Speed matters. But when six dealers send back the same templated email, guess who the customer trusts? No one.
In this episode, Simon breaks down:
- Why quick replies aren’t the same as good ones (2:01)
- The 7 digital questions every sales team should prepare for (8:10)
- A smarter way to personalise replies using ChatGPT—without rewriting everything (9:04)
- The exact format top salespeople at Leasing Options are using right now (12:01)
This one’s for sales managers relying on automation but losing the human touch. If your email replies sound like everyone else’s, you’re just making it easier for customers to ghost you.
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 visitwww.symcotraining.co.uk
Time, welcome to the Selling and the Motor Trade podcast in Association of Car Without. The online Car Changing Destination. Together we share tips and ideas on how to sell more cars, improve your service department, and generally put more profit into your department, dealership or dealer group. I'm your host, Simon Bowkett, or some of you might already know me as Skippy. First thing, I just want to say thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Hi, welcome back to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. Did I get some heat after last time saying appraisal apps are killing your sale? So I thought I might as well get some of your reviews last time.
Let's try again and pick another sector to abuse. Listen, I think these were your email response platforms. Okay, and there's lots out there. I'm not going to name any of them this time because I got no trouble naming specifically one last time. Okay, but you know the ones where an acquire comes through and it makes it quick and easy for your salespeople to respond to it. And I have all these standard templates there. I'm going to start with, I love, love, love those. I love them, but kind of hate them. I love them because it makes it so quick and easy for you to get hold of the customer. Okay, or get back to the customer.
We know time is really important. But honestly, I think there's so many apps out there that make it quick and easy. And there's some real clever technology of the cool drips of the world. And sorry, I'm named one there. Okay, rapid response and but I get to say, so in times a customer sends you a digital inquirer and the email and query, they're not just sending it to you. They're sending it to on average six different places. And actually, if six different emails come back with pretty much the same response, what's the customer think? Well, that makes no sense. I don't like the idea of that because everyone's saying exactly the same thing. It just smells like cut and paste.
Okay. And also, I read one of the standardized responses there. I don't know who had written it if it comes directly from the factory or this deal, the group, but we spend lots of time changing it. On your particular app out there, your platform, if you can change those responses, you can personalize it. Please do, please do. Don't just use cut and paste. Don't send the same response to everyone. And by the way, on our customer's first contact training course, they're still used lots and lots and lots. In fact, there's ones. I won't tell you the name of the company. I'm sure I'll get some abuse on this one. But there is an excellent choice and I'm happy to tell you about it.
So many times, people don't fill out or it hasn't dragged through what the actual car is. Okay. And it's the same response all the time that customers aren't stupid there. So I love them, but they need to be personalized, personalized, personalized, personalized. And what the world of AI at the moment, where chat is going nowadays, there's so much you can do. So actually, if you're a dealership that hasn't got one of those apps and you're still getting salespeople to write out response each time, you might be nervous about what your sales person's grammar is spelling is like. We know we need to get to the customer as quick as we can. And that's why we use those apps.
And to be fair, we use those platforms so we can tick the box, stop the clock running. So we can say to our manufacturer, we've got to the customer within one hour. We've ticked the box. And by the way, one hour is no any good enough now. 15 minutes is where you need to be. 15 minutes, because think that through. We have busy lives. People send your digital inquiry in a morning break, a lunch break, or maybe in the afternoon. If you don't get them within that window that they had some time to do something, it's often 24 hours before you can get back to them. Now, of course, I live in the real world.
Okay. So many of these digital inquiries come through at night time when people at home. So I actually just get through to them first thing in the morning. Okay. Speed is very, very important there. So that's why we do use those. So I kind of love them and I've kind of hate them. Okay. But if you haven't got one of those, okay, feel free to go and search them out there. There's lots of them out there. They're improving all the time. Lots of them say they're using AI as well. Sales measures, dealer principles. Today, I want to talk to you about our master class. We've been running symco training since 2000. And we've trained thousands.
But today, I'll talk to you about your experience. Sales people. How much better can they be? Are they the guys that get that constant coaching and development that the new people do? For the master class, we talk about taking things to the next level. It's not the basic steps of a sales process. Okay. We're going to talk a lot about the psychology as to why people buy. We're going to talk a lot about the attitude, how to get people out of the saddoms. If you've been on one of our courses before, back into the miters touch. We're going to talk about how each salesperson can have their own business plan, because they're actually running their own business within a business.
So listen, talk to us about the master class. And let's see how we can take your salespeople to the next level. But actually, how could his chat nowadays? Chat says, what, three years is it? And the growth of this is exponential, okay? And there's something that you, if you are a chat user, you might know this already. So it might be patronizing you, but chat GPT, okay? I want you to use this on chat 4.5. You'll need to set up a login for yourself, because remember, chat will learn what you do. And the other thing you got to do with chat is you got to tell it what good looks like. If you get a digital inquiry from the customer and just put into chat GPT and say respond to this.
It'll just make stuff up. Chat just makes it up if it doesn't know something, okay? And it'll go out to the internet and it'll find lots of different sponsors, lots of different ideas of some bloody sitcom, some movie on how to deal with it. One that comes up all the time is the price and the car. What we'd say is if a customer says, can you give me an idea what my car's worth, okay? On a digital response, we might say something along the lines of, how does it travel if any price and car without seeing it? It's going to be a guess. And you know what? I'm going to end up guessing too high or I'm going to guess too low.
I guess too high. You're going to be unhappy with me. I can't give you that figure when we see the car. We're guess too low. You know what? We're never going to see each other. If there's a rough idea you want, there's plenty of websites out there like we buy a car. We're not going to touch higher than them, because that was not the price down when you go to the drop-in center. And if you want a more accurate figure, would you give me a call by walking around your car? That way I'll be able to get a more detailed description to get the very best price for you. And it's a good time to arrange a telephone appointment.
So make sure my salesman is available to get the best price. Now, that wording's too long. We will take it there, ask chat GPT to cut it down, make it right for that salesperson. And that's how we'll go from a digital response to a phone call, where we start building rapport with the customer. OK? But here's the thing. If you just ask chat how to respond to a customer says, can you give me an idea what my car's worth? Tell me to make sure that. And chat GPT will say, yeah sure, no problem, I'll just need the registration number and my mileage in the car there. And can you give me this? And that might not be your sales process.
So here's how you want to do it. There's only seven digital inquiries your salespeople need to deal with day and day out. OK? What's my car worth? Is the car still available? What's your best price you can do? What finance offers? It's the same things again and again that you actually get from the customers. That's why all these other platforms had standardized responses. They good. OK? But what I want you to do is I want you to write down what you think is good. If you want drop me an email, direct message me. OK? And say, what are the formats that you guys teach? OK? Now we don't teach just one format. We don't have scripts there.
But we do have some formats there on each one of those. And what we do is we tell chat what good looks like. We tell it what good looks like because this is the response that we want it to be around. And with that, on our training course, we get our salespeople to make it sound like them. So a salesperson says, no, no, make it less formal. OK? Make it shorter. OK? Make it more formal. Make it funny. Make it whatever they want there. So it sounds like something they would say. We put that into a document, a simple word document. And on those seven different categories that you've got, and I'll just pick the one what's your best price in that car, is available and what's your best price.
We tell it what good looks like on the response. OK? We load it to a document. We upload that to chat GPT. OK? And I urge you to set yourself up two accounts. One account on chat GPT to play around with it, see what it can do. Ask you to, you know, all the fun stuff you've seen already. Write me a song based on the salespeople here in the style of Ed Sheeran. Give me a recipe for all the ingredients I've had in my house. Give me a road trip around Europe and going through the Fucher Pass. And it's got to be a 10 day trip. All those things, chat's good for doing. OK? But play around with that so you know what it can do.
And I tell you what, it is advancing every month so quickly. But then you have your account set up for your inquiries. And all you're going to do is upload the document. There's a little pink button there that says upload document. It's the plus button and upload it. So now chat GPT knows what good looks like. A digital inquiry comes through and someone says, hey, I'm actually looking at a new, I don't know, Q4. I've actually got my five series. I want to part exchange price on it. Can you actually tell me is the new Q4, that use Q5 available? And can you give me an idea what my car is worth? What chat will do is take that email, click into chat and just say respond to this.
That's all your salesperson does. Respond to this. It now knows what good looks like. And it's going to come up and say, I'm a spoke it. Thank you very much for your inquiry on that Q4. That car's in great condition. It's just coming stock. OK? And then whatever you want, it'll say. OK? Now listen, trouble with any price that's in it. It's going to be conservative at best. Would you be able to give me a call while walking around your car to get a more accurate description? So whatever you want it to, it'll come back. The Dremel will be good, the Spelen will be good, and also the process that sticks to your sales process.
You want your salespeople to be good. So where do you get that document from? Firstly, speak to us. OK? And we have what good looks like, but also what works. And we don't make this stuff up. I've had lots of trainers, lots of salesmen. So I like this approach. We like that approach. Now, what we do is we see what works in real dealerships. OK? We work with people. I've won the top salespeople. We've worked with leasing options for many years now. And we know the responses in their leasing world that their top salespeople use. We can see the responses that work. And we use those to create this document of what works well all the time.
Once you've got that document, upload it, chat, and actually, that way, you're going to get the response right. Now, having said that, I'm not knocking these other platforms. You might be a dealership. You might be a sales manager that hasn't got access to one of those platforms there. This is a cheap and cheerful way of doing it. And I have one of a better word there. OK? I know these other platforms are doing it, and listen, they're just using OpenAI as the background to do it in most cases. I'm guessing. OK? So again, I don't want to get the business we got from last time. OK? I know there's lots of great, great platforms out there.
But actually, start using this because get ahead of the curve. Chat, AI is not going away. Stay the stay. OK? We need to work out how to get the best out of it. Make yourselves people more efficient at dealing with these customers. Anyway, I hope that gives you some ideas, some food for thought. Do you want to discussion about it? Feel free to reach out to us. And we'll give you that document, if you want, of what good looks like. And I'll speak to you 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, through LinkedIn. Thank you.
