make more calls.

It improves the process while reducing its dependence on repeated manual action.

Standardise the routine, keep the customer relationship local

Central organisations sometimes respond to inconsistent dealer performance by taking more control. More approvals, stricter instructions, additional reporting requirements.

That can increase the very workload they are trying to reduce.

A more effective approach is to establish which activities should happen consistently across the network and build them into the operating process.

Take lead follow-up. The NSC defines when a customer receives an acknowledgement, how unreachable prospects are re-engaged, which communication preferences must be respected, and when a lead requires personal attention.

The routine can run centrally through automation, using existing CRM and dealer-system data. The commercial conversation remains with the dealership.

Dealers retain responsibility for understanding customers, arranging test drives and closing sales. They also retain flexibility where local circumstances matter.

This requires clear ownership, reliable data and agreed procedures for exceptions. A dealer with temporary staffing shortages needs a workable alternative. A customer who withdraws consent must stop receiving the relevant communications. A failed system connection needs to be identified before it affects hundreds of leads.

These are precisely the situations where central expertise adds value.

Head office should spend its limited capacity resolving those exceptions, rather than repeatedly checking whether routine actions happened.

Stop chasing status updates. Make execution visible.

Automation only removes coordination work when head office can trust what is happening.

A national contact rate of 72% tells management something about the outcome. It doesn’t reveal whether some dealers consistently reach 90% while others struggle below 50%, or whether follow-up routines were executed as agreed.

That requires visibility at rooftop level.

Which dealers activated the campaign on time? Where are leads waiting beyond the agreed response window? Which follow-up steps were completed automatically, and where did the process stop?

A connected network execution view can surface those differences without requiring regional managers to collect another round of status reports. WEBSOLVE Pulse is designed around that visibility, bringing execution information together at network and dealer level. We’ll explore this further in January’s article on dealer standards and execution measurement.

The immediate value is straightforward.

When a dealer falls behind because the sales team is understaffed, the regional manager can provide targeted support. When another location has an integration problem, IT can investigate it. When a dealer has changed the campaign audience because the original selection was unsuitable, marketing can review the exception.

Instead of spending time discovering that something went wrong, the central team can concentrate on understanding why.

Measure efficiency by the work that disappears

The business case for a network programme often focuses on more sales, better conversion or higher customer retention.

Those outcomes matter. But with central capacity under pressure, the operating cost of achieving them deserves equal attention.

How many hours does your CRM team spend collecting dealer updates? How many routine follow-up attempts require an employee? How often does a regional manager have to ask for information that already exists somewhere in the network’s systems?

A useful efficiency measure is the amount of recurring work that no longer needs to be performed.

If campaign activation can be observed directly, the weekly status-chasing exercise can disappear. If customers can schedule their own contact moments, repeated manual calling can be reduced. If deviations become visible early, regional managers can spend less time preparing explanations after results disappoint.

None of this requires removing the people who understand the network. It gives those people more capacity to do work that depends on their experience and judgement.

And it changes how an NSC can scale. More customer interactions, more campaigns or more dealerships no longer have to generate a proportional increase in central coordination.

What should disappear from your 2027 workload?

Whether or not your 2027 budget is already signed off, ask your CRM, marketing operations and network teams to identify the three recurring activities that consume the most coordination time without demonstrably improving dealer or customer outcomes.

Then ask a more difficult question: if those activities stopped tomorrow, what would actually be missing?

For some activities, the answer will be important human judgement, local knowledge or accountability. Those deserve protection.

For others, the only thing missing would be a manual process that nobody has challenged because it has always been part of the job.