When a customer leaves without buying a car, when do you usually follow them up? A lot of salespeople leave it too long. I’m actually a big believer in the ‘same night’ follow-up call. Customers might tell you they want to go away and think about it, but in reality, what they’re doing is going […]

Think about the words you use with your salespeople, do they directly ask your customers in the same way? Here’s an example. One of the questions we tell our salespeople never to ask a customer directly is, “When are you looking to buy?” Of course, we need to know the answer to this question, but […]

In fact, the experts tell us there are four different spatial zones: • Public Zone – people we don’t know, like the walk-in customer. They start to feel a little uncomfortable if you come within 3.6 metres of them, on average. • Social Zone – people we do know, work colleagues for example. Can come […]

Someone once told me that the name of a customer is the most important word in our language. But the problem I have is that my memory’s not very good. I’ve always had trouble remembering names, and I’ve been caught out before by getting to the point where we need to fill out the order […]

How do you deal with those periods in your career as a professional salesperson when your sales are in a bit of a downward spiral? We all have them, and my advice to anyone who finds themselves in this position is simple – stop selling cars. That sounds crazy, so let me explain what I […]

C ustomers need the comfort of comparison before they purchase, because they want to convince themselves that they’ve got a good value for money offering. Retailers understand this. It’s why the basic ‘Was £…… Now £……’ type of promotion works so well. It often helps to satisfy the customer’s need to compare without them having […]

What do you do with people you just can’t get through too? Whenever you phone, they just never seem to be there!! To actually get through to your prospect, you might want to try an even simpler approach. Call after six o’clock in the evening. Most people who can afford to buy cars tend to […]

Two of the most powerful words in the negotiation stage of the sales process are ‘Feasible’ and ‘Flexible’. Typically, when we’re with a customer we might turn around and say, “we can’t keep those payments at £350 a month, what would you buy it at?” There’s a problem with words like ‘Can’t’. If you ever […]

I sometimes think we’re too quick to make a judgement call on behalf of our customers. We tend to decide if we think they’ve spent enough, rather than offering every product to every customer every time and letting them decide if they want it. That’s why I always urge all Dealer Principals, Service Managers and […]

You need to be careful when putting a sense of urgency into your response to telephone enquiries because, if you build urgency in without any credibility, the danger is that your customers won’t believe it. If the customer has seen the car on a site like Autotrader, you can say: “Autotrader gives us lots of […]