We carry on with words of wisdom from Dale Wyatt, Sean V Bradley, Kenneth Purdon, Umesh Samani and Jack Allman.
This week features advice on measuring progress, referrals, listening skills, honesty and carrying out VHC’s early in the day.
Here are the highlights:
{00:37} Dale Wyatt
{06:40} Sean V Bradley
{07:46} Kenneth Purdon
{08:26} Umesh Samani
{09:33} Jack Allman
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. Now today it is my pleasure to have Dale White on. Measure the lead, not the lag. Can you explain your thinking behind that? I think we spend our business too much on our time measuring data. It's already happened. So management accounts or customer satisfaction results or sales. What we need to do in our business is focus on the activities that we deliver results. And if you get the activities right, the results will come. And that goes back to my early days. I talked about working for every life and following the process. If you're doing the right things, you will get the right results. Not necessarily when you deserve them, but they will come. So for me it's about remembering to do the things that make a difference and do the things that matter. So focusing on the lead activities, the lead things, the key things in the driver, are rather than celebrating the lag measures. So I would much rather celebrate all the take in registrations, for example. I'd much rather celebrate the number of appointments in the diary. Yes. For sales. Yeah. Yeah. We've got a great friend and we interviewed him for this. Gavin Hyde's runs the Joe Duffy group in Ireland. And he is one of the few people I know that he does not target. He sells people at all our results. And when I say that to other leaders, I said, really? No, he doesn't. What he targets is activity. And he tells a lovely story that when he was selling cars, he'd go home and his daughter said, Dad, did you sell any cars today? He said, not today. It felt like a loser. But then he said, he said it doesn't, when he sells, we'd feel like losers. But what he hadn't told his daughter is I've actually done three demonstration drives. I made these prospecting appointments and made five appointments for the weekend. And that demonstration drives the appointments will give me the result at the end of the month. So he said, in my business, Joe Duffy group, we're not targeting salespeople and results at all. It's activity, activity, activity. Get the activity right. The results will look at some of that. That's exactly. Measure the lead, not the lag. And I also talk about focusing on the things that make a difference. I've got five tips for you, if you want, Simon. Yes, please. Yeah. And these are things that maybe look to some people might want to think about. The one thing is don't bonus the score. I don't know. Don't bonus score. I don't know. Many dealers will bonus the score. Don't bonus score from an OEM or a dealer's point of view. They'll score both. From an OEM perspective, a lot of OEMs bonus the score. And that forces dealers to gain the system rather than to focus on the actual customer. So you can imagine, as I was putting the customer up when the dealer says, it's really important to me that you give me a 10. You're going to get a survey. Please take the 10 survey. You're going to remind you to take the 10 survey. That's gaming. It's gaming the score. We want to get proper feedback so that we can improve the business. So we encouraged him to have an action plan. We might bonus an action plan, but never bonus the score because you end up giving the system. That's the first one. Second one is establish your core non-negotiables. So focus on core process. I give you an example. We have five non-negotiables in the Suzuki sales process. And they are warm welcome to the customer. Ten customers details present the product. Follow the bar and tell them that you're a wide buy from me story. The other five things. And there are many other things you could measure. Those five things are pretty cool. Through our mystery shop, probably 94% of our dealers doing all of those things every time with every customer. It makes a difference. And my third thing is focus on the dissatisfiers. What are the things they're going to really irritate customers and try to remove those? Okay. What are some of the dissatisfiers you found in Suzuki? I'll give you an example. One of the dissatisfiers was courtesy cars. Yeah. I think most dealers have got more jobs than they've got cars. We can't register courtesy cars left, right and center. Unfortunately, we just budget doesn't allow. Always a problem. Yes. So what we did is Suzuki was we've refrained the customer proposition. And we said that we would provide alternative transport to every customer. And alternative transport could be a taxi or a collection delivery or a courtesy car. What I did was reframe the customer's expectation without reducing the customer's function. Okay. Now, example is car valets, car valets. Some cars arrive and need to wash them back. Some cars arrive and we need a full valet. Yeah. What we did was make our promise that we would do a washing vac, not a valet. And a valet was another service. So reframing the proposition and actually reducing the customer's expectations of what good looks like and delivering it every time was a good strategy for us. Okay. Yeah, it does. Yeah, it does because you wash them back the car and it's still not polished to an inch of us like when they bought it. The expectations might be different to what we were going to do. So change the wording. Love it. Exactly. So kind of reframing the experience, getting in all the goshables, removing those to satisfy those and getting people to focus on the customer rather than the score. The score follows. The score is a lag measure. The customer interaction is the things to make a difference. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. Okay. Love that. I'm counting the way. Is that number four or is that number five? Whatever it is, you've got it more. It is my great pleasure today to talk to you to Sean V. Bradley. You need to ask everybody every day without exception to fail. Are you in the market for a vehicle? It's yes or no. No. Who do you know that's in the market vehicle? Why? Because I pay cash money for referrals. Anybody. Okay. What kind of car are you driving? Why? Because we're in a pandemic. We're in an inventory crisis. We need used cars. So depending on your vehicle, we might actually be able to get you more for your vehicle than it's worth. Folks, you've got to remember this is the answer. The climax of this. Okay. The tip is this. Every single person you meet either needs to buy a car today or they will or they will need to buy a car in the future or they know somebody that needs to buy a car today or they know somebody that needs to buy a car in the future. If you don't ask, you don't get sales as a numbers game, the more people you ask a question to or solicit or pitch, the more opportunities, the more, you know, conversions. So the more people you ask, the more yeses that you get. So the tip is this everywhere you go, you need to be creating referral agents for yourself. What do you think about that? Today is my pleasure to be joined with Kenneth Purdon. Hi, Kenneth. Is there anything you learn in that first three months at Arnold Cloud there that you think says relevant today is it is for someone who's just starting the motor trade right now? Definitely. Two years and one mouth. Yeah. Yeah. Really, really basics. Certain lesson and lesson to what they're saying and respond to what they're saying, not what you think they've said. Yeah. Is that so, so true there? I tell you what, we often say there's three sales in any sale. You have to sell yourself first, the product second and then the deal. Today I'm joined with Umej Samami. We often say in the first 90 days, we learn things good and bad that lasts us for the rest of our selling career. Can I ask you, are there any skills that you learn in that first three months that you think is just as valuable today in this digital world as it was when you started in 83? I think I don't know if it's a skill or what about. I think I just think being open honest with people, I think, you know, it goes a long way, especially if you don't know the answer to anything, you just say, look, I'll get the answer for you. And over the years, I've employed salesmen, once worked with VW, that's the first thing I always told them is if you don't know the answer, do not flag it because the customer will know more than you. Yes. And the matter I catch you out. So I don't know if that's a skill or if it's just something which I've always thought you're just going to be open and honest, I'm front with customers really. Yeah, it's so true that people think they just want to, it is the gift of the gap and make it up. Listen, there's so much information people have nowadays, don't they? Why bother? Just say, how don't know, let's find out together. I'm joined with Jack Orman today. Someone, a service manager, listen to this in a different market that hasn't got your product. What mistakes are they making and what recommendations would you say? Go back and have a look at this, just drawing on some of your experience working with service departments around the world. Yeah, I think it goes back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of are they thinking at the customer or are they thinking about what is best for that vehicle and the safety of that customer? I think too often they try to put themselves in the shoes of that customer and how would you receive this news? It goes back to being very apologetic about the word that's required. But from our point of view, if you're in that headspace, that becomes incredibly difficult to turn that into a positive conversation as soon as you start to talk negatively about it. That for me, again, is further enhanced by, and this is probably going a bit into it, but the way that you load your workshop that day, I think as you get later on that day, there's almost just a desperate demand to get that vehicle out of your workshop. So they almost don't talk about the work for fear of the having to say to the customer, we have to keep the car every night because we're late in the day now. So for us, we see, and it's not always difficult because we appreciate customers drop cars off at different times of the day. If you can get that vehicle on the ramp quickly, if you can get the VHC done at the very start of that journey and not to utopia is your fingers will be falling off. Oh, yes. The golden hour cars on the ramp still, you get authority on that work and you get it done. However, we often see that that VHC journey get later in the day. And as a result, that puts pressure on everybody. The technicians start to rush. They perhaps don't start to identify works. They know that car needs to be back to the customer that day. The communicoid work almost sometimes deliberately late so that you know the customer will say, look, I have to leave the car back tonight. I think that puts massive undue stress and pressure on the performance of that workshop. And that's why those conversations get even more apologetic or they get later and shorter. And like you say, you get met with an okay, no problem. Great cars can be ready then at five o'clock because I'm not going to have to do that extra work. So for me, it goes back to how you're going to workload that workshop. Give yourself the time in your diary to identify the work and actually do the work and the performance of that will end feed through engine numbers. Isn't so true. The problem of upselling at the moment, so many times we've got service advice saying, we haven't got timed upsell. I mean, to book a account for a service, it's easily going to be three or four weeks. Someone's got a problem with their car. We can't get it in to the 24th of two months down the track there. And they say, actually, I haven't got time to upsell anyway because I can't, we can't do the work that we've got there at the moment. I mean, that's a real issue. I think there. Are you seeing the same? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think it's true of many dealerships and obviously there's variables that are somewhat out of their control, whether that's parts of it. Don't come through on time. But from our side, where you can nail that process. And I think that's supported massively by tech. And when you can support that process, for us, we see a really, really fully functioning slick workshop. And I think you then, that allows you then to finesse the performance of it. But ultimately, if you're kind of working through a backlog and kind of racing against yourself every day, you're never going to create an environment that either feels like a relaxed, positive moment to come into as a customer or to work in as a service advisor. So you definitely got to address that early on. 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 link to it. Thank you.
