Since we stated the podcast over 150 episodes ago, we have interviewed more than 40 Titans of the Motor Trade. This has given us a great catalogue of top tips
Our episode this week, is the first in a series of golden nugget compilations, that will help you in your career, whether that’s in sales, aftersales or management.
Here are the highlights:
{00:37} Sean Kelly
{03:46} Gavin Hydes
{04:11} Patrick Tessier
{05:52} David Martin
{09:53} Dr T
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:
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 will start by saying thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Do you have an appetite for an open sales training program? You see, we normally run our sales training programs for dealer groups or manufacturers so we can get enough people in a room to make the training cost effective. But every year I get lots of people saying, oh, I've got one dealership or I've got just two dealerships, I've got three salespeople that could really go through your training program. And we're often saying, I don't know how well it's going to stack up for you. Now you have options. You could also go to Amazon and get the book Words That Sell Cars. It's a great book and we have lots of clients give that to every salesperson when they start in the industry. Of course, you could always go to our signature sales fitness training program. If you listen to our podcast, we plug that all the time. It's cost effective because it's only £299 for three months of digital online training that gives your salesperson a great start in their career. You could do that. But what is an appetite for an open physical training course? Now guys, we have to run that course interactively. It's not one of these courses where your salespeople sit there, cross an arms, just listen to it board throughout the day. It won't be death by PowerPoint. So that sounds like something you'd be interested in. Go to our website. It's simcotraining.co.uk. Look for the tab about open courses and you get all the details you need right there. Today, I'm with the management director of Vines Group. Vines BMW, I'm not sure what I should call it. Well, I'll shorten in a second. This is Sean Kelly. So Sean, should I be Vines Motor Group, Vines Group? What do you call the group? Hey, well, hi Skip. Thanks for having me on the show. That's great to be here. Well, we refer to it as Vines Group. Sean, a lot of the audience of the Selling in the Motor Trade Podcast, sales managers, service managers, looking for those quick wins. We have lots of people saying, how do I make an impact quickly? Because they want to move on. They want to progress. They want to be heads of businesses. They want to be regional directors. And I'd just like to ask you, what advice would you give to someone who's listening to this that wants to make that impact so they're immediately? Is there anything that stands out that you would see and think, ah, I'm quite impressed with what Jenny's doing or what Billy's doing? Anything that stands out there? I think the number one thing, and this might be a bit old-fashioned, actually. It's bloody hard work. That's actually what it's about. And I mean, I still see this in my business today. I mean, you see people who will come in a minute before their shift is due to start and they'll leg it a minute after their shift is due to start. Now, don't get me wrong, they might be absolutely happy with their job and their work-life balance and all that sort of stuff. That's great for them. If you're one of those people who wants to get on and wants to be successful, you can't do that. You've got to be putting in the graft, actually. And, you know, just to share a horrible bit of personal story. When I was young, my brother and my father both died before I was a teenager. And so what that did for me was it did two things. One is it made me realize that nothing's for forever, so you've got to enjoy every minute that you're around. But what it also meant was that, actually, if anyone was going to give me something, it had to be me. So I had to work hard and I had to, you know, I had my first job when I was 12. And not even a paper round, because I had one of those two, obviously. But that work ethic sort of stopped by with me and probably to the detriment of my dear wife and the kids from time to time when they were growing up. But actually, you know, that's paying us back now a bit later in life. So for me, yeah, it's work hard because, actually, if you work hard and you're focused on what you want to achieve, anything is possible, anything is possible. It might be a bit of a Northern as attitude that a pound earned is 10 times sweeter than a pound found. Yeah, because I've actually created that. And, yeah, that would be my advice. Work bloody hard, do your job, make sure that you get noticed for what you're doing by successful results. But ultimately, yeah, it's about putting the hours and the effort in, yeah. Yeah, just great advice. Today, I'm with the CEO of the Joe Duffy Group, Gavad Hides. First thing I just want to say, Gavad, welcome and thank you very much for joining us on another episode. How are you, sir? Thanks, Adam. This podcast is all about sharing tips and ideas and best practice. And we'd like to ask everyone, do they have that one little nugget, that one little tip or idea that they wish they had right at the beginning of the career? All right, tips in the career is definitely get used to rejection and keep going back for more. Don't let, don't let nobody, if I don't want to go back, keep in tenacious and don't take off for an answer. It's my great pleasure today to introduce Patrick Tessier, one tip or idea or something you've seen across your life that in the motor trade that you'd say, listen, anyone, any sales manager, listen to this, any dealer principal, any salesperson, is there any tip or idea that you'd like to leave the audience with? Yes, because as a salesperson or a manager or a member, what you do, is set your goals every single day for what does your actual team. And look, I used to, when I was selling cars, I used to try and find a salad day. Just one every, Monday and Friday, just one every day. That's all I had to do, find one. In order to find that five, I had to know that one, that one every day, I had to have five or six or seven people on the go every single day. You've got to keep that funnel going. Don't be a waiter. Don't wait for it to come to you. Make goals, be disciplined. And make sure, if you're a sales manager, be disciplined with your team. But make certain your team's enjoying their work and they're having fun. Don't try and be the Mayor at rugby coach or the angry soccer coach. Don't football, I should say sorry. Don't be those things. Be a mentor yourself. But make certain you've got your own discipline in order as well. You've got to have discipline. You've got to have a goal. You've got to have an objective. And you've got to have it every day. I'm so excited today to be with David Martin. Is there one tip, one idea, some best practice that maybe that you've come up with or you've seen somewhere, done a bit of R&D, that someone can go back and put in place now, today and help them sell a car, make some money. Is there anything specific that stands out for you? Well, this will be kind of old hat because I've been using this now for a long time. But back in the early 1990s, and so as soon as somebody hears that, I can't work now. Trust me, it can. Early in the early 1990s, I heard a guy who was the number one realtor in the state of California. Now, it's a very large state, very prosperous state and this guy had just sold hundreds of millions of dollars worth of real estate and he had made himself millions of dollars each year doing it. So I was pretty sure he's good at what he did. And I heard him use a close on something that we hear all the time. In fact, probably other than maybe price, the number one objection we hear in the auto industry is I want to think about it. I want to ponder it. I want to pray over it. I want to whatever. And you and I have had this discussion before. I remember you said one time that the thing you love is to, I think, basically think in terms of no, Mr. Customer, or you thinking the customer is not really going to go home and think about it. I mean, when little Johnny comes out and says, hey, daddy, daddy, can we throw the football? No, son, I'm thinking about a car park. I heard you say that in Australia one time, I'm like, yeah, but it's absolutely true. It's not what's happening. But what happens is I want to think about it is usually not just of time masking a real objection. For whatever their reason is, they don't want to. How do subjections for the one you don't know what it is? That's got a fighting chance when you know what it is. That's it. And so I heard this guy use some variation of what I'm about to say to you, but I put it together for the automotive industry and it has worked brilliantly, not every time, but brilliantly in some form or fashion. When the customer says, I want to think about it, the first thing you should always do is start nodding your head. And you should soften the objection by saying, I can appreciate that. I hear where you're coming from or whatever you want to say, but something to soften it a little bit. But then for you to say, before you leave, Skippy, can I ask you a quick favor? Sure. On the scale of, oh, I don't know, let's just say from scale of one to 10, with 10 meaning you're about to drive this vehicle home today, and one meaning you wouldn't take it even if it were free. Why do you stand right now? Now, the average customer is going to say something like, well, I don't know, I'm a seven or eight, or then I say, I'm an eight or nine. But here's the kicker. Then you look at him with a little smile and you said, great, what would it take to get you to a 10? And you'll be flabbergasted. How many people will go, well, to tell you the truth, I'm just not comfortable with the price. To tell you the truth, you're not giving me enough for my trade. To tell you the truth, I like the car, but I don't think my wife is, so I'm going to run it past her first. To tell you the truth, I'm waiting on a settlement on a lawsuit. To tell you that it's amazing how many people have an objection. They don't want for whatever the reason, embarrassment or whatever. They don't want to tell you what it is. And by saying, great, what would it take to get you to a 10? And if you think about a skip, you and I both know this. It's exactly like saying, how do I sell you? But if you ever said, hey, how do I sell you? They go, you can't. I just told you I'm going over there. But somehow by changing the conversation and coming at it from a different way, a surprising number of people will tell you exactly what the objection is. And what you uncovered, as you just said, at least you got to shut that. Yeah. Well, listen, I've been using that not just training salespeople, but in my own business. It just works so well. So thank you very much. I learned that earlier from you and it definitely made me a lot of money. Now, I love psychology as to why people buy things. Why salespeople do things when I ask them to do it. And sometimes they don't. I love to know the psychology about what makes people tick. I suppose I'm a bit of a people watcher and maybe you are as well. But today, I've got Dr. Tharaka Gunaratha. Now, I don't know if I'm pronouncing your surname right there, Dr. But actually, I'm so excited to get the real ideas as to why people do what they do or why they don't do it. So Dr. Tharaka, do I pronounce your surname right? Tharaka, is that right? So, Tharaka, that's my first name. And that was pretty much right. Gunaratha is my surname. And to be honest, people within my family forgets. We've left that out. So it's Dr. T for short. The crisis crash and comeback is my simplified model for psychological volatility. Whenever, if you think about it, Simon, isn't it true that we're all either in a crisis. We've just come from one or we're heading into one. Right? They're all these spikes along the road. It's maybe a complaint. It's a deadline. It's, oh, I need to make up the numbers or whatever, something at home. There are fires to fight everywhere we go in life. And the thing is that there's a really interesting pattern in the shift of our mind when we're in crisis mode. We're hyper focused. We're a bit more trusting with our teammates. There's more camaraderie. We're in the trenches together, as it were. There are interesting signs when we are in that post sprint phase fatigue, that crash. And with that, scarily so for some people, energy goes down in a sense of purposeless can kick in. And it's that kind of like, why am I, why are we even doing this? Initiative goes down. You tell me what to do. I don't know what to do. And so there's that post sprint fatigue phase. But the great news is that you can come back with the right psychological strategies and the levers to pull. You can jump start the human mind or the team back into that. Let's go again. We're strong. We can do this. You're right. And leadership teams are finding time punctuation quite helpful. I'll just maybe let the listeners in on this. This is one of my strategies for triggering a comeback. I'm punctuated. What's the most commonly searched Google term on the first of January? What are people Googling about on New Year's Day? New Year's resolution. That's something about diet. Especially. What's the new diet? How do I lose weight? And the question is, why does the human mind do that on the first of January and not the 13th of me? And that is because when the human mind perceives the beginning of a new period of time, it perceives what we call a fresh psychological ledger. And with that, we're able to separate our mistakes of the past and go, that was then this is now. And by simply being able to go, that was then this is now. The brain is now able to reach for a higher level of motivation it wouldn't ordinarily reach for. So you go one week before the first of January and I'm eating mince pies and drinking grandi. All right, the first of January, I'm eating lettuce now. Great. Why? Because the human mind perceives a line in the sand time. So I've been saying to leaders and managers, hey, why don't you use time punctuation with your team? Wherever you can time punctuate, this might just help jumpstart human motivation amongst your girls and guys. So it might be like, guys, that was February. This is March. Ask the question. What's our fresh focus? Ask your team. This is this important question. What's your fresh focus? Guys, that was Q3. This is Q4. What's your fresh focus? Guys, that's when the kids were unholy now the kids are not unholy. What's your fresh focus? By helping your team see time. Guys, that was last week. This is this week. What's your fresh focus? By using that technique, Simon, you know, leaders and managers are finding that they can unstick their teams a bit more. And it's one way to come out of crash and then to come back. You know, many of these. I just love that. I have to expand on it. I met a man in Australia. He actually run his departments halfway through the month. Now, what he said is, I think it's similar to what you're saying. He said, towards the end of the month, there's a natural push. Because we're trying to get cars delivered. There's an actual, that's where we want to get to because that's where we get paid. He said, so why don't we actually run our new cars to the end of the month? Because that's when our manufacturer wants us to get to that target. But why don't we run our use cars to the 15th to the 16th of the month? So then we get two natural pushes in the month. So salespeople want to get all the cars out on use cars by the 15th because it's the end of the month on the 16th, okay? Or the new month on the 16th. And I suppose that's exactly what you're saying with time punctuality, okay? Yeah, time punctuation. By the way, that example that you've just brought there, Simon, is a really, really great example of emotional intelligence in action. Because what we're doing there is we're looking at human behavior, comparing it against the timeline. Because we're not machines, right? We're human beings. So we show an irrational or behavioral pattern rather than a logistical or logical one. And I just think that's a great, that's a great example. That just leads 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.
