I sit down with Symco Training’s Operations Director, Andrew Clark, to tackle the question every dealer is asking…
Where do we find clean, well-specced 3–4-year-old cars when auctions are thin and prices are high?
We unpack the post-COVID supply hangover and share a simple, repeatable playbook to source the right cars from your service lane, without burning your database or relying on “beer & pizza” events.
You’ll get the exact word tracks, the timing that doubles pickup rates, and the incentives that get your team fighting over the service diary.
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 to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. Today I'm joined with Andrew Clark, our Operations Director of Symco Training, and we're going to talk all things about stock, use cars, and where do you get them from? So Andrew, welcome again. Thanks, Skippy. How are you? Yeah, very good. Thank you. Very good. Now this is a topic that going around into dealerships, our clients, it's coming up all the time. And I just want to explore, where are we getting our used car stock from? And what's the issues out there? What's your views? What's your take on it? It's quite interesting because it doesn't seem to matter which manufacturer that we're working with, or which dealer group we're with. All are coming up with the same issues at this point in time. And that is they are really struggling to find nice three, four-year-old cars, which are nice spec, nice mileage, good history. And there's actually a real challenge around it. And talking to lots of our used car managers that we work with and within dealer groups around the country. It seems to be that is their biggest challenge today to actually fill the four-court full of stock, which they can turn and ultimately be good cars for the business and generate revenue. Yeah. Everyone seems to now be talking, though, is are we having a bit of a hangover from COVID-19? And I know that's a dirty word, and we don't talk about anymore. But if you go back to 2020, the market was a challenging place in Q1. We all panicked in Q2 because of the country got shut down. There was then a bit of Q3, there was massive discounts, push used cars out, get rid of used cars out of more to build the operations. They dumped a lot of stock in the market. And then because we couldn't spend money, there was a bit more uptake on people want to change their car. And remember, it's a long time ago, but people didn't want to go on public transport. They wanted to be in their own car and they were nervous about public transport. And then after that, there was a woman's perfect storm. There was a semiconductor issue. So where there was a factory that went offline, I think a lot of manufacturers had asked their suppliers to reduce capacity. So we actually look at Volkswagen Group and Mercedes-Benz and BMW. They all want to reduce the capacity of what they were building. So therefore, go to suppliers. Demand increased, not decreased. They were actually all the OEMs were getting ready for the recession that never happened. It didn't happen at all, did it? The boom that happened after COVID. Just then. So if you think then, as we actually came into 2021, new car supply really started to become tight. There was more demand than there were cars. If you think, go back to the discount levels, I certainly remember my time in BMW, we were doing it at the beginning of 2020, not 13%, 14% on some deals, trying to get cars out the door. We were pushing for manufacturing targets month in month out. By mid-2021, there was zero discount. People didn't talk about freer frustration. People didn't talk about hacking. It was, we sold what we had in front of them. We know that the sales process tended to, is that car available? Yes. I'll have it. We actually generated during that era a lot of superstars, who could sell lots of cars just by picking the phone and talking to customers. Funny enough, there was a BMW salesperson I spoke to at the time, and it was in 2020, probably three at the time, maybe end of 22. He was God's gift to salesperson. He didn't need the trading. What is this all about there? Because actually, what you said the sales process was, it's valuable. If not, I've got four other customers who want it, and who they didn't take the order then, they knew their colleague would have sold that car there. It's quite funny now, Andrew. Where is that salesperson now? Because it dawned on me on this training course. I thought, goodness me, this guy doesn't know the real world of the motor trade. He doesn't know the man from the factory events. He doesn't know the good news letters, the great news letters. He doesn't know the, because quite frankly, he'd never been in the industry that when he didn't have to do it. On our training course, when we look at road to the sale, and we look at the psychology behind selling, we actually talk a lot about the four fundamentals, the four principles of selling, the laws of selling, how we want to press it up. We always talk about, as a minimum, fulfill one, and we talk about comparison being a real driver for the customer knowing if they've got a good deal. I think we may actually focus on today that we've got to create value in our position, in our retailers and in ourselves, and really bring up the customer's expectations and create a fantastic experience for them. However, what we don't talk about so much a day is scarcity. Yeah, scarcity in 2021, in 2022, drove the market. And that was the reason for that was the sales process. I haven't got it. If I sell it, I won't replace it. And almost month and month out, car values went up. Now, we've got to say, fast forward October 23, Canada, and that's when we really seem to tip the market start to turn back to normality. But in fact, we're getting back on top of supply, cars are now coming through in decent volumes. And us cars now start to gradually drift back to a normal trend. All the way through 2024, we've been having to retail and deal and look after customers and create desire and actually get back to our sales process. But the hangover today is now 2025. Where are all the three year olds with four old cars that are a bread and butter? That I use car markets to demand that we need to sell because they're just not about. And I've big question, where do our retail get the cars from? Hey, well, listen, our sponsor of this car. Wow. I've got me saying, hey, listen, car. Wow. Okay. It's not just a service where people buy cars. Actually, you can buy cars through the dealer. So again, I want to talk about that. Some of the dealers, they know exactly with car whales buying service. Listen, they've got a funding proposition. They're just launching at the moment as well there. But the sales manager of listening to this in a dealership car. Well, the cars that they're selling is not that two year old to four year old cars. That's the stop that we want. Okay. And that's no disrespect to car whales offering at all there. How do we find those cars? That's what the customers want, Andrew. See, from my opinion, these customers and the cars that we're looking at, they're coming into our businesses every single day. And no matter what size of your business, you will have those cars coming in, being looked after by our service departments, getting serviced, getting cleaned, customers paying in the service belt off the go for another year. Actually, there's our opportunity. We're seeing those cars coming on a daily basis, but we need to get in the service department. Yeah, we do. Listen, that's the history lesson. What's actually happened there is good a recap there. So, actually, how do we start getting in and prospecting speaker to try to get those cars there from the service department? So let's kick around some ideas that someone listens to, the sales manager, head of business, the dealer principal. What can we practically do now to try and get those cars in? So I want to kick around some ideas. And I'm going to go back in time that something was so, so old, but I actually think it's now is the time. I've seen this from a National Automotive Dealers Association, top 20 ideas, and good as me, Andrew, this must have been 15 years ago. Okay. And a top 20 groups in the National Automotive Dealers Association, lots of dealers get together. For people who don't know the American market, lots of dealers get together in a group of dealers, similar size, but not competing. And they get together once a month and they talk about ideas and they compare what their business are doing to other people's businesses. They share composite information and they kick around ideas of how they can prove their business. And this idea was such a simple idea that actually, maybe we need to go back to it. What that guys did is they just got a flipped up, kind of like what's in the back of my office. People who are sitting there listening to this at the moment, it's just a flip chart board that you'll see in any training room up and down the country in every hotel. And they just wrote on top of it. We're currently on the slide on quality use cars. If you have one of these cars, please speak to Simon in the sales department. And they had a list of the cars they're interested in. Of course, the bit that I really loved, where does the list come from? The previous days, service bookings. So if they knew that the car was coming in, which was a villa, okay, and it was up to three years old, okay, it was coming in for its 40,000, 50,000 kilometre service, okay, up to 50,000 kilometres, okay. Don't say don't narrow it down to own by Mrs Casey, okay, and have a retractable tow bar on the back of it. But I actually had a list of the cars. And the reason why I like that, and there's a guy, Willie Stevenson, that did this very effectively in the dealership in Carlo Island, okay, he just ran with it. The reason why I quite like that, customers dropped their car off the service department. You've got that golden hour where they're waiting to speak to that service advisor, hopefully not for an hour, sorry, but they're dropping their car off, waiting to speak to Simon. And they're reading all the sale material. They're reading the difference between this oil and that oil and the pollen filter and the marker filter and the one that's really gray and grimy and the one that's nice and white. They've seen that all the time, but when they see something like that flip chart paper saying, we're currently under stocked. If you have one of these cars, please speak to Simon. Now, here's the thing, the board by itself doesn't work. All the board does is it gives you a phone call, credibility, okay, it gives the phone call credibility that the customer starts thinking, ah, you want my car, you're interested in my car there. What I would add to that today, something along the lines of, you probably noticed the sale in new cars slow down a few years ago. There was a global shortage of semiconductors, but not going to affect that is good condition, late model, low mileage cars, that's what we're looking for, and then have a list of those cars okay. That's why I would look at starting with. I absolutely couldn't agree more with you because in the past again, let's go back and it's not a history lesson, but it's something that would happen time and time again. If you go back, you know, it's 10 years, six years, five years even, that would be behind on the week you'd get the head of this is walking the sales manager's office, throw a list on the desk, go, I've been to service. Here's a list of customers coming to make sure you're in them as a salesman, you walk into the transaction, I'm going to go here's a list of service customers, make sure the team ring them. If someone in the team would pay the bond and go, oh, here we go again. Your car's coming in tomorrow, can I give you free valuation? And no, no, no, if you're lucky, Andrew, by the way, that would be better, but so many times, they say you're coming in for more of a service. Are you still happy with your car? Okay, I entered a new car. And of course, if a customer servicing their car, they're going to say, no, I'm not interested in you car at the moment. Otherwise, I'd be in there to buy a new car there. And again, I'm still hearing that happening day in, day out in dealerships. We did. I've got to support my hands. I was really guilty of this. I'd be, okay, you're on service duty tomorrow, you're making the calls, we'd get three appointments and admit them in the morning. And that was the last time we spoke to the customers. The customers almost gave us lip service to get us off from the message wasn't that strong. Yeah, how should we structure that call? So again, a sales manager listening to this head of business there, how should that call be structured? What should I get my sales people say when that the car's coming in service to apartment or maybe the cars in the service department? What should the phone call be? That is the thing to do. I, from my belief, the car should come in when the car's with us. I like it. Not before, because here we know it's here, we've checked it in, we've got the opportunity to actually going to check the car first, make the call, but we've got to be good doing. This cost my time, you probably wear that, and from there, I'm the best at putting it would be I'm actually going from the sales department and knowing cars in for service. Look, this might be a daft question. It's probably lasting on your mind, but there's Simon. Is there any chance I could buy your car for me? I'd almost be putting on the back foot, not offering free valuations, go straight and do it. Yeah, your customer's going to probably then say one of three things. Well, what's it worth? Yep. Absolutely not. I love it. Oh, why? Yes. You're going to get those responses, but we can deal with all three of those in a real good way. But I just want to go through those again, three simple things. Sales managers, heads of businesses, don't get your salespeople trying sell cars in the service department. Get them to try and buy them. Okay. And there's three simple questions. Hey, Mr. Customer, I know it's a strange question or it's a daft question. I think what that does, Andrew, I love what you said there because it takes the sting out of this call. Okay. It's probably the last thing on your mind because I don't want to wreck our database by trying to prospect them to death. Okay. How many times customers say, you're like, third person's called me this month. If I wanted a car, leave me alone there and we're wrecking our database. Okay. There's interest. We could buy that off you. So, hey, listen, I'm not such a strange question. It's probably the last thing on your mind. So, you say, as we could buy that back off you, I love the simplicity of that. Have you deal with those three reactions? If people laugh at you, if people say why or if they say how much, how should we deal with that then? Well, I think the first thing, if we cover off, we'll have what? The customer's probably expecting a price in the phone. The car's with them. You know, they're probably expecting you to already have a look at the weeks point. I say, Simon, without your permission, I wouldn't have even had a look at it. I'm giving a bit of the control back to you as a customer and a bit of respect. And so, but with your permission, when the car's in with my technician on the ramp, you're giving me to have a good look around it. Also, with your permission, can I get a certain figure on the car? I wouldn't be asking if the thunder, if it's un-fanned, let's just go in for the sum of the clause that it is. And then when they say, well, yeah, absolutely do that. Brilliant. Give me a huge favor. When you come back in to pick the car up and before you pay your service bill, will you come see me? And I'll have to figure something like waiting for you to let you know what we can do for you. And all of a sudden, you've now spiked that inquisitive gene within the customer who's going to go, oh, hey, I might not have to pay my service bill, but I might be getting a great price. We've almost now started the customer. Now, we talk a lot about customers in different buying cycles. And this was a Google start that your customers potentially up to 18 months before the buy car, the vendor, what we call the passive stage. So if you've got a customer potentially in that 18 month cycle who might have seen the new version of the CRV, who might have been looking at the new IONX6, all of a sudden now, the rest of the afternoon, they're going to start looking at the kind of one depth, because we spiked the knowledge. Once I confirm that up with the customer, I think this is how we finish the call off. We tell them who we are, where we're going to be sat, we're going to be looking forward to seeing them, can we get my coffee? Bit of that kind of absolute flair and everything that we're doing, that we're really good with customers in front of us. My last parting question is, but if I could manage my e-car sign, what would you replace it with? Yeah, I love that. Okay. And that's so important just to do that, if we could buy a car for you, what would you replace it with? But if we've got stock that's two to four years old, and the customer says, nothing, I'm immigrating to Australia. Okay. Oh, I love the new Bentley. Okay. And it's not a car that you're selling. I would say, who cares? If it's stock that we want, is that really the end of the world? So you'd want to make sure that you're only finding this of stock that you'd really want. Now, interestingly, I'm working with really, really great, very ambitious, very driven, head of business at the moment with one of our dealer groups. And we took this around with him probably about three months ago. And he's got the team doing it. He really sees the benefit. And they're buying two or three cars just a week. They're looking for stock. They're going to walk into their trident device stock. And what they've done is they've actually incentivized their team that if they can just buy the car, of course, they're trying to sell the new one, they just buy the car, they'll pay them £50. They'll actually pay them a small commission by the car in. All of a sudden, the team are so motivated. They want to make calls. And why not? Because if you bought a car from an options, there's transportation fees. Okay, there's buy a sales fees. There's all of that sort of stuff that you need to do. Okay. So why not pay ourselves people, 50 quid or $100 wherever you are there to stop that you'd like from the database? It makes all the sense in the world to do that. Absolutely. And the other thing he said was a buy product. Not only is he actually paying the team to go and buy the cars, they're fighting over the service store because actually they are people coming in our business every single day. When the prospect of the night time, the tradition is at six o'clock to late the clock, Pete tonight, let's make hit the phones, let's make 100 calls and connect to 10 people. Yep. There's no other picks the phone of June the day. Yeah. When the cars and for service, our service team are telling the customer, we'll be given the call with an update. The customer's waiting for a call from the retailer that when they see the number, what do they do? They actually pick the phone up. So the connection rate, the mindset of the team of bringing really works. Here's the thing that he said, the guys who buy the cars in, they know about the car, they know about the owner, they know about the history. So in that car's prepped and on the forecourt, they're taking common query, they actually talked with conference back. Well, actually, I've just bought that car back in. That's Simon. He's gone back to Australia. Lovely guy. Just been for service. We saw the car from day one. We've done all the service and right from the beginning. Love it. Absolutely love it. Listen, a little bit of a caveat and a bit of a funny story. We're talking about this process with a lovely guy in a Mazda dealership. Now, we have to go back into history lesson here. Okay. And Mazda had a car, the RX-8. Now, I quite have a soft spot for Mazda, but the RX-8 was not their finest hour. Okay. And this was a particular car that had reliability issues. And I'm not, I hear the Mazda dealer screaming at me at the moment saying, oh, no, it's because the customers weren't driving the right way or whatever it was. Doesn't matter. It wasn't their finest hour. Okay. We all saw the situation that this was in Ireland overnight. The road tax or the VRT whatever they call it in Ireland there went up to something like 2,100 euros. And the price these cars dropped through the floor. And there's a lovely guy right in the middle of Dublin. He said, Oh, I'm going to try this technique. And purely by accident, he phoned the first customer had a Mazda RX-8. And he said something along the lines of, at least I know it's a strange question. Probably laughing in mind, but seeing a change from combined off you, to which point the customer said, yes, you can. He went all great. Oh, when's a good time to have a look at it through the week or maybe a Saturday. So right now, come down and see you right now. This poor lad thought, goodness me, this is a great technique. Let's deal this. So he phoned all the RX-8 customers. I had the debt of business at the time. So I'm saying, what the hell have you taught my sales people? So please, heads of businesses, dealer principal sales managers, make sure this call is two to four years old. Is that the sweet spot of the stock you want? And it's stock that you want you'll know the cars that you want in your business there. Just say, hey, guys, from our database, it doesn't even have to be serviced from our database. They're the cars that we actually want. If you can buy those, I'm going to pay you that hundred euros, that hundred dollars, 100 pounds, something like that. And so yeah, don't just don't just willy-nilly-fucking-the-cars that you don't want in stock there. Andrew, let's talk about the objections there because I get to say that there's a presenter in America, he said from stage, I'm going to make a phone call now to live customers, all McDonald and Mike up, and I'm going to make appointments for people from your dealership right here live in front of the audience. I went, wow, balls are steel. And halfway through on, I'm scribbling there lots of stuff to, you know, how we do a lot of R&D research and development or broadband duplicate. And halfway through Andrew, I put my pen down for two reasons. Number one, I can remember everything they were talking about in the heat of the battle when I'm making that call. And number two, I kind of think they were making appointments for appointments sake. Okay. And I kind of want real appointments that we can deal with, not just appointments for appointments sake. It's like there's lots of companies out there and again, I'm not going to knock them, but they have these beer and pizza nights where they make appointments for appointments sake. And if they're paid on appointments, you're going to get crap sometimes. Okay. We want real customers to come in there. Okay. But here's this thing. What I learned from now, I said, any prospecting approach that you take, if it's you're going to do a man from the factory event, a VIP event, any sort of there's so many different events, the golden ticket events or any prospecting you're going to do. I think dealing with the objection is more important than the script you get you guys use to start with. I mean, what are the chances that your phone someone? And they say, Andrew, you must be a mind reader. I've got the computer in front of me. I'm sitting there speccing up the new car as we speak. How did you know it? It's going to be slim, isn't it? So when people say, I can't afford a new car, I want to wait till next year. I want to pay the finance off first. Okay. We can't do it because my wife's pregnant, the family's growing. Okay. I want to keep it. I haven't had a long enough only had it for two years. Want to keep it for three years. No, we want to do it next year. We're going to get that. And too often, Andrew, that's where I see that prospecting falls down. That's where someone says, okay, then, well, I'll speak to you next year. Okay. How should I deal with that objection that they know they're going to get? What techniques could they use? You're right. I've sat a prospect with teams. We do that in dealer. We'll spend time with the team prospect. And you do hear that, all right, thanks for that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Sorry to bother you. I'll call you the 12 months time, put the phone down. I think we've got to at least have a go at what, hanging out objection and the way that we do that, I've done that within certain retailers is almost absolutely, do you actually love my customer said the same thing? And it's almost normalizing the fact that we'll be having those thoughts until they realized that if they have the slight inclination changing the next 12 months, probably never been a better time than it is right now. You're almost going into the, I'm not telling you, which is all my other customers are because actually lots of my customers thought the same thing. In fact, if you've got the slight inclination changing the next 12 months, hence to cover off those people who said, I'm just going to leave the next 12 months because linked to how much your car could be worth today, we are really looking for cars like yours. Add to the fact that some of the deals that the manufacturers are, are manufacturing right now, if you've got the slight inclination changing, it's probably never been a better time right now. So I'm sure you've heard the old saying nothing, the venture, nothing gained. Why are they popping down and having a coffin to see what we can do? And you know, you might be pleased and surprised in how good the steel could be. You're almost just, but now you might still get the note. But now you might be converting some of those notes to, okay, then let's have a look. You're just giving yourself an opportunity to get that customer down to sit in front of you, and then to start wearing them when you get them in front of you. I love that one because it's one simple thing a salesperson's got to remember, not lots of different things. If a customer says this, then you say that, you can almost use that technique on almost any objection, like, if a customer says, I haven't had it long enough, I'll keep it for two years. Now, a lot of my customers thought they hadn't had their car long enough till they found out, because I've got some initiative, your car, hence the call, and the offers we got from Toyota and new cars, you might be pleasantly surprised. This one, I'd love to get together to see if it at least tempt you. They often say nothing Vincent, nothing gained. What do we got to lose? That process you can use for almost any objection. And I still believe that is probably as important as your first script. Is that the right word? Your format. Yeah. Big for customer. You are going to get that. And for me, prospecting it, it's about you will fail and fortune more than you succeed. And it's trying to keep the mindset right. But if you have the mindset, I'm going to fail, I'm going to fail, I'm going to fail, and you're getting lots and lots of notes. You will. If you have the conversation, you can now start converting 20% of your telephone calls to appointments, 25%. You've got a much better opportunity to come in. Now, here's the thing. These customers, our customers already are driving our product. They're like us going to get the car service with us. This is real gold. Get them inside, you're sure? And the other thing there as well for me, if you look at new cars, a new car offer, if you prospect for a new car team, probably 75% to 8% of your customer funding the car, because there's the strength of the offers on you. It's very rare we're going to get somebody in the business who spends money on buying a new car. There's too many incentives for the finance deposit allowances, lower it, funding, PTP offers. However, in the used car department, this is where we tend to see whether it's a 40 to 45% penetration. Sometimes we're missing out half of our customers who paid cash who are in the market, who might want to change, who just don't get called that often. So if we can hit those in the service department or just prospecting with the message, we might actually be talking to customers who haven't had a self and call last month, who weren't invited to the last month from event, where maybe we might just actually open up some more opportunity, because those people are ready to change the cars. People do tend to have a change. I think the average change cycle in the UK is still sitting around 32 months. So we're hitting that two to three year database. We've got a great opportunity to sell some cars, at least make some appointments. And let's go and practice prospecting, because the more we practice, the better we get. The other thing I've got, you mentioned man from events, VIP events, and these events do work. I'm not going to sit here and say the door, they absolutely do. But from my own personal experience running them, and nice to get the team really excited, we'd run an event for two weeks before the event, we'd sell less cars. We were prospecting, we're creating the point, we're telling customers we've got this phenomenal deal. And it's all smoking mirrors. We'd also then have a phenomenal weekend, where we'd be playing five and ringing bowels, celebrate success, doing 50 deals, 60 deals, or a weekend, go by one an amazing event. And then for the next two to three weeks, selling minimal cars as we're handing over, we've always told customers forward at the event. Actually, this way, I'd much rather make 10 telephone calls, make two or three appointments, get sitting for the two customers and deal one, try and absolutely bombard it. And I can almost see that now having some of the retail groups that we work with, where they've had a huge event, they've had massive success. And now, back in September, it's gone really quiet. Because all we've done is we've pulled those customers forward. And we've got to work harder than ever now to actually get those customers through the door. And do you want service? What a great opportunity to do so much to be. Yeah, I'm going to go back to what Frank Bensher said all those years ago. I'm pretty short with him. Some will, some won't, so what next. Because you know, prospecting, I go say, again, I'm talking to the heads of business here, dealer principles, sales managers, we go and deal with ships all the time. Last time I made some of these prospecting calls was last week. Okay, the phone still gets heavy for me. I train this shit for a living. Okay. And heads of businesses, when you just throw the list at your sales, we have to say phone these people, sales managers, tell you what, make the call first. When the sales people see you make the call, okay, and I promise you, it works almost better when you stuff it up. Because they said, oh, I could do that. And by the way, if you want to contact myself, contact Andrew, just send an email into the head office and we'll give you some formats to follow. Okay. And I promise you, I want you to make a call like this. And they see the sales people see that you're not getting resistance from it. They're more likely to do it. And that's if you pay people to buy cars or not. Some accountants will say, we're mad on that. We're not going to do that one. And obviously you have to deal with what you can. But also what Frank Petcher said is, think that's right. If you make 10 calls, 10 calls, five people politely tell you to go away. Okay. The other five, two people say, well, give me a price of my car with the phone. You called me. Okay, guess what? I'm going to go look at the deal and stack it. Okay, it's not ideal, but maybe it will. I'll probably make three appointments. One of those appointments, Andrew, I know won't ever turn up. Okay, they're just making the appointment to get me on the back of that tool turn up and of the two, we might do a deal with one. So 90% of my efforts being wasted, you might think. But actually, if that one deals worth 100 pounds to your salesperson, every call's worth a tenor. Again, you might want to try something like that. So I know every time you pick up the phone, if the customer buys or doesn't buy, I says, I'm not interested. Thank you very much. It's worth 10 pounds to them. Okay, remember, some will, some won't, so what next? This got into prospect now, but you know what? That's the market we're in. We need to find these cars. Okay. And they're coming in the service department. So I want to leave people with this as well. We're prospecting. Once you've made the appointment, you've got work harder on that customer that you've dragged forward, then you do a walk-in or an email or a phone call. Because I want you to think about someone who's emailed you, phone you or walk in, they've done, what is it? Andrew, 90 and a thousand, 42 minutes of research. Yeah. Okay. They know all about the car. They know what they want. Okay. We're dragging people forward. So you've got to spend longer on the demonstration drive. You got to do more of the presentation. And too many times, I get sales from that point there and say, yeah, can we buy a car? Great. They're just putting in front of the customer. There you go. We'll pay you 22,000 for your car. And the person goes, oh, what? Don't be silly. Do you know what I paid for that car? And again, we're wrecking that customer. We're wrecking that database when customers come back. So I want to leave this with you. You got to work harder on a prospect of customer. Then we'll walk in. Okay. You have to. And you might say, well, we're trying to sell them a exact same car. Tough. You got to get them in that car again and take them for a drive and show them the slight differences that happen over the last two to four years of having their car. Sean, the upgrades that have on it, don't just go and put numbers in front of people because it's just not going to work. It's not going to work. You're actually right. And I think the biggest thing we have, you had a guest on the podcast, not so long ago, a guest called Harry Bot. And I think he talked a lot about rockstar management. And I took lots away from that. If we get that customer into the show why don't we treat them like in the coinage phrase, a rockstar? Let's give them the experience. Well, do you think, you know what? Yeah, this is the place I want to spend my money. These are the people I want to transact with. And I do want to buy a new car. You don't get that by going, your car's worth that. What do you think? Yeah, so true. And that just happened too often. And just to leave that finally, I was in a dealer group last week where the general salesman was talking about the experience of the customer. The customer came in, didn't want to drive the car, just want to figure out, because he wasn't sure he could afford it, present the four percent of the figures that GSM got involved on. Has he driven it? No. Why are you going to give them figures? Yeah, he just wants to figure out even thought it. No, no, no, he's not having figures. He's driven the car. Go on, showcase the car, get out for a drive. Amazingly, that customer pushed his budget from 500 pounds to nearly 750 pounds, because he wanted the car. Because he felt like what a car to drive. The 500 pounds was the budget they told you exactly. It wasn't his real budget. Again, if we're doing that with our appointments, we drive the credibility. We've got no only paying for one pound a month. You only want to spend 400 pounds now. How about 500 pounds? Get them out, get them to drive it, get them excited. Build that report, build the excitement. We can walk those payments up a bit. Yeah. Guys, well, listen, thank you very much for listening to this one. If you want one of our team to turn up your dealership and show you how to do these things, just reach out to us. We'll come in and we'll show you guys how to do this and how to set it all up and how to continue. It's not a beer and pizza night. That's not what we do. What we'll do is we'll show you how to set up a continual process to keep on going forward there. Anyway, Andrew, thank you very much. I really appreciate it. God, thank you. 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.
