It’s a pleasure to have Alistair Horsburgh, Group Chief Strategy Officer, from CitNOW Group, with us this week to tell us about the group and his career path so far.
We discuss how a dealer’s digital presence is key but also presents challenges in how to differentiate a business. This then leads us on to examine the ever evolving decision journey a consumer makes when buying a vehicle.
Alistair will be back with us in a couple of weeks to chat about everything from Artificial Intelligence to Sales Agency.
Here are the highlights:
{03:04} Valuable Lessons Learnt
{06:03} People Don’t Earn Their Stripes the Same Way
{08:44} How Did Video Sneak Up on Us
{18:45} Digital Presence
{19:53} Consumer Decision Making
{27:17} Video Opened Up the Showroom to the Customer in Their Front Room
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 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 Skipping, I will 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. It's my pleasure today to be joined with Alastair Horsbrough. Now Alastair is a Chief Strategy Officer of the See It Now Group. See It Now Group is a group that you'll know from the videos but actually they've expanded so much over the last two or three years. I just had a look at their website. I think there's 10 different companies under the group. So I want to find out about what Alastair is doing and how he's been building the group. Alastair, welcome aboard. Thanks, Simon. Great to be here. Before we start, it's always nice to get to know our guests. Can you share with us your journey in the motor trade? I understand that your third generation motor dealer and I'd like to get an idea of where you started before we get into the See It Now Group. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. My grandfather had a Volkswagen business in Manchester in the 60s and my father took over that business when my grandfather fell out and I got involved in the motor trade in 1986. There we go. So a few years ago. A few years ago. So what motivated you to follow in the footsteps of your grandfather and father then? What was about the motor trade that got you into it then? I think in all fairness, I probably wasn't very academic. So I came out of school and attempted to go to college. I wasn't particularly academic and figured out that what I could do is I could sell. I think that was sort of the weird thing that came out of the experience of going off to college. And I was taught by some very old school salespeople in car dealerships wearing gold chains and things like... I've got the image. But maybe it didn't necessarily start me off on the right path. But it was a good journey. I think that in that time we had a way of voxel opal business and it was the sort of the late 80s voxel cavaliers around and voxel novas and things like that. So you said opal there. Voxel or opal? It was called opal then. At the time in the late 80s voxel and opal was still kind of in the same showroom as still. And we still have bed for actually on the trucks. We're still on the signs. So it soon came down. But that was the early starting of my time in the car industry anyway. Were there any valuable lessons that you learnt when you started the business there? Because this is a shameless plug for our first 90 day sales training program. We often say that the skills you learn in the first three months, good and bad, last you for the rest of your career, is there anything you learnt in that first 90 days that you think says valuable now? Yeah I think so. I mean I think that the value of watching people and understanding your customers on the forecourt in the showroom but also the salespeople in the dealership. I think it was all about people. Watching salespeople and learning from them. I mean to be fair, some of the traits you didn't necessarily want to learn but you didn't know what was good and what was bad when you were doing that. So I would say that a good lesson today is certainly the first two to three months of any new sales person's life are all about learning some good quality skills. That's what you come in. So it very much is, it's a good, I mean listen they say that sales is one of the oldest industries in the world isn't it? So if you can find that you can identify somebody's needs, somebody's problems, somebody's challenges and give them a solution for it, that sort of helps the whole idea about selling. Certainly was from my perspective, new cows and used cows were a good starting point. I also got involved in a rental company so my father had a rental business alongside the car dealership and that was all about learning about utilization and how to rent vans out and had to work at home price and which you could charge for them. You sort of 1986 D registered transit vans even though we were a box all the way up ship. That was the go to van in the day to try and work out how much you charge for a van. So that was very much, and I did a bit of everything so it was a bit of a, I went around the dealership, went from the past department to the service department, I didn't get on the spanners as they called it then. Yeah. I was at the time in the paint shop and I was taught by one of the spray paints is to paint it an old voxel shebet that I had which was two tone blue. I did a reasonably good job, I said, but that definitely wasn't my forte and I couldn't remember enough part members. I always remember in the time before computers, the way that the parts people, the parts advisors could be part million. Absolutely amazing. And microfecious and voice responsible. Yes. I was just thinking of that. I was going to say I had a similar start in the background. I started washing cars and then in the parts department. And I've got to say I hated it at the time. Absolutely hated it. I just wanted to get into selling, but looking back on it, it was a great grounding just to see how every department works in the underground. I just wish there was more of that happen still in this down age. I think you're right. I mean, you can say that it's just not the way things are done today because there are, you don't, you don't earn your stripes that way. There are some of the industries that have changed beyond your recognition because people don't, they don't earn their stripes the same way. It's just different. Yeah. But I do think that, you know, I've seen so many salespeople in the car industry over the years and it doesn't take much to work out which ones are the good ones, you know. It is, it is a quality that some people have got. But I don't think actually you need to be what I call the old school superstar salesperson anymore. You know, if you, if you can follow a process and if you can talk passionately about the products that are in the show and pass out information to the customers that want it, because they come in with questions, they probably have got answered off the internet anyway. Yeah. But if you can validate those and talk to a customer, I still believe to this day, even on it, we're here to talk about technology. People still buy from people and I absolutely agree. So I think that if you can have that, that personality, you know, we all smile, stand up when we answer the phone, you know, all of those kind of old school messages. I still think that some of that, if we did more of that today, I do think we saw more books. Listen, obviously I want to talk about video and technology and AI and where we're going. But I tell you what, one thing that I still get in at 2023, salespeople saying, well, I don't want to show my face on the video, or I'll show the car, or I don't want to do this. And it's like, oh, they're going to see you when they turn up anyway. People buy people and there's still that resistance there. But I'd like to get your views on all of that because we have the master video here. But this is a question that really separates the true motor traders. Alistair, do you remember the first car you sold? So you know, you've asked me this, and I have to rack my bread. I remember the first new car that I sold. Okay. Probably don't remember the first used car I sold. I think I was, I think I was bullied up with a used car sales person for a while. And I think he would send me out to warm the car up, you know? Yeah. I couldn't really claim that as a first sale, but I do remember selling it. It would have been an overage stock flat. I forget the color. It was a, it was a flat, dark green color, astromeric 1.23 door. I mean, it was one of these things that, you know, when you, when you ordered that car and arrived, somebody would turn on and say, who wanted that car? Why, why didn't you pick up this install? But it was definitely overage. I remember selling it, but it was not the most powerful of engines in a 1.2 overhead valve and 1.2 merit three door, astromeric. It was a little bit sluggish, but that was my first new car. That's what I remember. Fair enough. So, so the journey from there to now running, see it now, group, how does that happen? How did video sneak up on us? Because, and the reason why I asked that, I can remember it was the management director of Blockbuster videos, talked about Netflix. And I think he said something along the lines of Netflix is not even on our radar. Okay. You know, you're not going to be able to email videos. It's just never going to happen. It's takes too long. And clearly they had that wrong. Can you talk about the journey of how I see it now started? Yeah. So every time somebody asks me the question, there's a, there's always a five minute version or a 55 minute version. I'm going to try not to give you the 55 minute version. I think that the bit that's relevant is that when, when I got myself my feet under the table in retail, it had 18 and a half years of retail in the end. And we sold our garages in 2004. So in the late 90s, 1996, I'll just go back this far and then I'll talk to you about today. So auto trader launched auto trader.co.uk and I bet there are about 1996. And we put together a team of people, we've just built a new dealership right opposite forwards of winter, we had a small box of business and everybody said we were nuts. And clearly, Jeremy Hicks, who was the, the pretty short journey at the time was one of the directors of box. He was out, he was out of market area looking after market area. And he said, you shouldn't be doing this. And actually my father said, no, we're going to do it because you're going to open a bike shop. He knows we'll have more next to health folks because it was the best. So anyway, the site, I know the site, I can, the Arnold Clark site now. Exactly right. So the bit that's relevant is that there was a small team of three of us. It was a life called Jason Ashley and I'll talk about Jason. And a life called Drew Lewis, or Andrew Lewis, and three of us got together. And we created this sort of digital environment where we were retailing cars, selling cars online in 1998. We had a salesperson just to selling cars online in 1998. And we built a brand through the network cube environment. And that's what, that's what inspired me to do things digital. Fast forward to 2010. We sold the garage in 2004. And a couple of years before that, Jason left and went to become a salesperson at Rybrook Jagger in Warrington, which sadly isn't anymore. They just knocked it down. But he actually, because I didn't found, I wasn't the founder of the video business. There were two marketing people who founded it off the back of some seed fund even longer in 2008. And I got involved in 2010 and the founders were selling a few, losing a few. And they were doing it all with live video. And Jason had sold the idea to Roger Carroll, this boss, about the idea of doing live video and to be fair to Jason, they took it on and actually made a success of it. And then I met Jason. In fact, we just passed each other in the car one day. And I gave him a call and said, what you're doing? He said, you need to see this technology. So I saw it back in the 2010, met the founders and kind of that was our sort of foray into video. It was not fraught with bumps and lumps. In fact, many people turned around and said to me that you know, I won't name them because that's not fair to do that. But I still remember almost all of them that said that we were nuts. Well, I'll name one. A very good friend of mine and both of us, we know this man, Guy Orman, he turned around and said, fair play. He said, Alistair, just seeing the potential in it. And I think guys said, hey, he had so much on his plate at the time. He had so many other things he was doing there. But he said, no, that Alistair just seen it. And he can't be unique there. There must be lots of people thinking doing live video because it wasn't even emailing through the videos at that stage, was it? It was just live video. It was actually really quite challenging to be fair. And there was some very early adopters and maybe those names will come out shortly. But I remember going to Mercedes-Benz retail and Manchester to do my live demos. That's what I was doing them from. And we were doing the voice was down the telephone line. So you'd actually bring somebody through a headset and be talking on the phone. Or you'd be doing live video down and you'd be streaming it through the Wi-Fi, which at that time wasn't exactly great. But there could be a huge delay between the audio and the video. So you'd have to pan your camera around and count how many seconds it would take. But we should have to do a test to start up with ask the customer. Just tell me when my hand will appear in front of the camera. And you have a number of seconds. And then you knew how long the delay was. So that was a real challenge. And we did that all the way through 2011. And the first manufacturer that really gave us a break was BMW. So we did work with eight BMW retailers over six months with live video. And Richard Price, thank you, Richard. It was the man who put his hand in his pocket. And they saw the model of future retail for BMW. And we did this piece of work with these six retailers. And the closest one to me was Hallivol Jones in Southport. Philip Jones and Jim Houtney. And to be fair to Jim, Jim was the one who helped me with Richards for the Richard to understand what it could do for the BMW network. So that was the kind of how it started with live video. And then the February of 2012 was the launch. And I can never remember the model number. All the BMW dealers will be shambling at me. Whatever the three series launch was in February 2012. I'm sure somebody will tell me later. That was when it was launched for the BMW network. And Richard gave some statistics upon stage about what video had done for the... This was just in the car sales environment. We weren't even using it in the workshop at the time. And that's how it all started. That's... Now, that was the first... The first foray was BMW retailers around the country looking at how they could utilize video. But at that time, we changed it from live video to recorded video. If you remember, the first iPhones had come out in sort of back end of 2007, 2008. And we just about got the use of a video on it. So iPods then became available. And the iPod then had a camera on the back of it. And that came... Again, exactly when. Probably 2010, 2011, the iPod came out with a camera on the back of it. So it became quite a cheap piece of equipment that we could use. And we could put it into a hitbox and we could... That's at the retailer. So that... That's how it all started. And believe it or not, back in those days, we were watching every video opening up load. You know, we've seen all these videos being done. And we're not in the... We're doing a million, million videos a month now. So we obviously can't watch it. Can't watch anything like it. But we could watch it in time. And it was quite... It was interesting. And then one day we saw a salesperson handbook, obviously handed the camera to a... The iPod to a technician in the workshop. And the technician was recording a video of a car underneath... Or underneath the bar. And we thought, well, that's a great idea. Why don't we just go and put it into the workshop instead? Wow. I thought it was the other way around. I honestly thought it started in workshop first. But no, other way. And fair enough, that same name Jeremy Hicks came back up. Because Jeremy at the time was then running outy. And he got on his sort of expedition through the Boxall network. Ended up in Audi. And he commissioned a company called Master's Allen to create Audi Camera. And Audi Camera at the time was live video. And it then morphed into a recorded video. But he created Audi Camera. And that was... You know, there'll always be an argument into the day about whether we were in the first of the workshop or they were. But at the same time, it was the same time, 2012. And that's where it all started from. Wow. OK. I do remember the Audi cam coming out there. And I must admit, I thought you guys were behind it. I thought it was exactly the same thing, but obviously not that. No, so I mean, if I take it to the present day, I mean, it was my tenure as CEO ended in the summer of 2021. Jeffrey Page-Maurice, who I met. Jeffrey was one of the people that I met. Not actually very long ago, 2016, we met. Jeffrey was running the Jaguar and Rover Division in the same year, but he was sitting at the same time. And Jeffrey had made a decision that he wanted to retire, I was sitting there, and I'd said to him, listen, I really would like to do some work with you. I see the value of what you can bring to the business. He said, he definitely see what we're doing. And Jeffrey joined the businesses and on exec, the back end of 2016, and really helped me to go through a challenging period of my time where we went seeking investment and looking to take some of the shareholders out of the business that decided that they wanted to leave, et cetera, et cetera. And Jeffrey then fortunately, as per me, in the back end of 2021, early 2022, put his hat in the ring to become the group CEO. So, Jeffrey, today is our group chief exec. I took a back step into the Chief Revenue Officer role for a while, and I now run strategy across the group. And the reason why I'm doing that is because we've got 10 businesses across the group, and it's a challenge to make sure that we're doing it for the right reasons. So, and I can talk to you a bit more about that. He likes you soon. Yeah, I'd love to talk about that. But you've seen lots of dealers in your time there, good, the bad, the ugly, deal of groups to single dealerships. In your opinion, what are some of the qualities? What are some of the skills that you said before? You can see a salesperson straight away, you think they're a great salesperson. What are some of the character traits that you've seen that separates the good from or the great from the good? So, I think that, I've listened to a few of your podcasts. And I actually, John Ihanlon last week, was talking about the piece of rubbish on the floor, etc., on the forecourt, and I think you mentioned what you did. I think that when you drive onto a, when we used to drive onto a forecourt, you could pick out a good retailer because there was someone to park, and the cars were always lined up, and there was something about the place. There was always, people were smiling, they would be attentive, you could be spoken to, you wouldn't be left walking around the forecourt. Anybody and everybody would speak to you whether they were wearing a pair of other oils, or whether they were wearing a suit, or whether you look like they were working that or not. And I think that, that kind of changed. I think over the last 10 years or so, people have started to look at people's digital presence. So, whether they've got the social media there, they've got out there, what their retail website looks like. And of course, it's a bit of a challenge to stand away from the crowd. People do want to be different. But I don't think there's any one particular thing. We still have this challenge where, when customers make inquiries to dealerships, there are still a proportion of these inquiries that don't get responded to, and I think that's a way frustrating. And you don't need me to quote the auditorate statistics. There's lots of big auditorate to do that. Top 1000 retailers in a mystery shop every year. And it's still running, but 25% of those people that were made a mystery shopper inquiry on behalf of an auditorate, it didn't respond. So, it got worse in the time when we couldn't get used cars, it got worse. And I see salespeople all the time thinking, well, that car sold anyway too hard. I don't even bother getting back to the customer. It absolutely got worse since, which is criminal, you think in 2023, but it's still happening. Think, do you know what? We're seeing a bit of a shift here. I think that the way that consumers make decisions about where they buy vehicles from, I think it's constantly evolving, constantly changing. People make recommendations. They don't necessarily look for the cheapest vehicles. They want reassurance that they're buying something that's in good quality and they want reassurance that they're buying something that's a reasonable price. People will definitely pay more the better quality and better service. I absolutely fully believe that. I don't, we even see things like price becoming something that's less relevant. I see that certainly when video came for us, when we started to put video in the showroom, one of the biggest things that made an impact was there was always a challenge from adoption of video because sales managers wanted the customers in the showroom. They wanted to be able to do that because they felt that they had more control when the customer was in the showroom and they could make more deals, so to speak. And they feared that if all they did was send a video to the customer, then the customer would have all the information they want and they wouldn't be interested. Yeah. I'm actually selling my house today. Not dashing today at the moment. And the local estate agent said to me, we don't, because I said, can you put a video on live on my house? And they went, no, we don't do that because we want all the customers to walk into the door. We want them to come and experience your house. No, it's still happening. You serious? And they said, yes. And I said, well, can I pay for it to be done then? And they said, well, no, not really. And so I'm going, so honestly, this is not just a car industry thing. Wow. And they said that. One of the things that, when the salespeople who were adopting video at the time really understood the value, what we saw is we saw a big change in the way that those salespeople utilized video. Your point about hair and makeup, what they sound like, this was not a male or female thing. This was about, this was all about vanity. I didn't care. The mechanism was whether you're Northern, Southern, wherever you came from, it made absolutely no difference whatsoever. What made the difference was that those salespeople who understood the value of their personality are on account in front of a customer, were the ones that won? Yes. Many salesperson, to me, I don't like it when the customer comes into the showroom because they know who I am. Yeah. Oh, that's a problem. Oh, and they might just buy a car. Wow. So every single response to that, I said, so did the customer come in and buy a car? And they said, I said, so what are you worried about? Exactly. It was, it came down to control. And of course, if you can pass control at the right time, if you can pass control to the consumer to make a decision on their own, on their own, or with the information that you provided to them, then I think that really helps. And that was definitely one of the big light bulb moments for a lot of salespeople, a lot of sales managers, where if you could construct a video that was not, I mean, we've heard stories about retailers forcing salespeople to make videos in good three a day, et cetera, et cetera. We don't condone that, but we do understand that it is, and I've always said 25 years ago, and this is a true story. So 25 years ago, I used to pay salespeople to do a test drive. 10 pounds to do a test drive, no jokes, 10 pounds. And I used to get grief every board meeting and say, why are you paying salespeople to do test drives? I said, because every two test drives have some car. Yep. We do 50% damage. So I'd go, so what's your problem? It was costing me 20 pounds to sell a car to do more test drives. And all I wanted was an okay, you might say, well, they shouldn't have been paid. Well, that was just the way that we did it. Now, I'd also say to you that today video, whilst we didn't necessarily say that a video actually sold a car, we just know that the more videos you did, the more cars you sold. So I saw many salespeople in dealerships who were not Jack the lad. You know, they weren't flying by the seat of their pants. They weren't very much an average salesperson selling an average number of vehicles, whereas they started to do video consistently for every single and bound inquiry. Guess what? They sold more cars. And so this is what we saw. We just, and I'm not suggesting but one minute the video turned these people into heroes. But what it did do was it gave them a platform to be different. And if you can be different and you can address your personality, it is a monologue. So it's not like doing a two way video when you are waiting for a response back from a customer. But if you can do a monologue on a vehicle and you can do it passionately and you can talk about the features that the customer is really interested in, then you have a winner and that's what happened. Yeah, a few things just pop on my mind then. It's don't you love it when you've got the the young salesperson got into video and we're going back in 2013, 2015 and you'd see Bob in the corner go, oh, to get that. But Bob starts to get on board when they see the young guy selling cars. And it's like, what's he doing? How do I do that? And you know what, Bob is brilliant on a video when he sees it. And I can remember I went to an NADA conference. I can't remember the time. It must be in around 2013, 2015. Now, I still have the video on my iPad. I was on one of the conferences. I got all excited about, I don't remember who it was. It might have been Sean V. Bradley. It might have been one of the guys out there talking about video. So I got all excited about iJot. I think was a app they were talking about one of these video sharing apps. I got all excited about it. And this salesperson, the Nissan dealership, it went through a video on Alastair. I promise you, it was horrendous. Okay, I gave him the iPad to write, this is what you need to do. Start with yourself, which he didn't do. Talk about this car's been our workshop. One of our senior technicians has checked 145 points. It's an approved use car. Talked about the recondition we've done. And he said, use car check. I said, if it's got brand new tires, let the customer know the tires are still got six millimeters, eight millimeters. He said, the tires have been maintained. I was like, I promise you, I'll look to that. I thought, oh my goodness. Okay, well, don't worry. That's why he hits the first one you're done. You're not centred yet. So let's do it properly. He said, I've already sent it. I went, oh no. I'll tell you what, I learned a lesson that day. As I'm turning, I said, well, that's not exactly the way to do the video. The customer come back and said, wow. No one else has done that for me. That's exactly what I'm looking for. I'll go ahead with that. But of course, that was when no one was doing video. Now, I don't know anyone who's not doing video. And so video, we just, it's not something, it's part and parcel of what you're doing. It's part and parcel of doing a demonstration. You do the video. I think it's just what we need to do in ourselves process now. I agree with you. And I think you made a really valid point a little while ago about use car shortage and shortage of cars. I think that it's a real challenge today, not so much today, perhaps. We're coming out of the bulk of it. I think there's some. Yeah, there is. But we're never going to get those vehicles back. So there's going to be this a lot of vehicles away from the market for a considerable amount of time, depending on what age profile customers are. And the retailers are selling the products. You're always going to see this problem. But I do believe that video has opened a, it's opened the showroom up to the customer in this front room. That's what we always used to say. Now, can the customer stay at home? And actually, fair play to Honda. When Honda gave the seat from the Sunday to Android on a back in 2008, their concept was they wanted the consumer to stay at home in their armchair and they wanted to bring the share into them. That was originally their goal, their idea. And in all fairness, even like video today, I don't know whether you've experienced it, Simon. But I was looking at buying a vehicle and I was on a website and I was getting some help from somebody on the other end. But the thought of me, I was in a place where it wasn't appropriate for me to turn my camera on. I didn't want to turn my camera on because I'm walking outside. It's just not the right thing to do. But in that instance, I think that live video still today is still more, it's more akin with us doing a FaceTime with our family. Still not quite there, but those that want to use it, it's available. But we're still 99.5% of all of our video content is recorded. And it's kept because they can share it across their family. They can show their loved ones. They can share it across their peer network. Whoever helps them to make decision. They can watch it 28 times after they've bought the car, which we know. I want... Exactly. I want to go back into something you said before and a good friend of the show, Gavin Hyde's, who runs the Joe Duffy Group in Ireland. There's something you said, you would pay yourselves people, 10 pounds of over demonstration you do. And I don't mind sharing this because Gavin mentioned this on the podcast that he recorded. And he's one of the only dealer groups I know that. He actually doesn't target salespeople on results, be targets people on activity. And the activity is, number inquiries they speak to, number of demonstration drivers are done, number of follow-up calls there. I think in there is the number of videos they send out to people. I'd have to get my head around the criteria. I'm pretty sure it is. But he does. He targets the people on the activity. And it's just music to me is what you're talking about because the people that get the activity right, they're the ones that are selling in this group because it's that old-fashioned sheepskin, big chains salesperson. I can close anyone. I've been Pendle Trains. I don't think we need anymore, but get the process right, the results look after themselves. I think you're right. Even back to our online internet salesperson in 1998, Anthony Kearns, if you're out there, I still remember you. He was a good process person. He was full of a process. And all we had was the customer make an inquiry. At that time, we had a Sony Mavica floppy disk camera. If those of you out there, there's probably people out there not even old that remember or know what a floppy disk camera is. And then we send photographs off. And we knew that we had to send a max, we'd be going like a maximum of 12 photographs. And we would send multiple emails to the same customer with all these pictures on. And that was a way that we could show the photographs. And we knew that that process worked. And also, as we started to, we built our academy up from scratch and in the 2000s down, I think it may date, right? In the early 2013-14, we started to put our academy together. And it was all about, can we pass on best practice? Can we learn? And the biggest, I think the biggest rollout that we did along off the deal of groups, this was with a manufacturer's web box wagon. And in fact, to implement now, it was traded at the employer at the time. And he worked with us on the strategy for box wagon, which was about bricks and clicks. And that was the sort of the beginning or their viewable army channel was going to look like. And I'm not a fan of that phrase, but it's about whatever the customer's choice was about, the way that they would go to market and the way that they would buy the vehicle. And another name out there in the big ether at the moment, lady called Karen Hilton, who's now running Haker, she was the lead on running the project. So she helped us roll out box wagon video in 2014. And as a result of it was an immense success rolling them out to the whole network. And we also ran a program, an Academy Pro, and we're going to back up that, which was box wagon video stars. Well, we actually put a van on the road and we drove the van around all of our Volkswagen retails in the UK, showing them in the workshop how the technicians could use video. And so it wasn't as if we just put software into the environment and we just let people get on with it. We did want to pass on best practice. Now our academy today is stronger than ever. And we have, I mean, he'd done a great job running our academy. And he's got together a sort of a refined strategy around video today that is almost, it's quite cliche in some respects because it's back to basics. But if you're talking about sales techniques, there's nothing really complicated. It's just about putting them together in the right order. So we do talk about the use of video in today's society, maybe being slightly different to what it was when video first came out. But if you get it right, your consumer will still be wild. We still get five-star reviews that we see on videos that are quite freaky. I look at them and they go, it's a bit of a lot better. But the consumer still is wild by the fact that actually they've had somebody send them a personalized video and they've gone, hey Simon, it's Alastair at the dealership. Thanks for your inquiry. All of these things matter. And that is still my view of people buying from people. That is still the essence. And in my opinion, it's the foundation of the industry. It's people buying from people. 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.
