Before your first sip of coffee, 75 % of Auto-Trader shoppers have already picked their dealer – will it be you?
In this episode, Harry Bott – co-founder of the industry’s #1 call-recording platform, Mediahawk – breaks down the “48-hour window” that decides 75 % of your digital leads.
I ask Harry exactly how top dealerships capture, coach and convert those calls.
In this episode you’ll learn
- The single objection-handling phrase Harry’s AI flagged as a “profit killer” (and what to say instead)
- How to slice every inbound call into coachable micro-moments, without drowning your team in data
- Real client case study: from 29 % to 67 % appointment set-rate in one month
- A zero-cost script tweak that turns “just looking, mate” into booked test-drives
If you sell cars, manage a team, or simply need more deals from the leads you already pay for, hit play.
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 is my pleasure to be joining with Harry Bot. Now, Harry Bot runs Media Book, and he had me in stitches when we're talking about what we're going to talk about on the podcast.
Some of these stories, some of the people he's worked with in the past, what he's built over the years. I think you're going to learn a lot from Harry, and lots of good tips and advice that you can put into your dealership and improve the bottom line straightaway. So, this is a great one. You're going to love this. Harry, welcome aboard. Simon, thank you. I'm really excited. God, I'm flattered. I'm not sure that's quite me, and I'm somewhat amazed that you think I've got enough to say to come onto your podcast. But let's see how my face for radio goes and see whether I can amuse a few people. If I do, I hope that will help.
Well, Harry, let's start right back from the beginning, because your history, just doing a bit of research on Google, obviously having a brief conversation with you from selling BNP in the mining industry to media, and everything in between. What do people need to know about Harry's stuff into his career? Where did you start off? Well, Simon, I've got probably one of the most bizarre careers of many people you'll meet. Is I did a read history of Art at university, which as I look back on it, I'm not sure that makes you very commercial, but it makes you interesting to dinner parties, so I suppose that's a good point. And then I decided not to go into the art world.
I'd worked for an auction house for a couple of months and thought that's not for me. And I went into commercial lease-breaking back in the days where we were doing computers and things like that, and helped bring down British and Commonwealth Bank, which if those of your older listeners will know who they were, but it was an enormous scandal. There was a company called Atlantic Computers, and I was selling out their commercial property paper. But in terms of where did I learn my selling skills, I absolutely learned them there. And we used to sit with an A1 sheet of paper that had come out of an old-fashioned printer where we had bought from a list broker, a list of people, companies with a telephone number, and then you'd ring them up, find the name, and then you would cross them off with a marker.
And if they got through, because we didn't have a thing called CRM system, you would then remember that you would write your notes on the side. So I was doing the old-fashioned hundred phone calls a day, and that's how I learned my trade in terms of the importance of persistent grit and all that sort of stuff. I left that job and travelled for a little bit, and I saw an advert in the paper, and I applied to it, and I got a job at BHP, which is that. For those your listeners went there, it is the largest mining company in the world, and I used to sell coal and iron ore to the worldwide steel industry.
So you can trust me otherwise, but I am the man who sold coal to Newcastle. I used to sell a million tons of Australian coal into Newcastle. I sold it to Romania. Well, hold on, hold on. As a noisy, why? Because I do something this is on the side, but this will amaze your listeners. People always go on about the coal industry here, and it has very sadities, and yes, it ripped the heart of the communities, and that's a different issue. We have eight mines in Queensland. If you put them from end to end in the United Kingdom, they would go from London to Birmingham. They would be a mile wide, 100 meters deep, and the coal was 10 meters thick.
Wow. So you think the M1 is what is it? Max, 100 meters wide? Yes. Now imagine a mile of that, which is a coal mine from London to Birmingham. Wow. See, as a Queenslander, I see these mines, and I've never worked in them, but I just hear the stories of it, but that's why there's so much there. And it was cheaper to take a ton of coal by boat to Scumfield than it would put 10 miles onto the steel mills in land from Scumfield port. Wow. Wow. So that's why we don't have a coal industry. Anyway, that's by the way. But I then went from there and then went down to Melbourne and I used to move big ships around, and I thought I needed to have an MBA because I love business, but I thought I needed to get a more generous approach, because I either going to be an international businessman with a BHP, but go more senior or come back.
And I came out at the first dot-com boom. Again, some of your listeners were probably not even born in the first dot-com boom, but we had companies with market capitalization of half a billion pounds with no turnover. It was just bonkers. I had to. So you came out there. You had to have a job because you thought you were going to make a million. I joined one company called People Bank, which is an online recruitment company, and after six months they sacked me because they quite rightly worked out. I was bloody useless. Anyway, I thought someone thought, well, but you'd understand what this dot-com stuff is. So I then went and worked for a publishing house called Quantum Business Media and set up the publican dot-com.
And that was the publican dot-com, which was the trade magazine for the pub sector. And we had 25,000 publicans chatting away on chat boards before name one even heard of Facebook and social media. My fatal flaw, and it was a fatal flaw, is I could not sell my way out of a paper bag because no one really wants this internet. My business plan said after three months, I'd be turning over 20,000 pounds a month for this publishing house and I was making 500. So everyone's chatting on them, but no one's buying advertising. Absolutely. But they've no understood the value of this. So again, I got sacked. And I then learned there's two things about getting sacked.
You should never take it personally. There's a reason. If your face doesn't fit in the company, you're probably not right for it. So you move on. But people get really upset by that. But anyone and I say this to any salesperson, we all have bumpy careers because it was so performance and hit. If you ever leave your company, never take it personally, wipe yourself down, crack on, you'll find the company that understands your skills and your skills fit them. People take it very personally. However, so but what I also, by taking it personally, I was pretty much unemployable. I'm in my early 30s. And I set up my own business with my business partner, MediaHawk.
I wasn't popular with my wife. We just had a baby. So no money. No money coming in a young child. It didn't mean it wasn't career enhancing, but there again, no one's going to give me a career. So I needed to sell it. So we set up MediaHawk. And here we are 25 nearly 25 years later. Automotive, you know, I head up the automotive side. We got 500 customers. I just love the automotive side. It's full of really interesting people. It's always challenging. No two days are the same. And I'm going to say something which always muses but winds up all my customers. Someone once said to me, the great thing about automotive retailers is that they're like cockroaches.
And I said, what? How can you call an automotive retailer cockroach? And he said, well, it's very simple. When the end of the world comes, there only be two people left on this planet. An automotive retailer and a cockroach because they're so adaptive and they're so exciting and they dig so many fun things. So I apologize to your listeners. But if I hope you'll feel proud with yourself that you will be there at the end of the world, whereas I probably won't be. But you know what? You're right. Because look at all the change we've gone through with agency sales models and the internet and selling online. And we're not going to be there and could have been just changes with the EV vehicles now to ICE.
Think about the changes as an industry. We've gone through over the last, I was going to say 10 years. Goodness me, Harry. It's less than that. Over the last four years, the change we've gone through, whereas coal, I'm guessing that industry changes at a slow pace, doesn't it? Well, there's so many customers who buy coal and there's only so many people who sell coal, but they have they've created futures which added to a certain element of excitement to it. But interesting, one thing that hasn't changed, I feel very strongly and I know we're going to come back to this, is the sales price of the sales. It's 100% back to the future. What can I ask you?
This is a shameless plug for our first 90 day sales program. We say that the skills that people learn in the first three months could end bad last for the rest of their career. Can I ask you, and when you were selling computer systems or maybe coal, is there anything that you learned in your first three months in both those careers, which is as relevant to a car salesperson that stumbled across this podcast or just started the motor trade in 2025? When it was when you started? I think probably there's a number of tips I give you, but I always think the most important tip I ever give anybody is when I was in coal sales, because every 10 cents on a ton of coal, when we used to negotiate, and these contracts were $100, $200 million contracts, every 10 cents was worth about $100, $100,000.
So it covered my salary happily. So if we did a good job and just get another 10%, you're basically paying the staff cost, every 10% up, you're paying the marketing staff cost, it's just fabulous. So we used to go on very sophisticated negotiation courses, and the thing that always hung out to me, I'll probably talk about some of my other tips, but 80% of any negotiation is done before you even meet or talk to that person. So true. So why is that relevant in car sales? Everyone goes on about the internet, etc. It's because your buyer is gendered, they know about you much more than you know about them. You are not selling to them in the traditional way.
They're walking in, and therefore they're wanting to have an amazing experience, they're not wanting to be sold to. And so if you can think that 80% of all of that process has been done to or even 90%, and they haven't even talked to you, they haven't talked to your business, they haven't even approached your business, then you'll approach to how you treat that person has to be different, because you're putting the, you're putting the fairy dust on the top of the cupcake, if I may mix my metaphors. Yeah, so true. And this is before the internet and in the coal industry. So in our world now, with the internet, the 19,042 minutes of research, it's got to be even higher now.
160 sites, if you're looking at a used car, new car would be probably a little bit less. 160 sites now, wow. Yeah, that's what I think Google came up with some research. That's about 106. It might be the same site, you'll interact with 160 times with sites in what you're trying to do. So don't sit there and think that you've got all the time in the world to change their mind and focus on it. You know, they know what they want, they know what they know, what their job is, how can I make their life amazing? This comes back to the question that you often ask, and you ask Andrew, our sales director, and when it's the last time you bought a car outside of the motor trade, because senior managers listened to this, Harry, we're either in company cars or you deal with, like as a train company, I always deal with clients there.
Why is that such a powerful question that you'd love to ask when you deal with them? I do it. I love it. When I'm in boardrooms, I'm in sales meetings, everything. The first, pretty well, the first question I ask them, I always say, hands up or those of you who bought a car not through the trade in the last year or two years. And basically, normally, the bulk of the room sits down and says nothing. All one person stands up and then I ask them to go through the process that they went through. And the reason why that's important, if you're not buying your product, you have no idea how you'd expect to be treated.
So if I can turn that around to you, Simon, if you were to spend £50,000 of your money on a medium-sized car or a basic BMW, how would you expect to be treated? Yeah, like a celebrity. Like a rock star. So I have a theory that's I call rock star management. I say you sales people in the motor trade, and actually to an extent on service as well, you're in the business of rock star management. It's your job to anticipate my needs. It's not your job to not answer the phone. It's not your job to never get back to me. And it's not your job just to treat me like I'm with some former Numpty and especially on a sexist basis.
If I'm a woman, I will ignore you because I've taught you a husband. I just love that. Actually, you think Paul McCartney turned up to buy a car. We treat everyone like a rock star, but two weeks. In Paul McCartney turned up to buy a car. Wouldn't the red carpet get rolled out? Would you turn and say, sorry Paul, your car's not ready. We have to get a loan car for you. No, sorry Paul. You just wouldn't, would you? He would be treated. And so the point about rock star management is first that you need to untest people's needs and you've got to treat them really, really well. Because let's just sit back and think about the sales process and business.
It's a dirty little secret, but a lot of our jobs are unbelievably boring. And what we do on the day to day is dull as dishwater. Now, if I'm going to spend £50,000, I have a pretty boring life. If I'm, you know, lots of my mundinity of life, I want to go in then just have an amazing time. And you honestly ask if every car dealer stood back and said, if I spent £50,000 and I walked into the show, do I really feel like I'm getting a £50,000 experience? And often the other song, and listen, don't get me wrong, that unbelievably busy salespeople, they're unbelievably stressed. If they're part of a PLC, they've got unbelievable desire and need to put buddy numbers up to head office.
However, they therefore lose the absolute need and the desire and requirement to just be well-mannered and look after someone and just make that, add the excitement into what they're doing in that sales process. It's like you say, it's retail theatre, isn't it? Yes, it's theatre. I love that concept of theatre. And the point is you can do it on the telephone. You can do it any interaction. You know, a simple thing. If you're doing following up a lead that someone's filled in a form and says, hi Harry, I'm interested in that BnW3 series. What's better than, yes, it's still available whenever you want to come. Or, hi Harry, I'm that BnW, really excited, it's still available.
And actually, you're probably not aware, but we're doing an offer that we can put a bit more on the spec. And if you were looking for finance as an indicative quote, this is a sort of thing we could do. And by the way, my name's Harry, and here's the postcode, what three words, what you need to do, and let me know whether you like preferred tea or coffee if you want to come and see it. What's better, what sounds better. And that's just old-fashioned manners with a little bit more effort. And that's rock style management for you. Can I be cheeky now? Good old-fashioned manners. And I don't mind telling the listens to this, the people are watching it.
Harry asked me to talk through some different ideas and themes we were going to discuss beforehand. And I promised to email them through the weekend, which of course I did not. I have no excuse, I just forgot all about it. And you were emailed to me this morning was beautiful. It had manners. In case you could you resend it again. Now, and I said, Harry, you knew when I knew that I'd forgotten. Okay. But the way that you did it was so clever. It was so nice. It was not, you promised to do this. Why didn't you do this? It was just a nice little, gave me a face saver on the way out of it.
And that's good old-fashioned manners, isn't it? Yeah, I think it's good old-fashioned manners. And it's a really interesting you picked up that point about face saving. We forget, especially in car dealerships, are quite high, a lot of the higher-fot driven males there. So they turn up big, big pumping gorillas, and we forget that people need to save face. And so you always want to try and make them feel a million dollars. You've got to turn it the other way. And I really believe very strongly on that. And so maybe it's just my background and my age. Oh my god, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I'm a surfit of too much posh education and nannies in my youth.
But I just, you know, let's bring it down to tic tacs. If you and I were on a desert island and there was a bunch of cannibals going to eat us, the one of us who was better mannered is less likely to get eaten. When the choice gets through. And there's no different for someone was to come and buy a car. If they want to buy a car, because they love, they really like what you've done for them, rather than because, you know, you need to buy it now because it's a deaf thing. And why are you walking out the door? Come back now, because it won't be available tomorrow. Can I just add to this one a minute?
I'm talking to the younger generation. And I have a 22-year-old. I have a 19-year-old and maybe this is not an age thing, Harry. I'll get your views on it. But we make mistakes. Sometimes I get things wrong. What's wrong with saying, sorry, Mr. Customer. I got that wrong. Sorry. I forgot. Why do we always, sorry, why does some people go into that bullshit mode straight away thinking that has to think they've never been taught this. And one of the best bits of business advice I ever had from a boss, and he was a tough old boss, a very impressive leader. He said to me, Harry, one thing you need to remember in businesses and during life is always say, sorry.
And if you can be the first one in the room to own a mistake within your company, whether you did it or not, you will be popular for doing that. So if you're in a group of you and you're on a team and someone's made a mistake, and everyone's starting to point the fingers, always stand up and say, that was my mistake, because. And then as soon as someone owns it, they will know you didn't necessarily made the mistake, or you might have been a bit of a part of it. As soon as people know that they'll trust you, they're like you, but they want to be told, sorry, it's sooner rather than later. Yeah.
Yeah. It's just so true there. And is that something that's taught? Or is it how you're raised? Is it your posh? You use the words, I'll bring it up. And by the way, people listen to this. Some of the people that Harry went to school with, like David Kennan, oh, God, let me call him Dave. And Boris, was he called Boris when you went to school? No, he was to call Boris. He was he was three years above me. But even then he was a noisy figure with a large shock of blonde hair. Even then he was very pleased for themselves. He was there. Is it something that's learned? Is it nature? Is it nurture?
I think I think it's I think it's nurture. I think you need if you haven't been taught it and never told it, you don't understand it. There are some people who might come from very tough backgrounds, but if you then dig under why they're so well-mannered and so good and so focused, you'll find that they haven't had some unbelievably amazing parents who really fix them. You know, you look at that, they just have learned. And there's other people who might even have, you know, been in care homes or whatever, but they've learned maybe if I've been told it, or maybe a bit of asthma nature, they've learned that it's much easier to be nice to someone, much easier to fess up.
It's much easier to be polite than it is to be aggressive. And I know we're in a world that Donald Trump is trying to teach us all to be aggressive, but actually, the after deal means that's a winner and a loser. And actually, if your car sells more than any former salesperson, it's not about winning or losing. It's about someone ringing you in three years' time and I'm not prompted by the car off you. Someone said to me, you're only a good car salesman when you sell the second car to that person the second time. Second and so anyone can sell one car. We was the second the car. And family and friends cars. And with Google reviews and all that, that's how it works nowadays.
So I want to dig into, and what's it look like when things are done brilliantly? This retail theater, this rock star management. So why is it some deal? It's make buying a 50, 60, 100,000 pound euro dollar car. Make it feel a lot worse than buying a watch for 50 or, I'm sorry, well, 50. I'm not not that sort of watch. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But watch might be high and watch might be 10,000. I suppose it could be up to that. Why is that? So if I can, if I could, you know, you, again, you've got me on some again, one of my passions. So when I talk to people, I ask them the question of how many people water car the next question I then asked them and said, how many people here have got a decent watch?
Now, if I'm a road salesman, it's remarkable in the car trade. A lot of people their first proper check, they've always wanted a lovely watch. Yes, which is great. I admittedly, I don't wear a watch, but that's for various reasons. I've never really watched being a watch person. But that's their passion. They've always wanted to have really expensive watches, which I think is wonderful. I don't think they are amazing. But if I say to them, can you describe the experience of buying that watch? And every single one will go slightly dewy-eyed and they will describe even if they research on the internet or whatever. And then I walk, I rang them up. I spoke to someone the other day, you know, they told me it wasn't available.
They let me know when it was available and they went into the shop and they come out with it on a special tray. And there's just amazing sense that this 3000 pound thing has the value on it. Whereas the problem with the 50,000 pound car is first, no one in the car trade wants to spend 50,000 pounds of their money on it. If it's a second-hand car, it's probably out of the money. It says losing them. So they hate the car anyway. And they've completely forgotten that actually for some people, this is the most important thing. So it's like pulling teeth. I mean, some car dealers, it takes three hours to go through the paperwork to buy the bloody thing.
And one of my closest friends is he wants said to me, he's really bright, able fellow, he said, um, Harry, you need to forget, you never forget, there's one thing rich people and poor people having common. And that's time. So when someone's buying a car, especially an expensive car, they're generally from a high net worth environment, they hate having their time wasted. It's so valuable to them. Even poor people, they don't like having their time wasted. So the reality is, even if the cars are 1000 pounds or a 50,000 pounds, whoever's buying that level of car, it's really important for them. And it's really expensive within the budget of their personal finance. So why wouldn't you want to treat them like an absolute rockstar and make them feel really special?
Yeah. Is it salespeople? Did selling cars get too easy after COVID? We had a limited way of cars. We had more customers than cars. Has that made the sales process, the treating people nicely, the rock stars? Let's be honest, salespeople didn't have to do that turn the different way. Have they forgotten how to do it properly? I think part of those couple of things I think have come in here. People have become very process driven. It's absolutely you have to have some form of process to tie people around. And I'm sure when you're training you, you teach people various processes, but people haven't been either taught or understood or explained, you need to put your personality around a sales process.
So you follow things and make sure systems and processes are kept up to date. But at the same time, you can provide the fairy dust, the fun as a human being. That's why AA won't happen, although you can argue it's going to come at some stage. But human beings are the ones that put the fun into it. And I have an argument that says that a brand new car is a commodity, and an older car gets the less of a commodity it becomes. So a 10 year old 75,000 mile fiesta is different from the next one that's got 65,000. Has it been smoked in blah blah blah? Brand new Mercedes, you know, what we can do.
It's a sausage machine. So the only way you earn your margin, well, there's there's only two ways you earn your mark. Your people are going to earn your margin. One is using the piece of marketing is place. So it's not the product can't differentiate on the commodity product promotion. You don't do the manufacturer does. So you've either got price. Well, if it's agency, you can't do on price. If it's non agency, you can do it on price, which is what why dealers buy packed deals and do all that sort of stuff. Or you've got place as in where is it you physically deal. So if I'm right next door to my Mercedes, I might ring someone over all my Audi, I'll probably buy it from my Audi regardless of what happens to me.
And then the final piece is people. And people is the people is the differentiator. And the most successful dealers I know who do two and a half percent return on sales, they're obsessed with their customers. So they employ people who love human beings and want to be nice to human beings. They then employ people who because you might your great salesperson is because you actually fundamentally want to be nice and help someone and give them a good time. Yeah, I was very fortunate going through some Ritz Carlton training in the States a few years ago. And the guy said in Manhattan, there's probably seven hotels at their level. He said, when you get set level, he said, money can't buy good service.
They all have the best accidents to carpets. They all have the best beds that money can buy. The latest tech with TVs in the room, they all have the views over Central Park or wherever it is there. It's the unexpected wells people, not the expected one thing that a lot of Gen Z get wrong. And even above Gen Z. And this goes back to manners. They don't understand that you can't call people mate. And it's one of my absolute bugbears. If someone call, if you have a customer and they call you mate, they can call you mate to the cows come home, you cannot call the other person mate. They are not your mate. You are there to serve them.
You would never expect, so you either call them sir. You might, I mean, if you're old-fashioned, you might say, do you mind if I call you by your Christian name? You just about get away with calling people by their Christian name nowadays. Or however, that you cannot call people mate or use the slang that they're using to you that they get back to them. And I think if salespeople knew that and have grating it sounds, it's one thing I would really, really suggest that they need to kill from their behavior. Again, I'm going to be 52 tomorrow. And I'm buying a course at the moment for myself and our sales director to go on, which is at least probably high end at just short of 8000.
That's big money for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And the young salesmen, I don't know when Gen Z and millennials and I get confused with all that. But it is, thanks mate, what about this day's mate? Can we put you on that one mate? And it is very, very matey. He's a nice guy, but it does great with me a little bit. Yeah. But he's never been told not to do it. But would it great for someone his own age, though? I think they wouldn't notice he wasn't doing it, but it might still great for some of them. I can see I can maybe because my old fashioned, I bought out my children, I can find my children finding a bit odd if you started calling them mate when you've just met them.
Yeah, yeah, because they mean, you know, and actually ask yourself people, what would you expect if I started calling it? You walked into a shop and you know, you walk into shop you've never met and they start calling you mate. And ask them, do they really feel comfortable with mate? Yeah. It's one of my absolute buggers and I genuinely think, if I'm going to spend 100,000 pounds, 50,000 pounds with you, I really don't you mate me? Yes. pun intended. Yes. Talk about pun intended. Are you going to run us through your snog window? Okay, I'll run you through my style. This is this is one that I in this political correct world, I generally don't, I used to do about four or three or four years ago, but I do worry a little bit.
But anyway, the concept of the snog windows is fairly. Those of a certain age of me like me, I'm somewhat old, you know, I'm 58. Back in the day when, when before I was married to my lovely wife, I, not that I was a great breeder, but you know, when you would meet people, there was always a window where you knew if you met someone you fancied, there was always a window when you knew you would get you might get to snog them. Yeah. But what's really interesting about the snog window and go back to your your youth if you haven't got it, but when you were having fun in your youth, for those of you a bit older like me, there's always a time when suddenly the drawbridge comes down and you know there's that that sort of spark that you can get to between you is never nothing's ever going to happen.
That's it. And it absolutely the shutters come down. And the reason I use that because whenever I talk to salespeople, they always get it. They kind of laugh and think I'm a bit idiotic and old fashioned a bit eccentric about it, but they get the sense of a so that's a snog window. And it might go on for years, it might not, you know, you always have a spark with people. But when it stops, you really know it stopped. And the problem with the car trade is that because the car trade doesn't buy its own vehicles, especially sales managers are normally in their 40s and 40s upwards, they're not used to doing it. They think the snog window is much longer than it actually is.
And the point is go back to 85% or 80% of all sales or car sales are done before they even meet you. And then you then apply the fact that they know when they walk in, they know what they've got, they know what they want. Basically your snog windows that infinite testably small. So why the hell when I ring in and say, is your is your courses available, do you not ring me back? Do you not want to snog me? So we know we know from our data when we look at analysis of sales calls, you know, on average, 75% of all auto trader calls will convert into a sale within 48 hours of the initial phone call.
That's all we've got 48 hours. But even quicker than that. So why, why, you know, that essential window of getting back to someone be it a form fill or phone call, you just got to be on it. And so the modern sales manager, I believe, should be much better at moving leads around. So where I think sales process breaks down within a dealership is someone's really busy. They might have a couple handovers today. They pick up the phone, all the trader call comes in and says, hi, it's Simon. Hi, Simon. Yes, you're interested in that car. Yes, tell you it's available. One moment. Yes, right. Okay. Can I have your number? Maybe, maybe not. Bye.
And off they go because they've got their handover. What they should be doing and saying, I haven't got time to deal with this handover. Right. Go back to sales manager. Look, can you do that? And then they go. Because the karma God will get them and lead from someone else. But they're really bad at holding on to their leads, but not looking off their leads. That makes sense. Yeah, no, it does. It does. And I'll go to say there's lots of systems out there where rapid response and call drip and some of these systems that make it so much easier for salespeople to respond to the customer very quickly. My concern sometimes we've got to get there quickly.
But also we've got to get there in the right way. First, Dean, Elente, make haste slowly. There you go. My family motto. Sorry, because that's, I told you I was posh. I have a family motto. Yes. Let's Dean, Elente, make haste slowly, which basically think about your actions. And if you cannot get back to someone, go back to manners in the speed that you think it's required, we'll pass it to your neighbor. There's a famous London club full of posh people where every single male member of staff is called George and every single female member of staff is called Georgina. That's because they can never remember anyone's names. And salespeople think that you're really, really memorable on especially on the first phone call.
They haven't got a clue. I'll ring into a dealership. I'll talk to someone and I'll then I'll ring back and I said, it's about an awfully charming person. Don't know their name, but they told me XYZ. So that first lead, it's really important that they're given that wonderful experience. But if you haven't got time to deal with it, pass it to someone who's got a drought because the karma god will get you back on the other side. But it can be properly looked after and managed and cuddled and looked after. And please read your response before you send it to someone. I mean, I know I say that all the time because part of what we do is we'll deal with one of our training programs, customers first contact and we'll ask salespeople to go on a mystery shops, some of your competitors and let's see what they're doing.
And the responses, if anyone's done this, I'm sure lots of people listen to this has mystery shop their own team there. And not only is the grammar, the spelling and all of that, we know it was an issue there. But more importantly, just read. I mean, there's there's one particular company, I won't name it, but I know exactly the wording beforehand. And that every customer gets almost the same cut and paste response there. That is an excellent choice. And I'm happy to tell you more about it. So many times, the car, the fiesta is not in there because it's not there. And I'm just please read what you say before you can say. I will confess those who know me and get emails from me is one of my absolute weaknesses.
I'm a very bad speller. I mean, I 100% believe in dog. And then that's my problem. And I do feel for people who can't spell, but you're absolutely right. And use those use those tools that can have you the right spelling. But it's it's about responding right incorrectly. I mean, my favorite one was when I bought our VW estate and we got a four-wheel drive VW estate. And I ended up buying it from Sinclair Group. Because the first person we spoke to was JCP JCT 600. And this guy sent us a video. And the video was of him describing the car. Because he hadn't turned it round. So now you can see he walked all the way around the car, let's hit the video, except for send it straight off.
And he hadn't realized it was on the wrong way round. And then he never rang me again thereafter. He'd done the video. Never rang me. I'm running out of Sinclair Group who happened to be a customer, but that's by the by. And actually, he never sent me a video. But he said, Yep, bum bum. He then ran me back to confirm a couple things I needed to do. My wife and I were down to Wales the next day we bought it. I love it. Bless him. He's done the whole video of himself there. Yeah, because he hadn't seen it with he had punched the round and he never watched it back. It was hilarious. That is a classic example.
Yeah, what or how do you watch the back and realize too late? And that's why he never called you again. Maybe, maybe. Anyway, but then we, you know, they were one of only two because it's quite a rare car because it's four by four, four by four people sat at a state. There were only two in the country. And I got a Sinclair got it. In fact, Sinclair was more expensive, which come back to another point is that people car dealers get really, really frightened by price and people don't buy, they don't buy on price. They buy on how they've been treated. But actually, Harry, in the internet world, okay, 160 websites people go to.
We got the car there to the world. And again, car where? Okay, we love car where they're a sponsor of this podcast. But is it not just a race to the bottom? Do we need to have all the sales process? Is it not just the number? Get the lowest number there and people will buy? No, no, Simon, no, you're good. Absolutely. It's not a race to bottom. And this is right. I'm going to be very boring. I have the car where I auto-traded the bait with you right now. It is not a race to the bottom. And I'll tell you why it's not a race to the bottom. Prices is not what people buy on.
Okay, if you do all the research, people is about number seven or number eight in a car in a car buyers experience. So, they'll look at the headline price or whatever. Give you think about product, place, etc. If you are the local dealer, you've come back to someone quickly and you are within a number, you will get the deal anyway. If you think, oh, if I put the cheapest price in, I'm going to get the deal, that is not the difference. You won't be differentiating. And that's not how people use car. The best dealers I know who use car. Go back to Rockstar. Think about Rockstar management. They use it as a way of capturing someone who's in market and then cuddling them in an amazing way.
So, they're not buying on price. They're not focusing on the price. Now, if they're using the price of them as a cutter, they're using price because they want to think it's the cheapest. That is not what's bringing people in. It's about how you've been responded to, how you're understanding what your customer doing. And secondly, and this is a really important one, and I'm not sure people have worked this one out, is in sales, especially in car sales, you see it happening. There's a very famous thing where you defer to what's called deferring to a higher authority. Do you know about deferring to a higher authority? Is that if someone else is doing it? I'll do it.
No. So, what someone you come in and say, hi, Harry. I want a thousand pounds off the car. I'm really sorry, Harry. I need to go and talk to my sales manager because I don't have authority. However, where people go really wrong with car, wow, is when someone comes with a walk-in, with a printed it off, and they say, hi, Simon. I know I can get that a BMW 3 series down the road for a thousand pounds cheaper. Will you match it? What you do is you say, one moment, we have a specialist car, car, wow, person, and their job is to make sure that we have the right prices. And then you pass them across to someone who says, yes, we check the market blah, blah.
I'm really interested to see you've got a thousand pounds, but you're currently in this dealership. How have you made sure it's got the following things? You then start to wrong say this, but you start to make there in your dealership, but yet they've got someone else's quote. You know you've got them, but because you've deferred to the car, we're expert. You say, look, we do use car, as you know, we don't use car, but we make sure that we are absolutely on point on the brand, etc. And we can do the following things. And here we go. But if you really think you want to get a thousand pounds off, I can wish you the best of luck.
Listen, that's half-tongued in Shek asking questions like that, Carwell, because speaking to Jay Dean, speaking of the people at Carwell and selling for it, we know it's not just the most devoted location. It's one of the things. Yeah, then, you know, it's location people and price. You know, three, five piece of marketing, place, price product. People don't buy on price. Products the same. It's place and people, place and people, place and people promotion. You know, promotion, Carwell, I did the promotion. That's how they got there in the first place. Place and people. So, you know, you can absolutely do it. And the people is, what does it? The lunacy is that I understand it. The reason it gets, I think Carwell gets a reputation for being a race to the bottom is if you are a big dealer group, and you've got a massive bonus on those sales and you've got five more to go three days at the end of the month, you will knock it out at 10,000 pounds cheaper because you need to unlock your 100,000 pound donuts.
So, if you sell five and you lose 50, but you've got 50 on the other side. So, it's this dealer group behavior through their own bloody stupidity, rather than Carwell as a platform chases people to the bottom. Well, I'm going to say something else. Speaking to Carwell, the head office in London, they're in a manufacturer. I won't mention who they are, but they're direct to the consumer. They don't have the others. And so, they are the ultimate fixed price. It's not even agency, it's fixed price. But they're still selling a very big percentage of their cars through Carwell. And that's not a price comparison side. That's because it's an information custom of the getting. And that's what they're doing.
And then that's because Carwell will provide a valuable audience that people know they want. And at the end of the day, the reason Carwell does really well, I believe, and the reason all trade does really well, love them will load them. They provide an audience. And that's why you spend marketing spend because they provide an audience. If they did not provide an audience, regardless of what you might winch about the price. And it's the same thing with Australia, dare I say it, you might say they're not a competitor, Carwell, but all trades the same thing. Unless you can prove that you've looked after every single auto trader lead really, really well, don't winch to be about how expensive it is.
And Carwell is the same. It's not a race to the bottom. It's 100%. Are you managing the leads in the way that they should be managed? And are you a content that you're converting them properly? Then you can start winching about whether you think it and you'll find that both most of them, they do a really shit job at running the leads. Sorry, I've got a sort of. That's fine on this podcast. Sorry, don't worry about that. That's what I'm at. So, so no, I genuinely don't believe Carwell is a race to the bottom. I think it's a smart model. And I think it provides the leads. And I see the data from the phone calls and how they perform.
So I think that's a very lazy approach to how you're managing a sophisticated lead management of a form of leads. 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 symco training.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, who linked in. Thank you.
