In this episode, I’m joined by Neil Carrahar to talk about the bit most dealerships get wrong: motivation and mindset.
Neil shares a real story from a sales training program, where a new starter put his hand up on day one and asked, “How do I get into the 200 Club?”
That one question told Neil everything he needed to know. We break down what that kind of hunger looks like in the real world, and the simple behaviours Neil told him to focus on if he wanted 200 sold and delivered.
We also get into leadership. Not the fluffy “culture” chat. The practical stuff like how a proper one-to-one works, what you look for before you go anywhere near performance, and what you do when someone’s not performing and everyone’s tempted to write them off as “lazy”.
Neil explains how you find the real cause, what to check first, and how to coach it before it becomes a resignation.
If you manage salespeople, train new starters, or you’re trying to build a team that actually hits targets without burning out, this one’s worth your time.
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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. Hi, welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. Today we're going to talk all things leadership and I'm joined by Neil Karah. Neil is the operations director for Symco Training and we thought we'd just kick around some ideas about leadership today. So welcome aboard, Neil. Thanks, Sam. Good to see you again. Well, let's dive straight into this and let's talk about leadership foundations and I'll get from your views there. What actually separates high-performance dealerships from average ones? They have the same products, the same pricing. They're broadly the same. What separates the difference between the good and the great, I suppose? Okay. Well, like you see, when it's the same franchise, it's the same dealer group, it's the same financial packages, it's the same talent offers. In theory, everything should be the same and it's a long-or-playing field, but then people come into it. And as we talked about in a previous podcast, I'm hugely passionate about leadership, leadership quality and mindset. And literally everything about business, if it's performing or if it is not performing, it's all about people. There's either a leadership problem or there is a team problem or even worse, it might be a both problem, but all challenges that every business has every summer performing comes back to the people that are in the business every day, or, Lord forbid, the people that own it. And the difference that stands between those performances is what we do with the hours and minutes and time that we do with all of our team members and customers, while the business is open, even in some cases, outside of opening hours when we look at failing and online reservations and process. If the processes are there and they're being followed, the performance should follow, if the processes are implemented but not unnecessarily there, we need to start finding out why that would be the case. In some cases, I've been an underperforming business before where the leadership team thought that they followed the process and then we started to do a little bit of digging and fault finding to try and get the bottom water causing the problems. Actually, there's some uncomfortable truths that start to come out and that's why I've said in the past podcast time, whenever I arrive on site to do development work, training, a caution with a site or a team, they say that I'm not there to become bad ever cause them to be exposed, it's actually to add value and work together with them to find the problems. And it's always about leadership, it's always about people and process and how they're led. Okay, let's get an early on that leadership there. So in your experience, what do most sales leaders think leadership is and where are they wrong on where they think it is? I'll give you my personal and experience of this as a young sales manager. I thought great leadership was being the number one in the division for volume on new cars, used cars, more ability. And whilst that is important to be a high performer, being number one shouldn't be at the expense of your customer satisfaction, your relationship with your other departments like the workshop after sales, body shop, and particularly in your relationship with your team. And as a young sales manager, I look back at myself and think, oh, I wanted to be was number one. And I was so determined to be number one, I neglected those areas. And it's with hindsight and wisdom, you look back and reflect and you realize and you think, ah, the bit that I didn't have right was my leadership skills. I thought leadership was being number one as a performer. It was not. The other side is if you're a general manager, listen to the podcast or a divisional or a group person, start asking the team around you what the difference between a leader and a manager is. Most people on this podcast listening, I'm sure will know, but you'll be surprised at some of the answers that you get. And sometimes the two are very badly confused. What is the difference between a leader and a manager then? So if we think about a leader, a leader is someone that will do what we said in a past podcast, you know, show me, watch this, I'll show you how it's done. I'll coach you when you have a try at doing it yourself. So show me, let me coach me and a manager. And there's nothing wrong with a manager role. But what we've got to think about is edge tasks and we manage performance and we manage, manage, manage. We spill in the micromanagement and we spill into negative behavior, demotivational behavior and leaders are the polar opposite of that. We want people to feel empowered. We want people in our team to feel that there is a huge element of trust that can come and talk to us. When you manage and over manage, as I've been guilty myself of doing it in a past life, people become distant from you because they think, well, I'm not going to go and tell him I made this mistake. He's going to go mad about this and mad about that. Leadership is about having that open relationship of trust with your team, all of your team above alongside and below if you think about hierarchy. And that element of trust needs to be respected and nurtured. So therefore, you have a team of leaders. Anyone in their team should be able to come to them and say, Simon, I've got a problem at home. Simon, I'm not performing and I don't know why can you help. Simon, this has happened. Can I confide in you? Great leader is a listener and a person that creates that safe space of trust so that their team feel that they can open up about problems and therefore you can start to understand challenges and difficulties from within the workspace and outside of the workspace, all in one place and have that much bigger field of trust with your team. But can I ask you, how much of a dealerships performance in your view is driven by the processes versus the mindset and where the most teams invest or maybe under invest? I think a lot of dealerships invest a lot in process and rightly so, process is vitally important but it's ultra important that the delivery and implementation of the process has a human factor. Otherwise, customers suffer from a wooden customer experience, very scripted and unnatural. Sales people feel unsafe and unfamiliar in that delivery and sales will suffer as a result. If salespeople and customers are having fun and it's a good place to do business, we're going to do a lot more business. If it's wooden and scripted and false and forced, it's never going to perform the same. So therefore, if we think about process vitally important, it covers customer experience, it covers compliance and how the two are aligned. But in addition to that, we've got to think where leadership comes into it, the human factor arrives. Simon, I know that when you did your training two months ago, you were taught to do it this way but put your personality around it. Open up, relax, we want to see the real Simon command in front of our customers. A leader would give that feedback, wear appropriate. A leader would support and coach a salesperson who is underperforming. A manager would fill in a box taking monthly one to one and say, target of 10, achieved 6, 4 short, need to sell more cars. Yeah, how? Where is the leadership there? Simon, I see that you did six deals, your target was 10. Firstly, I'd like to congratulate you on fantastic FMAMO six deals and five out of those six customers wrote in with a five-star review about your brilliant service and how great you were to deal with. That's fantastic. Let's think about how we can work together to help you get to the 10 next month. What do you think were your highlights? What do you think you could have been better and get that person open up about the things that they should celebrate, even though it was a six out against the 10 unit performance? Let's talk about all the great things that that underperforming salesperson did achieve and let's get them feeling good about it and then address the shortfall in performance. What do you think the shortfall in performance was caused by? Could I have done anything more to help you? All these things are where leadership goes above and beyond managing the process and managing the performance and becomes the human factor, the support, the empathy, the understanding and the trust. That's basically where the wooden process comes to life and it becomes a trusting environment and a team-spirited environment. Clearly, there needs to be accountability. This job is all about we need to get the result there. We know we need accountability, but how do you personally define accountability without creating a fear-based culture? Today's DNA-aj-7, there's no space for fear-based leadership anymore. I think it's very outdated. That said, you're right, there needs to be accountability and there's no reason why accountability can't fit with all the things we discussed earlier in this podcast when we talk about creating a safe space, trust, relationship, empathy. All that can coexist with accountability and expectation where a lot of leaders, managers for short here, there is a lack of explicitness in the expectation. If I'm doing a one-to-one review with you and you've done six units against a target of 10, the first thing I need to ask myself, was I clear with Simon that I expected a minimum of 10 units? Did I stop at half time part with through the month and say, actually Simon, we're not looking like we're tracking towards a target achievement here? What support do you need from me? If I haven't done those two things, firstly as a leader, I've failed. But accountability to combat your point, we need to be explicitly clear with the team member, what we expect from them. We need to be explicitly clear with them that we want to support them in any way that they need. We need to understand if there is any blockers or things that are preventing them from achieving that task or that target. We need to make sure that we listen intently to what those may be to make sure that we understand them and we work together to genuinely remove them, overcome them. It all sounds very idealistic, but it all starts with dialogue and clarity. That is vitally important if we are to expect accountability later. I could never come to you, Simon, and challenge you for anything less than 10 units. If I wasn't explicitly clear, that 10 is the minimum. I wasn't supportive of you throughout the measured time period when we need those units. What role does the personal responsibility play in sales performance? That's got to be at sales person that has to have some sort of accountability or personal responsibility. Is that often missed in the motor trade? I think it is missed painfully a lot of the time. Where it comes from is when you have a large team, let's say 10 salespeople, and you have a large delta in performance, you've got two or three big hitters that constantly get your year 20, 25 units a month. You've got 200 people in the teens, and then you have these one or two that are constantly below 10. The moment that you continue to accept a subpar performance, 10 units are less against a target, that's their 20, or a target of 15, say, as soon as you start accepting a subpar performance month in month out, whether you like it or not, whether it's intentional or not, the rest of your team see you accepting a subpar performance and they lower their own standards, sometimes without even realizing it. More guys that are doing your year 15 to 20 a month look across the room and see somebody getting away with sixes and sevens consistently without being challenged, without accountability, and it tells the rest of the team the accountability that's there is not real, or it doesn't hold any integrity. The accountability is not going to come to them when they are all of a sudden doing 12s and 13s, yet they were doing 15, 16, 17, 18s previously. So by accepting the lower performance, without realizing it, you condone it with the rest of the team. So what you accept, you condone. So it's vitally important to be explicitly clear with the team what the objective is, that everybody's measured equally, and that we absolutely celebrate success with those high performers and celebrate it lavishly in front of everybody. We congratulate everybody that made it to target and got better, and that we privately discuss and support those team members who didn't make it to target, but were explicitly clear on what the target was and what the expectation was. We've got every right to accountability when we have those two things aligned. How do I spot when that team member is slipping into that, a comfort zone mode, rather than that high performance mode, other than just the result at the end of the month, because that's clearly too late. What do you look for for someone who's slipping into comfort zone? Well, there's those give away signs. There's those give away signs we talked about in a past podcast sign, and you and I, we talked about turning up versus showing up. Showing up is coming to work to the dealership within tent to perform. Turning up presenteeism, isn't it? And you start to see the traits of presenteeism or turning up. When you start to see things like test drive rates falling down, customer complaints, you start to see things like they're not involving the business manager or sales manager for second-facing, they just seem to be drifting. And there's all these little telltale signs, and it's really easy to spot when you know what to look for. And if you intercept it in a friendly, supportive arm around the person type way, that's certainly what I would have always done. Understand what could be causing the change of behavior or performance. More often than not, you'll find there's a reason or a story behind it. It may be problems at home, problems with family or relatives, or it may be that their own performance is causing them to become stressed and become withdrawn. And that's critically where we talked earlier on in this podcast about trust and about empathy and about explicitness and clarity and dialogue. And having that, not because we want to do it to take a box or you heard on a podcast on a single podcast once one time, but to culturally create that and build that within your business, you're far more likely to get that person to open up. Actually Simon, we heads off, I missed target last month, I'm really stressed about it. I don't know what it is I'm doing wrong. I really need you help. I don't want to be failing again this month. You know, having someone that's brave enough to share those fears and concerns, that is a gift and an opportunity to all bundle together in one because culturally it's a safe space for sharing that feeling like that. Additionally, you may be that you do a little bit of digging. You find out that your team members got, like I said earlier, problems at home, problems with family could be that someone's sick or there could be relationship problems. The fact that they're willing to open up and share that with you and you might go up and tell you what, understand your situation, take the pressure off, we'll support you, but we need you to be brilliant at the basics. Even if someone's got problems at home, there's never ever a problem with asking somebody to still be brilliant at the basics. That's what they turn up for. They're turning up, not showing up. It's really important that we've got that culture of does the team member feel safe? Will they open up? Are we challenging the underperformance early enough? Are we seeing it early enough? Have we snoozed it and waited until the match has finished? Okay, well, can I ask you more in depth? You know I'm going to get into the nithy gritty. I love that. What mindset shifts has the biggest impact on a salesperson's results, but rarely coached properly in your view? It's being clear with a salesperson of any ability or experience to always let them see what they're going to achieve. I remember spending time with a sales trainer a long time ago in my early career. He asked the room, what's your life goal, Neil? I didn't have one. I was just in my early 20s. You must have a life goal. I thought I haven't actually. He said, have a think about that. And then in the morning, I want everybody in the room to tell us who didn't have one that day. Tell us what, what does 15 years look like, five years look like, 10 years look like. And I thought about it and I shared with him some of the things that I like to achieve in life. And around the room, there was 20 people in the room or so, and there was nice cars, particular cars, house, house in a certain city or a certain country, holiday homes, lifestyle things, all sorts of typical things you'd expect. And he went, right, great. And he came over to me and he went, how are you going to do it? It was Alan McNutt of the Be And Only Academy. I said, Alan, I don't know. He went, right, tonight I want everybody to think about how might you achieve it? What would you actually have to do to achieve that, to achieve those things that you want? And because I was going to say, were they life goals or were they just things that people wanted? Everybody wanted different things. There was life goals, there was family goals, there was children, there was possessions. There was all sorts of things. It just sounded like a list of possessions to start with, which is a real life goals. Yeah. Yeah. But there was all sorts of things that came out from around the room. I'm work possession based things at the time. I was in the early 20s. But what he said to everyone, how are you going to do it? Yeah, OK. I hadn't thought of that. And I'm like, OK, I need to think about that next. How would I actually achieve that? I'm going to have to grow my career. I'm going to have to earn this amount of money. I'm going to have to reduce that amount of debt and various other things. And it got me thinking later in life about success and achievement and mindset. And I'm not sure if he'd never had that conversation with me. I don't know where my life might have went. But I definitely think he had a huge effect on me talking to me that day about what is your goals? What are your dreams? What are your aspirations? Great. How are you going to achieve it? And it's exactly the same in a sales environment of any kind, particularly in the motor trade. Right. Your target this month is 10, 12, 15, whatever the unit number might be. Great. How are you going to do it? And quite often the not salespeople don't have the answer. They just say, well, I'm going to do 12. Yep. Brilliant. How many customers might you need to speak to? How? And it goes back to that one to one that I mentioned earlier in the podcast where bad manager leaves one document, target 10, achieved six, short full of four, need to sell more cars. Great. Yeah. How? How are you going to do that? Yeah. And more often than not, does the salesperson have the required knowledge in their role? Do they understand the current range? Do they understand the tactical campaign and offers? Do they get a manager involved every time? Are they confident with customers? Are they motivated? Basic checklists and stuff. But if you sit with a salesperson who needs to achieve 10 next month, who only achieved six this month, how are you going to do it? Put the challenge back to them. I don't know. I'm just going to have to. Yep. How are you going to get to that number? You know, start by sharing conversion rates. Are your current conversion rate off? You need to speak to X amount of customers if you still convert at the same rate. And then chuck some coaching things out there. Simon, how might you convert more customers? I don't know. Let's give it a bit of thought. What might you be able to do? I could get the business manager involved more. You could. Yeah. That is a problem. Yeah. Let's make that an action then. Let's get Gary, your business manager involved earlier. You know, if he's busy doing something and you're going to accept him and say, can you come and meet Simon? He's interested in all of a sudden you've broke the ice and you've, you've all of a sudden got the best closer in the business. Hopefully. Involve your customer earlier. That's an action. So instead of saying, need to sell more cars, first action is involved. Gary, the business manager as early as possible and the salesperson understands the why. What else could you do? What else could you do? And keep asking, what else could you do until they've run out of answers? And only when they run out of answers, start making suggestions. Because someone that's been given the opportunity to give you what they want to do to perform until you've exhausted all those opportunities, only then should you be permitted to give your ideas because you've already got them to commit to the things that they're more slightly engaged with upfront. Yeah, like that. Yeah, like that. So how do you raise the standards without burning people out or loosing them? So many times I see people that good people, we need to raise their standards. Okay. But we do either. They just throw in the towel. They leave. Or we burn these people out. Yeah. So it's a really interesting question. And we talked about burnout in that question. Burnout usually becomes a problem when communication didn't occur first. The person leaves because they got burned out. When I've come across that in a past life and I've said, what happened to Peter? Why is he left? He was burned out, couldn't cope anymore. Let's have a look at these last three preazels then. And you see the go, oh, yeah, we didn't do them. So either you didn't do them or you did do them. You look at it and go, sword six, target 10, need to sell more cars. Very often there's the how wasn't there. And I challenge back that manager and say, look, you're a great manager. We all know that. We know your site performs, but we've lost a good sales person there. That's had a bad few months and left because he felt burned out. But looking at them last three appraisals, do you genuinely feel that you support them? Usually the answers are no. And it's like, right, let's think about who in the team around us now that we still have might not be performing. We haven't addressed that yet. Who is it? It's Diane, right? When was the last one with Diane? Well, I haven't done one yet this month. When was the most recent one? Let's have a look at it. Let's make sure it's supportive and it's got challenges, but it's got actions and supporting actions. And what's the leader looking for in that one-to-one meeting with Diane? So Diane's struggling there. What are we looking for to help a leadership compared to a manager? First thing I want to know as a leader is how Diane's feeling, how she feels it's went, what does she thinks being going well? And then we'll tackle the challenging bits at the end because I want to know how she is because I genuinely care. I want to understand how she's feeling because I genuinely care. I want to understand what she thinks has gone well. It might be that Diane thinks everything's going fantastic and there's no problem at all that performance. If we discover that, we can tailor our approach to the challenging part, which comes later accordingly. Actually, Diane, I want to throw in devil's advocate. What if Diane is no problems at home? She's just lazy. Yeah, could be that. If she is lazy, what do we do to get her to that high performance then? What can we do? Well, the first thing I want to understand if Diane has no problems at home, she's happy in her job. She thinks she's performing and she shares a few good things about what she thinks is going well. But then we bring the performance conversation to it. Firstly, I as a leader should have been explicitly clear that the expectation was X in the past. So have our failed it and I'd admit that if I have, if I have been clear and it just turns out that Diane is happy and things are going well at home and until this point's not really being conscious of a performance problem. We need to start to think about what's causing the lack of performance. We can look at basic sales performance figures such as inquiry level, prospecting level, test drive rate, offer rate, conversion work. She's not putting enough in the top of the funnel. She's not speaking as simple as that. It's not speaking enough people. So what do we do? Because we know she's not doing that. She's not getting the activity and some of the results there. I'll come back to it. She's lazy. Is there a point where a leader has to give her a kick up the bomb? I think there's a point where we definitely have to have a conversation about performance and expectation without question, absolutely without question. But the expectation should have been set far earlier anyway. But to answer your question a little bit deeper, what I want to understand is if we get the impression that Diane is a little bit lazy, I want to understand it. Does Diane understand the product range? Does she understand the current tactical? Does she understand the sales process that she's been trained? The answer to any of them three is not a resounding yes. Then we've got some support work and training and development work to do with her. Because we owe that to her to make sure that she knows. If it's not that and we know that she's very knowledgeable in those areas, I'd like to quietly observe her from a distance on the phone and in the showroom and see what her confidence looks like with customers. It might be that she's had a few bad customers recently and she's took a bloat of her confidence without even knowing. But as a leader, did we spot that? It's down to us as a leadership team to discover that and spot it early enough to be able to check. If it turns out that she's knowledgeable and she has all the confidence in the world, what happens to come from a very wealthy family or have a very wealthy spouse or have certain standards at home where she doesn't need the financial motivation, we need to understand what motivates her. Because it sounds like it's not money if the latter example was true. We've got a knowledgeable, confident person that's not performing. What actually does motivate dialogue? Does she want promoted? Does she want a better country car? Does she want a better seat in the showroom? Does she want something else that I've not even thought of in them examples? Don't know until we have dialogue and that's where a powerful one to one creates the trust in the relationship so that we can create that high performing expectation and a high performing mindset? Yeah, I always challenge the thought when people say, ah, Diane's lazy. Because I think the hours we work in the motor trade, natural lazy people don't sign up for the motor trade because they don't work seven days a week doing what we're doing there. There's definitely something else. I always challenge that thought, that's why I want to play devil's advocate on, are they being lazy there? And you're right, there is something else there. And I always love to show Diane what actually good looks like and start with why. I know that's a cliche, so I'm in a sense, start with why. But hey, Diane, if you were achieving that level, that billy is, what difference would that extra amount Eastmont make to your life? Diane, what difference would that make to your children? Start with the why and show Diane what's achievable. And then I always think when people get a taste of that success, they don't want to go back. When we show Diane that this is possible, they don't want to go back. And I love the other set that you mentioned there as well. Get into actually the sheep believe that she's as good as salesperson as your top salesperson. You know, I think leadership starts with getting into their belief because wise man once said, whatever the subclench one can conceive and then believe the conscious mind can then go on and achieve. I believe that was Walt Disney. He did the right. He drew a male self statement. Yeah. But what is the outcome? And too often it's not that Diane's lazy. She just doesn't believe. She's as good as salesperson as the top dog. And we need to show her the belief that she can do exactly what I like. That's where leadership for me really starts getting that belief between her ears that she can do it. Yes. Hey, listen, if she's naturally lazy, listen, we need to work that. So often that perceive laziness comes from the lack of belief. Yes. Yeah. All motivation. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Well, motivation comes from belief too, doesn't it? It does the two intrinsically linked, aren't they? Absolutely. Tim, it brings me back to an example. I met a sales trainee back in 2013. We were doing a sales trainee intake. The delivery I did that with was doing two a year at the time. And the dealer who used to have something called the 200 Club. And then the 200 Club, what would happen is anyone that sold and delivered 200 units into the calendar year, the previous year, the managing director of the group, his wife, the operations team would take anybody and a plus one on a four-day trip, departing on a Thursday night, returning on a Monday night, collecting from your door, dropped off back at your door. It would be abroad as well, me orca, tenorife, a B-3, that kind of thing. And it was called the 200 Club. And you had to get 200 units sold and delivered in that period of time to qualify for the 200 Club. And I remember we were doing the induction day of these sales trainees. And this young sales trainee called Jack, put his hand up, and he said, Neil, Neil, before you get two in depth, how do I get in the 200 Club? I went, well, we've got a 14-week program that's going to make sure you get in the 200 Club Jack. He says, yeah, but there must be some hints and tips. And I smiled at him because I knew I just thought the fact that he's asked that on day one in front of everybody, he's already got the motivation that nobody else in the room could even approach to becoming close to. And it's really easy, Jack. I said, forget all the training for the next 14 weeks. Speak to more customers than anybody else. Involve the manager as early as possible. Listen to your customer, understand their needs, and never tell any fibs. And always ask for the business. And he went, right, right. Okay, and he scribbled it down. And that was 2013. That was great advice there. Yeah. His first full year was 2014. And the very, very last 200 Club prize was in spring of 2015, and he was there. He did it. But it was mindset. He's asking for day one, what do I have to do to get in that club? And that was motivation. He just wanted to get the knowledge and the confidence. He already had the confidence to be fair. He was just a sponge for knowledge. He had that internal motivation, didn't he? I love you, like, I love you said, to get the training next 14 weeks. Focus on these things. Like that. Focus on that. The things are absolutely going to make the difference. Yeah. I'm sure you don't mean forget the training. That was going to happen anyway, but it's focusing on that. 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 Sal's Fitness Online Sal's Training Program. Easiest way to get hold of me is Simon Bowkett, food linked in. Thank you.
