It’s the time of year for goal setting, so let’s talk about some techniques that can help you.
These tips can be applied to help with you goals in your career, home life and financial aspirations.
A great episode to play in your sales meetings this month.
Here are the highlights:
{01:22} SMART Goals
{01:47} Dream Goals
{02:40} Process Goals
{06:45} Magical Tip
{09:05} Failure
{12:10} Habit Forming
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon’s words ‘real world’, it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visit
www.symcotraining.co.uk
Welcome to the Selling in the Motor Trade Podcast, an association with Symco Training. This is the weekly podcast where we share best practice tips and ideas on how to sell more cards, improve your service department and generally put more profit into your dealership or dealer group. I'm your host, Simon Bowkett. As some of you probably already know me as skipping, I will start with saying thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Hi, welcome to a new episode of Selling in the Motor Trade. Now I'm recording this on the 2nd of January. So this time of year, I always love to talk about goals. Now it's the time of year that you got over all your Christmas and put it on too much weight and I've done that as well. We've all done that. And we sit down and think, okay, what are we going to do? Now to be fair, Amra and I, we like to do this between Christmas and New Year, so we've hit the deck running, okay? But you might be a salesperson, listen to this, you're in a car dealership as a manager, a line manager. It's all about goal setting and working out what you want to achieve for 2024. And I'm sure if you listen to this podcast, I'll know you guys, you've heard about smart goals and I'm sure I've talked about on one of the episodes. A smart goal, okay, or smart goals or there's so many different permutations in these to be specific, in these to be measurable, achievable, realistic and timed, okay? However, I want to add to this, okay, when it was goal setting, okay, I'll we sit down and dream and work out exactly what you want to achieve in 2024. And then think about 2029, five years down the track, where are you going to be, okay? I want you to dream and visualize and pitch of where you want to be. But then I urge you to look at process goals, not outcome goals. Now this I learned from a lady called Dan Jenkins. So I wrote the book Words That Sell Cars and I tried to write that book for five years and I just couldn't get it done. So I met this lady called Jeb Dankins and she said, what you need love is some goals. So yeah, yeah, Deb, so I've got goals. I trained goals that I've ever lived in. And she said, oh, but love, you've got a outcome goal, not a process goal. That I, what? She said, you can see it finished, can't you? On the bookshelf, all ready to go. What you need is a process goal. How big is this book going to be? I don't know, this thick. She said, that's about 60,000 words. Okay. So you need to do this within six months. So I tell you what, that's 10,000 words each month. That's two and a half thousand words every week. That's five hundred words a day. So I tell you what, I'm going to help you write this book. She helped me set out the plan and all that sort of stuff. But she said, and what's accountability, you need to give me 500 words every day. That's two and a half thousand words every week. If you don't, I'm going to beat you over the head with a stick. Now she didn't actually beat me over the head with a stick. Okay. But she gave me a process goal, not an outcome goal. I'm going to tell you too many times I did goal setting in the past where I'd say, oh, I want to earn X amount. Okay. I want to buy that house. Okay. I want to go on this holiday. But was never a, hey, what do I need to do to get to that? Okay. I'm going to get an extra water and need to break down. How am I going to get that to break it down into a process goal? Okay. That's what I want you to do. So again, if you're in selling and selling cars, okay, it's so easy. We'll say, what do you want to earn over the next 12 months? That's X amount. Take away your basic salary. Okay. That leaves this. So how many cars based on your current commission per sold car do you need to sell? I need to sell 190 cars this year. Okay. So I want to sell 190 cars. What activity do you need to do? Now, if you want to really talk about process goals, I think the book that sums up really well is a man called Frank Betscher wrote a book, How Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling. He'd work out now. He wasn't in the motor trade. I believe he was an insurance. Okay. But he worked out the sales activity funnel. And well, he's the guy that's largely credited for putting the science into the art form of selling. So he'd work out that, okay, if you want to sell that number of cars, how many demonstration drives do you need to do? To do that mean demonstration drives? How many qualified customers do you need? So how many total opportunities do business do you need? Okay. Hey, that means every option to do business is worth $25 to you. It's worth 25 euros to you or 25 pounds wherever you're listening to this. Okay. And they break it down into the activity. You need to do to get there. But what I love and what's largely forgotten the motor trade. To work out how much each stage in the process is worth to you. So when it is Saturday afternoon, Sunday afternoon and you're on a late shift, everyone you spoke to last week has turned to crap. And all you want to do is go home and see your family. Okay. All you want to do is go home and go to the pub and have a point to drown your soft roads. And you see a customer walking in with the arms behind the back, the paces. If you know that, hold on, that's worth 25 quid to me there. That's worth 25 quid. It helps break that outcome goal into a process goal. Now if that's something you want, go back and have a look through the episodes. I talk about Frank Betcher in depth or contact us through Cinco training at the office and we'll give you a business plan for salespeople to work out what actually they need to do to earn their income goal and breaks it down. Lovely little Excel spreadsheet that Darren Bedford is written for us and it works really, really well. Okay. However, here's the next thing. I was talking about some goal setting one day and I believe this is one of the things that helped transform our business a few years ago. And as I make a poor bratly, I was doing some training with some of his senior managers. I talked about goal setting and he said, Hey Simon, have you got your goals written down? Yeah, yeah, Paul, I know exactly what I want. He said, yeah, but are they written down? Yeah, I know exactly what I want, but they're not written down, are they? He said, Hey Simon, there's something magical about writing your goals down. You know what? He's right. I'm going to tell you this as well. There's something magical about writing your goals down. I don't know what it is. The really smart people out there will tell me what it is. It's something to, I don't know, it makes the subconscious mind visualize it more clearly or something like that there. I'm just going to go down the magic room. Okay. There's something magical. In fact, there's a guy called Walt Disney. He did all right. He said, whatever the subconscious mind can conceive and then believe the conscious mind can then go and achieve. And there's something that Paul got me to do and I do it every year now. I write my goals down. I just don't write down the outcome goal now. I write down, okay, that's that particular property on a purchase. That's that business want to purchase. But then I don't just do that. I say, okay, what activity I'm going to have to do to get that? Okay, I'm going to have to speak to X number of these companies. I'm going to have to speak to go and view this number of people. I'm going to have to go and work out what activity I need to do because if I do the activity, I know I need to go and get it in car and go and shake hands with eight of these estate agents and to go down that route again. Okay, I need to physically go and do that activity to go and buy that new investment property I want without doing the activity. I have to go and see eight now. By the way, the first one I go to might land me what I wanted, but I've got to go through the groundwork, the hard work to get to what I want. Okay. So what activity you need to do? Write it down and visualize it. But here's something else. This works well for me. What motivates people more? The pleasure of getting something or the fear of failure, fear of missing out on it. You see, we often say with salespeople, any privilege becomes a right. You give a salesperson a lovely flash demonstration car just because he hit a target one month. Try and take my car off him or her. Okay. They're not going to like that at all. Okay. Any privilege becomes a right. So actually, what does it look like if you miss your goal? That might work better for you. Okay. If you can't get that goal, okay, what does failure look like? Doesn't that motivate some people more? I tell you what, simcoe training, we've been going for 23 years now, 24 now it's going to be. We're going into our 24th year and many times in the first two or three years. A lot of people say, I had you start the training company. Hey, let me tell you. In the first three or four years, I was mad to continue. Okay. It would have been so much easier to take a job as a back in the dealer group. And I had lots of opportunities to do that. And you know what? I probably should have taken some of them just on logic, but I didn't. And I'm so glad I didn't. Okay. Because it was the fear of failure. If I did that, hold on for a second. I can't even run a sales training company. I can't sell enough contracts. I don't have the right to keep selling. If I can't sell training contracts, okay? So the fear of failure almost keeps me going more. So if you're goals, I ask you to think about what does failure look like? Because that might motivate you. If you like me more, now some people want to say, ah, that doesn't work for me because I never fail. Fine. Well, I do. I think that's you. Great. But that might work for you. Here's the next thing. Discipline. You have the goals. Some of you guys now being new years might have a discipline to go run. I'm going to lose weight to something you need to do. If you look at the gyms at the moment, you can't get into gyms because they're hacked through New Year's Eve's revolution or whatever they call it. Those people there. Now, apparently the worst time to lose weight is the first of January because everyone's trying to do it. Okay. However, the fear of not achieving that goal might help you get there, but also you need the discipline to put those running shoes on. So many times a year, people have worked well for a week, two weeks, four weeks. And then about March time, how many people are still doing what they promised they would do? I'm the same on lots of different things. Okay. And I say, yeah, yeah, I'm going to actually do that with the business there. I've got all good intentions. By March, we were going to do that. Why are we not doing that now? Because it fell by the wayside. Because I tell you what, the things that are really, really important for long term success are really urgent. All the things that are urgent are often not important for long term success. And I don't believe we're lazy people. I know I'm definitely don't feel like a lazy person. I'm still working my bum off all the time, but I don't do these other things I said I was going to do because life takes over. Other priorities take over. So actually the fear of failure might help you a little bit more to get there. And that discipline with that discipline, maybe, and I can't remember who I heard this from, but some podcasts somewhere there is if you want to do, I don't know, pushups and you're going to do pushups every day to get your fitness back in position. If you do pushups when you get around to it, you might never do it. But actually if you're going to do your pushups every day, why don't you do it when you do it? When you do it, because it cleans your teeth something that's a habit you do all the time. You do it currently anyway. And just turn around and say, hey, before I clean my teeth, I'm going to drop down and do the pushups I said I was going to do. Because if you attach the new habit, the new discipline to something you've got already, that will become your new discipline. I've heard some very smart people say that do anything for 28 days and new habit forms. So actually if you've got your habit of brushing your teeth, I just use that as an example because that's something that most people do every morning, every night. I know I do. Okay. So actually if you want to do something, attach it, if you want to read, attach it to the habit of something else that you're doing currently. See if that one works for you. And let me tell you, discipline is the real key to goal setting. You can write goals, smart goals. You can have process goals, not outcome goals. You can visualise them. You can sit down there. But without the discipline of fucking doing the work, you ain't going to get there. Guys don't be paralysed by analysing. In the words of, I'm going to, I'm going to make you add my own little bit, the real key to goal setting is just fucking do it. Too often we over complicate things. I suppose in lots of successful people, okay, running their own businesses. I've interviewed lots of people. And so often it comes down to just bloody do it. Give yourself that self discipline to do it. Oh, actually, if you want a really good read, no, this is not read. This is a podcast or a video. You may have already seen it. Make your bed in the morning. I can't remember the guy that get your ship together. This is the guy that's a US Navy captain. Again, whenever I do these things here, people bombard me with who the admiral was, okay? He says, make your bed in the morning. Okay, I laughed at the start with, but he's dead, right? The discipline of making your bed in the morning, the first thing will give you the discipline to do everything else for the rest of the day. And my guys, this time of year, think about goal setting. But you know what? Make sure you do something. Sit down with a pen and a paper, tonight. Or when you get to the dealership, if you listen to this in the morning, or actually you're one of those new years resolution guys that you're going for a jog at the moment there and you listen to me, when you get back to home, back to the work, wherever you are, get a piece of paper in the pen out and start writing some goals down. Think about the discipline. Think about a process goal, not an outcome goal. I'll see you again next time. That just leaves me to say that all details of this episode and other episodes on the selling in the motor trade can be found on our website simcotraining.co.uk. Go there to get a copy of our book, Words That Sell Cars. Go there to sign up to a free trial of our sales fitness online sales training program. Easiest way to get hold of me is Simon Bowkett, food linked in. Thank you.
