Adhering to Best Practices with Steve Curran, Part One

Changes within the automotive industry is something we have focussed on with a lot of our guests.

Upheaval throughout the pandemic, and issues with parts and electronics certainly took their toll. So in this week’s episode, Simon talks to another fellow Aussie , Steve Curran about where the industry is going and how it has changed over the years.

Now Steve is considered one of Australia’s  automotive industry leading motivational and sales leaders, so his insight and experience is fascinating. He explains how he first got into the industry , recalls the very first car he sold and goes into a great amount of detail regarding Best Practice in all areas of the business and how it is the key to success.

This is the first part of a two part interview.

Here are the highlights:

{01:22} The hardest job in the dealership – Service Advisor.

{03:30} Remembering the Mazda 6

{13:35} Closing the escape hatches.

{22:25} Getting out there and selling

{24:39} Focus on what doesn’t cost you money!

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 inspiring 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 and 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 cars, 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 Skippy, I would start by saying thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Hi and welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. Today's my pleasure to introduce you to Steve Curran. Now Steve Curran, he runs total selling solutions and you'll hear from his accent, he comes from down under again. Now I've met Steve at the National Automotive Dealers Association and we're putting the world to write about sales process, what's happening in the industry, where we're going. I thought we've got to get Steve on the podcast. So Steve, firstly, thanks for coming along. Thanks Simon, thanks for having me. So Steve, let's find out a little bit about how you started the motor trades. When did you start the motor trade? What was your journey? Oh, my journey was, I started in the workshop as a technician for a decade. I was the guy with the greasy overalls on, working on cars and then I was after a bit more coin. Once I progressed from an apprentice and I knocked on the manager's door and I said, look, can I get a payer? He said, you've got to do a bit more to get a bit more. So progressed into a service advisors role, then I moved on into sales. Okay. So service advisor to sales. Okay. Yeah, the hardest job I ever did was a service advisor. Yeah. Oh, Steve, I'm glad you said that. Whenever we do any training, I promise you, the service advisor is the hardest job in the dealership bar number. And it really is there. I think it's probably good grounding, isn't it? Definitely good grounding. It's definitely good. Really? It's starting at 7.30 a.m. And you get, you know, I had eight or 10 people lined up and they all hit you with all their challenges and they're grumpy because they're going to work as a first way out of their way in the last 12 months, because I only come to you every 12 months. And at the end of the day, they've got to rush back to you to pick their car up. So it's not a great experience. And plus they're going to hand over a handful of cash. So there's a bit of negotiating. You're on the phone. You're doing upsells and people want to negotiate. So, you know, although you might be doing a real crappy job at the moment, you don't love it. It could be sort of, you know, sharpening your skills for a later career path. So why this jump into selling cars, then? Was it more coin than this? Well, it totally buys the price. So my manager at that time, he gave me a position on the front counter as a service advisor because a senior service advisor actually went to the UK for six weeks and they wanted someone to fill the counter. So I did that. And then when he came back, John Red was the guy's name, when he came back, I said, you're pretty good on the phone. And over here, what we've got to do is to get a vehicle work approved, say, for a fleet company, you've got to ring these fleet leasing companies up and they're pretty tight with their spend. And you've got to sell to them why you want to do all this work, right? Everywhere in the world. So they're all the same old. So when John came back from his UK trip and that, the service manager said to me, he said, we want you to be like a rep on the road for service. I said, what does that mean? He said, well, go for all our old records. Anyone that hasn't been back in the last 12 months, any businesses, I want you to ring them, make an appointment, go out and try and get them back into the business. So yeah, that was my journey into that. And I saw I did that for six months. And at that time, the dealership only had one franchise. It was Holden back then. And then they were getting a second franchise, which was Mazda. And they had a manager, but they had no sales staff. So my service manager, who was a business partner in the dealership, he said, come and have a meeting and have a chat. And he sat me down. He said, look, we've got a great opportunity for you. He said, how do you feel about selling cars? So what? Big car salesman. Oh, I don't know about that. This is a true story. I'm going to have a ton of my family. They've all gone, what? Big car salesman. Because all I do is remember me in greasy. I have emeralds. So we're not trying to get onto the front counter. We're in nicer clothes. They probably could see a bit more opportunity. And so could the guy that I was working for at a time. So that's how I got into selling cars and being a car salesman. Cool. This always separates the real motor traders. To remember the first car you sold? Yeah, first car I sold was a Mazda 6 estate wagon. And when it got delivered, my manager called me into the office. And he said, what have you done here? I said, what do you mean? He said, well, there's not only only $2,500 gross in these cars. You've made four grand. So I don't know. It was the process in the book. And I just saw a charge. He goes, well, he goes, oh, I know what you've done. They bought a manual, but you're charging for an automatic. So that was the first car I sold. And it was highest gross. But I don't mean tell you after that, it sort of went a bit, you know, I learned all about gross. And then, you know, an overall ounce and my gross is dropped. It always amazed me so many times when people first, you get that brand new car salesperson. He doesn't realize that there's an overage car out on the forecourt, out on the lot. And he sells the overage one. He doesn't realize that, hold on. Well, that's the full price. That's what you charge. And when we're in the business for a while, they start to, oh, overlamps and giving it away. And where do we need to be? Yeah, definitely. We get preconditioned. So we start believing everything that someone tells us that they've seen up the road or gotten a price on the road. And then we have to quick the run that price into our manager and spend more time negotiating with our manager about price and negotiating or, you know, doing the sales process with the guests when they come in the dealership. It isn't so true. I was in the land drive of a business. Beginning of this week. And a guy come in and it was a brilliant salesperson speaking to his sales manager. Yeah. And I just said, mate, are you working as hard on your customer as you're working on your sales manager? I mean, he was brilliant at working his sales manager. It was one of the best sales pitches I've ever seen. And he just had that little smirk on his face of that little grin. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It happened. They do that. So when you're selling, do you remember any really great days? Any great days when you thought, ah, I've made it as a salesperson now. To be honest with you, it took me 12 months to get comfortable with selling cars. Okay. And I still tell trainees right now today, if there's any trainees listening, I had butterflies in my stomach for the first 12 months. And I used to sort of panic a little bit because I thought, what if I asked me a question I don't know. And the best thing I ever did was learn a few techniques on how to get my questions right, you know, which was, which army with bit more knowledge and maybe very much more comfortable and confident. So I suppose it wasn't one real defining moment, but yeah, it was just, just learning, yeah, techniques to sort of be able to learn the right questions and to open people up. And I found once I opened people up, I just started working a lot better. But I tell you one quick funny one, I still remember to the day, like this is a lot of years ago, when I sales, I'm like one of my sales counterparts, Sydney goes, look, you test drive everyone. I said, yeah, well, that's what you got to do. You're going to test drive people. And he goes, well, you know, why did his test drive that guy? I don't know, he spent two hours in, he's gone, you know. And I said to myself, well, at least he was a chance in selling a car too. I said, I'm talking to you now. I got no chance of selling your car. Right? So I talked to two or three people a day. You spend 30 minutes or an hour with these, every guest comes in my dealership. How hard is it? And what I learnt was very quickly was the people I thought with DeadSec on a buy car didn't really buy a car. And the ones I thought was sort of a little bit fluffy, not a lot of buying signals ended up buying cars. So I thought, how can I second guess a market? And another thing I did was sometimes I thought it'd be clever. And I thought, oh, well, this guy's not on the buy car. Look how fast he drove up the driveway. Right? And he'd get out of his car and I'd say to my selling buddy, other buddy, I said, you want to talk to this customer? Because I want to go and grab something to wait. And then, yeah, yeah, I'll have the next talk. I'll go in the back room, have my lunch come out. And he'd be there to find... He'd find it in his personal, person up that I classified as like not a buyer. And yeah, and that was another thing. So yeah, there's not really one defining moment. It's just a whole series of different moments that sort of gave me life lessons. Yeah. It's so true. Tommy Gibb, a friend of the show we interviewed a while back from the States. He said, the trouble with the motor trade is, every now and then a miracle comes along. And he said, on that used car, a miracle comes along and you make full growth. I think that's what happens with car salespeople. Every now and then, they sell a car without doing a demonstration drive. Okay. And they think, oh, I can sell a car without doing that. Why don't I drive that all the time? And they start short cutting the system and getting a bit of knowledge there. And I think that's what happens to lots of things. It does, especially between COVID. I don't know what happened in the UK, but over here, we'll let people just test drive the cars on their own. COVID's pretty much gone in Australia. And guess what? Salespeople are still using that as an excuse to send people out on their own. And we know that most of the rapport is built on the test drive. It's the only time we talk to people and we're not looking at them in the face. And most of the chat isn't even about the car. It's about life and where they've been on their holidays and all those rapport building conversations. So if you're a salesperson out there and you're not test driving, you are dead set. You're playing at a disadvantage. And the other thing is too, you might think you've been getting away with it. But your competitors are going to start test driving more. And if you're lagging behind not test driving, let me tell you, your competitors are the smart salespeople, have a smart dealership, have a strong process to ensure that the sales person is spending the maximum amount of time with the guests when they come in. And that includes like for test drive. Yeah. As Steve, you hit the nuttlehead for me. I'll go say over the last three years in COVID times, we all know that supply issue was a real it was an issue everywhere around the world. So the sales process went out the window. There's so much low hanging fruit. And there's so many people that were selling vehicles without having to go through any process. Because the process was, is that car available? Yeah, I need it. I want it. And the sales process was, well, if you don't want it, I've got three other people who want it. But I got to tell you what, and I think Australian market, you guys are ahead of supply where we are in Europe. And what I mean by that is I'm hearing that more and more suppliers coming through all the time. You got to get back to the basics. We're going to get back to slowing the process down and sell yourself first, the product second before we sell the deal. Now's the time to get sales fit. Yeah, yeah, dead right. You don't wait towards raining to fix a hole in the roof. So Steve, this is a shameless plug for a first 90 day program. We often say that the people learn in the first three months, the skills that last them to the rest of their selling life, okay, good and bad. Can I ask you, is there anything in your first three months that says relevant today for someone who started either selling cars or maybe a service advisor as it was when you first started? Number one thing is get training. Okay, if you don't have a lot of access to training, the biggest tip I'll give everyone out there is spend more time and ask more open-ended questions. All right, you're going to gather a lot more information. So the example I like to give is when we're talking about trade-ins, don't just ask a guess, are you replacing a car with another car? Do you have a trade-in? People say, yeah, I do. So look, okay, great. I'll get that priced up for you. I'll get evaluation. Dig deeper. Ask them questions about how long have you had it? How's the car been? Why are you thinking about changing an over? Has your lifestyle changed? That's going to go into like 10 different avenues where you can find out more about people and help build that trust. But I'm going to tell you here in Australia, we're in a program, a sales cadet program and it runs for six weeks. And what we find is that we fast-track people from zero to hero. We've rode to the sale and rode to the phone appointment. And it's all the technical stuff. It's all the word tracks. It's understanding the process. Reality is, they're not going to turn into a superhero in three months. Okay, no one does. But what happens is it gives people great foundations on how to build their sales process. And what I found was for me, for the first more than three months, probably up to 12 months, I sort of knew what I was doing. I was selling cars. I didn't have to keep my job in a company car, plus a reasonable commission. But I didn't really know how I was doing it all. I didn't know, I was just sort of working people. I like people. I like to talk to people. And I believe that got me through. But as I progressed further, the penny started to drop about the process. And that's why I do this in this position, because if I don't qualify properly, we're not negotiate and I get pushed back on the price, I get bounced on the price. I've got nowhere to go. So it was all about closing those skate patches. And I'll never get one of my managers. My first manager, Ted Dickinson, he was a hub. He was the next trache. He was one of those guys. He was a really great trainer. More of a mentor to you. Was it a mentor? Yeah, yeah. He said, yeah. I said, I know I had that guy, Ted. I just couldn't close you. He goes, son, you're a bit nowhere. I said, what do you think? He goes, you're leaving all these gates open. And he was a country guy. And he said, think of a barn. If you put all the horses in the barn, and you don't close all the barn doors. The next morning, there's no horses. And so that's like you were closing. You've got all these doors open. You need to qualify better, right? And I learned from that. And that was my typical question. You know, who else has got to be involved in the buying process? And people say, oh, it's just me. Well, obviously, an objection you shouldn't get at the end of the sale. So true. So true. If it comes up, then you've got your qualification wrong, having you? Yeah, you've got your qualification wrong. So what I learned by that, by having training, we didn't have like training companies in, you know, that's like going from the States and it come for a week and then go back home. And we forget everything that he said. You know, been a great trainer. We get really pumped up. But you can't remember everything and life happens. Yeah. And deal with life is just so chaotic and even more chaotic now for everyone. But having a process you can lean back on, it might sink straight in today. It really helps. And the penny start dropping. You go, yeah, that's what happened. That customer walked out. And I still remember like we had an elevator platform. And when people leave the dealership, I go out there, I think, I just ran over my mind, what could I have done differently to get them to buy a car? I counted every car I sold up to the first 100. That's a true story. But I think what could I have done? And I think, okay, I could have test driven that person a bit longer. I should have got his partner to drive your car. I should have engaged the wife a little bit more. I could have done my right up better. Still, I just hadn't bob on the right up. Just all those little things. And I've just been checked. So when the next guest come in, I've plugged that whole. I love that. You were hungry. It's like, what can I do better? How do I improve myself every single time? That's it. Yeah. I love that. Absolutely. I love that. So listen, I'm always interested. How does someone like you and I go from selling cars to running a trainee company? What was your journey then? Yeah. My journey is probably typical, but it's a little bit interesting and lucky, I guess. Okay. Okay. And if you're always doing something good, someone's always noticing, even though you think they're not. So with me, I was selling and managing cars and a dealership for 15 years. I was working for a company. It was one company, but it did progress into a bigger, bigger, bigger. And they bought, was back in the day, all the companies were buying big company. They became a big group. So I started selling one, servicing one site, selling another site, and then it became a manager and got to a general manager's role and a totally another dealership, an hour away, which was part of the same group. So after 15 years, my kids were getting a little bit older and so on. I thought, I'd like to have some more time with another 14 and 11. They're about. Yeah. And back then in the day, you had to work every weekend. And that's it was a Sunday, sorry, it was a Wednesday to Sunday job. It really was. And if you work at those days, you've got to be missing out opportunities. So no doubt different, no different from a lot of the guys and girls out there today. But yeah, I was looking for that edge and you had to work those retail days. So what I ended up doing was I was looking for another opportunity and I actually left the business momentarily and bought a tie, a tie of franchise. Wow. Okay. Yeah, those guys have come in there, their trucks and all the alloy wheels and nice big ties. That could be that guy. Anyway, a workshop background and someone I thought, if I buy one of those tie stores, it's a Jack's tie stores. It's like a franchise over here. Don't know if you got in the UK. So the franchise always said, come and have a meeting. He said, great. He said, you've got good training, good background. We're going to factory store. Why don't you buy that? So we did a deal on paper and it was a trial period of three months and I got in, left my role with the company. I was with 15 years and started running the store and I hated it. The model was really good. The people that had office was fantastic, but I just could not get my head around selling ties and making 20 bucks here and 50 bucks here. I was selling a wheel on for $75. When you're selling vehicles for 80 and 100k and you come down to small transactions like that, it's too many transactions. It was back to the service advisors role, I think. The owner of the whole of Australia, I said, hey Fred, I'm really sorry, but this isn't for me. And he goes, bloody hell. We really like to start with so on. You're sure there's anything we can do and all that. I'll give you a month and then yeah, we'll go from there. And he was fantastic about it. So I hung in there and you wouldn't believe it. A week later, the phones run at this tire store and it was a guy that owned a training company. Okay. And he said, I'm a number for someone to look after our training business in Sydney and New South Wales. Would you like to have a chat? I said, you get my number. And he said, well, another guy named Hans, who's an IT guy, a contractor, and he said, he knows about you. He did some work for McGrath's, who he used to work for. He said, you'd be a really good guy to talk to. And he said, you're left and he wasn't sure what you're up to. So no one knew I pulled a pen on this friend. And the phones run. So someone's always watching, do a good job. Someone's watching. I'd say, yeah, just that old thing and like, dress for the job you want, not the job you've got. You know, because I just want you always. I've never heard that phrase. I love that. Dress for the job that you want, not the job you got. Yeah. That's so true. Yeah. The sales guy, he said, by the $30 shirts, I buy the $80 shirts, you know. They buy the ties with the car turbines on it, which I've got. I still don't understand what people wear. If it were not, look, it's your thing. That's all cool. But I can never, so, you know, business title. And this guy's run me up and then I went and moved for him. He was awesome. His name was Mark and he taught me a lot of things I know about now and now about business. It was a fantastic marketer. Yeah. And then yeah, I worked for him for about, you know, six or seven years and then I thought, okay, well, times I'd get my big boy pants on and do it myself. So yeah. That's right. Yeah. That scary moment where you think, right, let's do it for myself then. Oh, shit. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You go. So tell me about your company there. What's the typical day look like for you? Are you out in dealerships all the time? How's it? Yeah. So we service all Australia. So we got 150 dealerships across Australia. So it's all the way from up in far north Queensland all the way down to Western Australia. And I've got a lot of help. We've got four trainers in different states and then plus my soul from them. Got staff that head office and then we've got 34 call assessors full time. We just listened to phone calls. So what we do is we record calls coming into dealerships and then we assess those calls based on what the business owner wants the salespeople or service people to ask. And then we provide an assessment which populates the portal. And then those school cards go back out to call to the call takers. So we send out about 20,000 assessments per month all across. And we spoke about before like about training and how do you make it stick and so on. So we actually go in once a month and train, but then we make sure the training stick, training sticks by sending call assessments back during the absence of our training. Because otherwise I will forget what you do say. Right. And so there it's a little reminders. So we've got a lot of mechanisms within the background and there's 44 people in our company that help all those mechanisms work. So my job each and every day is probably more so I'll work on the training side of the business. I've got a son that works in the business. He's a general manager. He's no major agent. He looks after everything HQ and all our call assessors, which frees me up and allows me time to do things like I'm doing right now, but also go out and visit dealerships and do training and visit in dealerships. So we're on traveling into state or I'm checking with my staff on the phone or answering emails. Dealers deals will ring me to have a good relationship or this contact me direct. Sometimes I get a salesperson of men who contact me direct and I'll get back in contact with them. Sometimes I'm doing deals. We do presentations and I've got to get out there and sell. And our product is like your assignment. There's no one pushing your sell it. You're going to push it. It doesn't come out of a box. It doesn't come from the store. You can get in a boat, road and bike. We've got a manufacturer just like you have to manufacture your product. So we're going to keep it fresh and going out and talking to people, keeping your ears at the ground. I think it keeps it fair income, keeps it real. Because people know if you're a bit of a phony, and they know if you're not at lunch. So getting out of dealerships is what I do like to do, but it's just balancing what I've got to do every day. I just keep the main thing, the main thing, we're not selling, we're not closing deals. We're not building and growing our business. We're not shooting content in videos, in training videos, doing podcasts. We're not growing our audience. Social currency is definitely the way to go. That's how you beat the big dogs out there. You don't know who's from money at the market anymore. You've got to get your presents out there, right? Yeah. Retention is another big thing. So Steve, what I love to dedicate yours there. But we just met at the NADA conference. And I know we both go out there all the time. And you have to go and look for what's new, what's fresh, what's changing. Because the world is changing out there all the time, isn't it? And you have to be really at the sharp end, I think, as a training provider. Yeah, definitely. Definitely. We spent a lot of shiny stuff out there. Yeah. Yeah. On the trade floor, like millions and millions and millions of dollars of shiny bits, tools and equipment. But let's take out from it. Like I did more workshops than I've ever done at an NADA. Because everyone knows there's after drinks, there's after dinner, there's networking and all those sort of things. You get better at 2am and you're up at 7pm, right? You're living on five hours sleep a day. Yep. One of a half an hour keeping the afternoon sort of thing. But what I found was, and I pushed myself to get, make sure we're getting the most out of it. We're two of my team members with me. The thing that the trainers were talking about who are running workshops and a lot of these guys had their own businesses and some had their own dealerships, which was fantastic. It was all about focusing on the things that don't cost you any money. Don't have to go look in front of you widget, right? So it's all the things that don't cost you money. So working on how people feel when they come to your dealership. We did a dealership visit, which is at Southwest Ford and Texas. We toured the US with a group over in Australia called the double ADA. We went on the convention. We have about another 85 delegates. And when we rocked up to this dealership, two big black coaches, we pull up in the driveway, and then we walk up to the showroom and we're going in the showroom because they had everything set up in the showroom and we're doing a dealership tour. And there was a guy in front door. He shook everybody's hand as you walked in the door. The whole two coaches. It was amazing. And behind him was another guy and behind him was another guy. So his experience is pretty cool. And he said, hi, I'm Charlie Gilchrist. Welcome to Southwest Ford. Hi, I'm Charlie Gilchrist. Welcome to Southwest Ford. He created everyone. And then we all sat down and then this guy got up on the podium and said, welcome everyone on Charlie Gilchrist. I am the owner of the love of it. It's what. So he didn't have to do that, right? So the message was that NADA was focus on the people, the things that cost you any money. Focus on your staff, the things, you know, they do cost you an investment each week. But you know, how well do you know your staff? How often do you check in with them? Do you sit there and have a three month conversation around how do you feel your career is going? You know, are we along with where you want your career to be going? You know, keep checking in with those people. Meet and greet your customers when they can show them. You know, does everyone remember that in 2019? We used to meet a great people. We do that. It got to be hard back then and people, managers were even double opening, not just double closing. So focus on the people was a message and focus on what your teams why, what makes them tick? Is it money? Is it career progression? Is it being able to sometimes watch their kids sports? Is it drive a better car or a bit more flexibility in their day? So that's what I really got out of that. I thought, wow, you do need all the things behind you, all the tools. The most valuable resource is people. And if you are not focusing on people, it doesn't matter what you buy out there. It's going to be short. I just got to say, anyone listen to this podcast who has not done the NADA trip, Patrick Tessier, James Walkman from the double ADA, the Australian Automotive Dealers Association. They do such a great trip every year out there. And I just tell any dealer out there listening to this, get out there and have a look at what's happening there because it is just such an eye-opener sometimes, isn't it? Yeah. The great thing about those guys, the tour series, but I don't take them so serious. We had a lot of fun. No, just remember one night we went to Q&A there and they had some foreigners from other countries and we'll talk about Australian lingo sort of thing. And I'm sure if you were there that night, Simon. I was there that night with asking people, what do these things mean? Yeah. Yeah. What do you think are threes? You know? Yeah, it's exactly. One, you know, is it on the way? But we know thongs of, you know, what the price I think. So that's all that sort of thing that the guys are just like. Yeah. We have a lot of fun which makes it great, especially when it's long days and long nights. 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 LinkedIn. Thank you.