This is the final part of our discussion with Steve Curran the CEO of Total Selling Solutions, looking at top sales people and the key attributes of top performing teams.
Steve explains that communication is essential when selling, starting from the customer’s initial contact and beyond. The key is to use open questions and once rapport has been established invite the customer to the dealership.
One of his top tips is to focus on accountability across your team, in order to drive success.
Here are the highlights:
{01:05} Females are the best communicators
{07:55} Digital Enquiries
{12.50} Buying Cars Sight Unseen
{15:08} Spend time with the service customer at drop off
{22.16} Commend, Commend & Recommend
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 inspiring 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. Now, some of you probably already know me as Skipping. I would start by saying thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. So, listen, as a trainer, you've trained lots of people. You do core recording. You've listened to the good, the great. What do you reckon is the character traits that separates the really top performers from someone who's just average? Just tick along. Is there anything that stands out? Some conversation people, females do this very naturally. They do it the best out there. They are the best communicators. We find the guys really need a lot of training. I'm a guy, a lot of be pretty hopeless. I can only focus on one thing at a time. Females just have that. The De-communication, I read somewhere that males speak about 7 or 8,000 words a day and females speak about 22,000. We all know that we can go home to our partners, if your partners' females, I suppose. You'll run the app for the day and they won't have a chat as well. Then after they have a chat, they'll talk to the mum or whatever on the phone. I think that's the Allen P stuff. I think we heard the same stuff. I'm not a model R&D that's from good old Allen. Because they communicate so well, they listen very well. I think what we can do is we're very task driven. We're trying to tick the box on your name ears. Great. What are you looking to buy? Awesome. Have a driven one. Thank you. Are you trading? Great. Would repayments be helpful? All right. When do you want to come in? There's transaction. Let's be crappy. Just trying to deflect that first question if people are after the best price or have you got one of these in stock? I think it's where it all starts and the intro. Just that intro. Thanks for calling ABC Motors. This is Steve. I guess we'll say, yeah, hi, Steve. I'm after a whatever vehicle. It's one of your pricing and how soon I can get one. Yeah, great. I'm happy to help you with that. So drop those defenses straight away. Because all we do is salespeople is when someone hits us for the best price, we get defensive. Right? So yeah, I'm happy to help you with that Simon. By the way, how much do you know about the car? Because there's four different levels and depending on what you want, depends on availability and pricing and that kind of stuff. And then they go, look, I've got some pricing. Think a bit deeper. Yeah, great. How did you go there? Did they look after? Did you test right one? What was the experience like? And I gave the example about tradeings and things like that. But if you want to have a general rule of thumb, open it into questions, slow the call down and invite every guest to come in to the dealership. We've fallen, I'll give you some quick stats, right? I mentioned before we measure calls. So in terms of sales, talking about trading, only 55% of salespeople. This is on a survey we did with 22,000 calls we assessed, right? 55% of salespeople talk about the trading. How many people do you think of trading the car in or have a trade? Well we know 89% in the UK market, but it's high, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And these are made up fluffy facts. These are definitely based evidence data where we've listened to a phone call and scored a scorecard for that. Asking, you know, what suburb are you calling from? It's about 60%. A lot of salespeople still say, are you local? Yeah. And people go, yeah, like what does that mean? Right, it could be 20 miles away or 100. Who knows? Things like confirming phone number. So I can see your phone number on my headset is, you know, ends in 707. Is that the best number to contact you back on? That's only about 70%. And the challenge of that is when you're doing follow-up, if you haven't confirmed or asked for the guest phone number, the only thing of the first minute, how does this do get my phone number? And if you're talking to a lady, I think this guy's a creep, right? Didn't ask my phone number, he was rearing me. Yep. And if you look at the gold number when you're talking to someone on the phone who you haven't spoken to before, considering the phone calls only, sales calls only go for 3.5 minutes. And we know that because we pay per minute to a tell. Right? Go for 3.5 minutes, we've been doing this for over 10 years and it's always 3.5 minutes. So if you don't have a game plan and you don't have a set of questions in front of you that you can sort of just tick off, not a word track, not a script, just tick off in your own language that you've asked that, you're probably not going to ask a lot of good qualifying questions. And we all know that when we ask for commitment, which is on the phone, you're going to be asking the guests, can they come in maybe this morning or this afternoon, as soon as you're still asking for commitment, you're going to get an objection most of the time. All right? So if you haven't qualified very well, you're not going to have any great information to lever off. So an example would be Simon, because you're coming today tomorrow, you're going to say, yes, Steve, look, I might do that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to check on a few things and I'll get back to you. Really, I'll use you, probably not to get back to me. So I need to have a comeback. So I might come back to that. It would be Simon, look, you only leave 3 minutes from us and you've got a trade in, which I've mentioned before, but something definitely my use card manager would like to own. And you mentioned you're going to be looking at some dollars per week. So you've got to start your buying journey somewhere, where you're just down the road and you're set to drive past it. So if you come in and see me, I'll give you my personal guarantee that I'll maximize your time and I'll give you all the information you need. And then you can see how that all sits with you. So how does that sound? Can we set something up for maybe today? You need to have that answers to those qualifying questions or else you've got nothing to lever on. So I'm saying nothing that none of your listeners don't know. It always goes, yeah, yeah, I used to do that. I used to do this. But we forget, we take shortcuts because we get very good. But the game's about the change. Yeah, it is. And again, as we said before, salespeople haven't had to do it in COVID times. It's getting back into doing that. Hello, let me get you a view. We all know that the customer's buying journey starts online now. What's it, 90 now and 42 minutes of research? That's the last figure I've seen. I think it could be a lot more than that there. So how is that changing? Because what I mean by that is more and more of the journey starts digitally. You know, the email comes in query and it's not just email either. So I'm sort of digital contact saying, hey, can you tell me, is the car available? If so, what's your best price? And all too often, the phone number is either not there or it's 012345678. OK. Yeah, that's the one. So how do we go from that digital inquiry to phone? What's your views on how do you use video to get that there, to earn the right there? Do you just say, hey, if you want the best price, call me. We know that doesn't work. What advice do you have for someone who gets those inquiries, that digital inquiry? I look at the facts, OK, and the facts will help you keep your process. So the number one fact is the guests want to be contacted in the same medium that they made an inquiry on. So if they email you, they want you to email them back. And it's a bit like, you know, when you first meet someone in a relationship, you've got to start off small and work to the bigger stuff, right? So if someone asks you a question, they say, look, this is what I want to buy, can you give me availability and tell me what your price is? Well, number one, everyone knows stocks a little bit hard to get. So you might have a little bit of a preamble around that. And pricing, well, it's no secret how much vehicles are. It's all over the internet. So maybe I'd start off with that. Now, most sales people won't even email someone back. So you think, oh, that's not revolutionary. But I'll solve cars, not because I've been a superstar, it's because they haven't got any of the right stuff that I like. And the same things happen in digital age. So depending on what I know, you're available in your price. Why don't you just give it to them? Why make that the world's biggest secret? If you don't give someone a price, how are they ever going to buy from them? OK? So that's number one. Second thing I want to remind everyone of is that more than 90% of people or more, this is from Cox-Won-Motive data in Australia, 90% of people or more still visit a showroom to purchase a motor vehicle. So 90% of people or more still visit a showroom to purchase a motor car. All right? So logically, I don't know how expensive cars are in the UK, but in Australia, I'd never jumped right up. So this meeting, though, whatever, $40,000 to $200,000 in Australian dollars to buy a car. Is it any reason that we're going to see it smell or touch it, drive it? Right? So people want to come into the showroom. So I get an email lead, I'm courteous, I'm trying to build some trust and respect, and I might have some niceties on there. I tell you what, I've nice thing I said the other day, I've got an email for salesperson, and then the plot of the study saying salesperson, I think I said, like Yogi, Interfitness, and my dog. Well, something like that. The Yogi part was right because I thought, well, that's pretty, that's a bit left field. But they're trying to personalise what they do. So people do do 20 hours or more research on the internet. They will rank five to six different dealerships. Who's got a deal? And who's got stock and so on? So I think if anyone's out there when they get that email lead, just answer it. That's the first thing. If you don't answer it, you've got no hope. All right. And quickly, time is so important and personalised it. Oh, they're at their computer now. So just answer it, nice and directed back. As you may know, stock is a little bit limited. We do have cancellations and we do have our order bank does change from time to time. So I can't give you a definitive, but it is round about three months for those sort of cars. The list price for that vehicle is $46,900. At the moment, there are some increases on the horizon. Please let me know how I can help you a bit more. Question mark. Yeah. You know, always, that's the thing. Always finish up the question mark. If you just answer everything, full stop and send it. There's nothing, right? Well, there's what's that same curiosity to kill the cat, right? Get them curious. And then I'll email back and then start the dance. Yeah. Yeah. And that's what you want. You want a dialogue, don't you? Not a monologue. Just not one email. Let's get and earn the right. We always say earn the right to go from digital to phone. Earn the right to go from phone to appointment physical. Earn the right each time is what we need to do. And what's quite interesting, one of the conferences, the last National Automotive Dealers Association, they're talking about the Google reviews and the complaints from some of the big car banners in the States, the car maxes where they're pushing this digital retailing where people just go through when they do it all themselves. And Steve, what I learned from that is I talk about the people who are complaining, the one star reviews and all of that. And they're always saying, Bob never got back to me. This lady didn't do this. They didn't. And I think, well, hold on. People are still part of that process. It's not this magic button where people are going on like Amazon and they're ordering a car, there will be a percentage of the population will do that. We know that. It's going to happen. But 90% of people, as you just said, they're the stats from Cox Automotive, Australia, still want to come and touch, feel and drive the car. People are always going to be part of that process. Yeah, people want to deal with people. And here's a tester, right? Let's give it the, can I say bullshit on this? Yeah, of course you can. You can put it up to this, right? Give it a bullshit test. So I don't think to yourself, it wasn't the last time you jumped online and booked something for 40 grand. Mm-hmm. And didn't try it out. Yeah. You know, you'll buy a, while I was going to Dyson vacuum cleaner, she's at Dyson vacuum cleaner's for like 20 years. And I've been sex with South New Ladies, right? She won't let me vacuum. Go do a crap job. And that didn't go. She pug a punted from being the vacuum guy, right? I would order a brand new Dyson on the internet, Side Unseen. Because I know what it is, right? It's a thousand dollar product, a strained dollar product. You know, you might buy a coffee machine or something like that, where you went to a French place, had a coffee, it's a great coffee machine. It's blah, blah, it's a D'longy. And it's got the griner, it's model, you know, SC007 or whatever. And you go, yeah, I'm going to buy that, right? That's all cool. But buying cars, Side Unseen, you know, it's, it, it, it doesn't suit you. Those are started with most people in the States ofRE, in the States, say, plump it, plump it. In the States. Here's a stat for you, right? And they said, this is going to take the market by storm, right? Get your portal set up and sell on your websites, all your widgets and so on. Ten years later, 2022, the online booking for services is still 27%. Right? So people will go on and serve out, look, for availability, SUSAC, your pricing, right? Because I don't want to pay too much, that's still inherent in us in our DNA. But then I pick up the phone and they go, hey, I've got to see you on a booking here for Thursday, you know, 1pm and $499. I just want to ask you about that, you know, if I wanted this extra couple of bits done, you know, what do you think that would cost? And then what they also focused on, here is another thing, is spending time with the guests when they drop their vehicle off. That's South West Ford dealership. They focus on spending seven minutes with every guest when they drop the vehicle off in the morning. They're spending that seven minutes of time and, you know, walking them out, showing me your car, great, we just have a quick walk around, they acknowledge what's very good on the car and then maybe things that might need doing in 12 months and they might highlight a couple of things that sort of might be doing today, right? So what they found was their upsells went up dramatically. The service advisors were gun-shined to make that follow-up upsell call because they had a bit more, more for guests. And I know with me, I didn't space my appointments out very well when I was an advisor. We were taking inbound bookings on the counter and I was in that smart, the space for my appointments out, right? Everyone comes at once. Everyone comes at once, right? It's great, you know, you're up at 7.30 in the morning and there's eight people at the counter waiting for you. What a great day, right? How silly was I? And so spending that time with the guests at seven minutes, it stops people migrating to another dealership down the road and they gave cases of all the different dealers and all the competitors that they have where people can go to. So again, that spending time with people and it's getting back to you that question about online or online bookings, people still want to talk to people. Okay, so you just focus on the person that's in front of you, spend time with them. You've only got to sell one car a day, if you work 20 days a month, that's 20 sales a month, think about those rules of fun. You know, people want to buy, 90% of people want to buy in a dealership and here's one other last thing, right? On that, right? The stats are now, people only physically visit 1.4 dealerships and why wouldn't they? They've been on the internet for 20 hours, they've run five or six other salespeople. When they come in, they don't have your book in after them or not. So working on that guest experience, trying to keep people in your dealership when they're looking to buy a car is the smart thing to do because if people walk out, they still in fact only get a 1.4. How many people are going to come back? Right? So if you're a manager out there, putting that time and effort into training your staff, if you don't have a training budget, you need to have a time training budget instead of a financial training budget. Anyway, it's going to cost you. I believe get a contractor in, they're an expert, that's all they do, right? If you're doing a lot of other things as a manager, but if you don't have a training budget, if your dealer principal doesn't want to spend the extra coin, which I think is crazy, when you think of how much money goes into generating leads, not between 20 or 30,000 pounds a month, this is how much goes into training, a thousand, right? It doesn't take a genius to work out that figure as skewed, sometimes it's zero on training. But if you're training your staff as a manager, you're investing in them and the culture improves, the guest experience improves, the time at the dealership improves, so your grossers will come up, your closing ratios will go up. If your lead's to start to drop a little bit, all you can do is don't spend any more money generating leads, improve your closing ratio, even a couple of percentage points, we'll get you back up to your quota. These are things we all know, right? Yeah. Listen, I want to go back in time slightly on that one. You write about when the service advisor, when they drop the car off, spending seven minutes with the people, building a rapport, they're not gun shy, when they pick up the phone, there's something else I want to just flag up there that really quite sums up the importance of offering things to people. We've got lots of these kiosks over here, where people drop the car off themselves, and they don't use to reach people. If you booked an airline flight recently, you check your bags in yourself now, you do it yourself. You go to McDonald's, they've got the big iPhone where you order the meal yourself. But one thing, those systems there, I hated them to start with, I didn't like them. Let me speak to Betty, let me go and speak to someone. But one thing I would tell you those systems is the sale of the value added products afterwards. It's gone through the roof, because machines asking people, do you want the one liter top up oil pack? Do you want a full valet detail on the car once here today? Would you like the rates that have done this time? Would you like that? And the machine is getting a higher hit rate than what the service advice is. Now, I'm not advocating, you need to buy one of those machines, if you want to. Great. Okay. But what that tells me is, if a machine's offering these things, and they're getting a hit rate, how much better can it be when our service advice offers? So I think we just don't offer it all the time. I was reading some service advice material a couple of months back, and I've got it in my computer, so I kept the document. And I was saying that if you build a good rapport with the guests from dropping the vehicle off, the guest is 60% likely to take the service advisors' recommendations. And there's a whole document about around facts and what you should do, whatever. And that really stuck in my head, and I thought, that's so true. But I think a lot of advisors, making those calls, because you're so busy, I think making the call number one, if you're out there, if you're an advisor, you know what I'm talking about, you might tell me to make every outbound call, but I know you don't, because I didn't, right? And I'm not being special. But making the calls number one step, if you have a bit of good rapport with your guests, you're more likely to make the call. So think about that when they drop their key off. Where's your car, Mrs. Smith? Hey, I just never, let me have a quick look just to make sure it's right and the service, anything they've talked, go any way, right? Go any way. So when you call them, you feel like you've learned the right. Okay. And then ask them. So this is what, this is what's really great about your car. This is what's going to need, need doing in the next 12 to 18 months. And they're thinking, oh, yeah, that's good. But this is something I really recommend you get done right now. You should get the white blades done on your car. It's really a safety item. And we all know something we all put off. Right. And then what does something else? And then we're likely going, yeah, okay, well, how much is that? Okay, go ahead. Put it on, put it on. But we record a lot of advice as calls. And it will start off like, hey, yeah, it's John here at the dealership. We're having a little bit of your car and it's a couple of things it's going to need doing. You know, your wiper blades are a bit worn. We notice they're chatty on the windscreen or we notice the lollipop in your strut and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, your car is all right. What are you saying? You're bagging that car. So good stuff. Just like we do when you're training, we commend and we commend and then we recommend. Advisors out there. If you take that, remember that, command, command, then recommend this. I recommend you do right now. Providing you've earned the right spend seven minutes with me at the start. I know you'll get the upsell and you've probably got a bonus on those upsell. So hopefully that's a tip for an advisor out there. Yeah, another tip for advisors as well. If we always say that, if I say something that needs to be done, of course, you're just trying to sell it. We use the credibility of our tech. We get our techs to go through a process called SWOP. It's just a simple acronym, SWOP. Hey, this is what Dave, the technician, seen on your car. This is why it's occurred. This is the outcome. If you don't get it fixed, and this is what Dave recommends. And we always love to give credibility. It's a day to technician when he serves the car. He carried out a complimentary vehicle health check. Listen, as we thought, most areas are green and they're good to go. There's a couple of AMMA items, which I'll talk about when you pick the car up. There's one area that Dave recommended, really needs immediate attention. And that's different to tires. You only got 0.4 of a millimeter until they're illegal. And actually you're toppling your breaker. But we love to give the credibility of Dave. Dave's the expert. He's the technician. And but again, build the rapport early on. So they're not gun shy when they make that call. I love it how you said that. Because if a machine, I'll go back to it. If a machine's getting an upsell, how much better can be when the service device has done that? And use the credibility and technique of Dave, the technicians. Just it works. And so what do you views on the whole EV market? And again, this podcast, most people listen to this is in Europe. We've got a bigger relationship now in Australia, happening all the time in America and Canada. EVs, over here 2030, we have to go down the EV. That's what the government's saying at the moment with electric vehicles. We don't know if we're going to make it. Will that be pushed back? What's the view on electric vehicles? And how's that changing the Australian market? Yeah, I would say anything that's sort of political, I suppose, or, you know, on green and that sort of thing. But how someone who's retired today, who bought a car a year ago, upgrade their car in five years time. So you think about all the people that are retired and so on. If we go, okay, no EV vehicle, how do all those people have an electric car? When they've always only bought second-hand cars. And there's no electric cars out in the second hand, right? Or, you know, affordable. So I think that's a big problem. Number one, the US market, 7.1% of cars in the US are EV, sold EV. They're going to market of 7.5 million cars. That mark, that percentage is deceptive. 20% of that 7.1% is sold in California. Okay, so I have a lot of rewards around it. Look at states like Missouri, Texas and so on. It's like 0.7, 1.2%, super low, right? So the take-up isn't all that great. The internal combustion engine isn't the problem. It's all the crap that comes out the exhaust. That's the problem. Come on, Oxide, right? It's the ozone layer and so on. That's a fact, right? And we don't want that to happen. So I think for me, you know, the best alternative is to work on a conversion, to make that internal combustion motor not put out in pollutants, like hydrogen or something like that. And I think that's a better fit. Back in the day, they brought out LPGGAS as an alternative. And I remember the government saying, well, you can convert your cars when it costs two grand. We'll give you $1,500 to convert your car. And that was a solution. And I worked in a service station in my yard with that, right? And that was a solution for all the oldies that wanted to convert their car and get a better cheaper fuel, you know, instead of paying that, you know, to be able to pay one through the fuel price. So a bit of a long answer there for EVV, it was, I don't know if it's a total solution. I can jump in my car and go from Sydney to Newcastle, which is three hours, do three dealership visits by three hours back, and not have to think about how long I charge my car. And I'll do that in one day. My trainers are on the road. And then, you know, their first job might be 70 kilometres away from their home. And they might have multiple jobs, duvetate, might do two or three different dealership visits. And having them worry about, you know, the charging and all that, I know these are sort of, you might, people out of the car, this cross, so naive, right? He's a dinosaur, right? But that's reality, right? And it's evident on the way of the takeout. I think the difference is people listen to this in the European market and the UK wear a lot smaller than Australia. We've grown up in Australia, hey, listen, go on from where I live down to Brisbane. You're not going to do that in the EVV. It's 12 hours. It's a 12 hour drive up. You know, people don't know. Don't think about it. I went away the other weekend to see my wife's uncle. It was his 80th birthday. The drive was sitting in the Maribre, right? Going out west country. It was 6.5 hours there. Yeah. 6.5 hours. I know there's ways around it and all that sort of thing. That's my personal opinion. But it turns into one of the biggest markets in the world, the US market. Still 87%. Bye. Yeah. Yeah. We have in, there's a key business. I was with James Walkman and I, we went there two of there in London now. Last year, 64% of the vehicles were EVV. But the difference is legislation, London, where you are, infrastructure. Now, the infrastructure over here is still nowhere near where it needs to be. A big one for me is, that's the way we're pushing there. Public charging stations over there. And charging points are still nowhere near the infrastructure that needs to be. But it's a lot more than what I see in the Australian market at the moment. A lot more. I was at a domestic down a day and we were talking about EVV. It comes up all the time. And they said, yeah, 2030 target with EVV. We need to be installing 350 charging stations a day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Do you matter to battle with proper coverage? I mean, no, that's probably not going to happen. And what about a week? It was a day or a week. I can't remember. It was a large number of gone. Whoa. OK. That's a big old number. That is a big number. So listen, let me ask you then, if you bought your own dealership today, OK, so you decide that total selling solutions, you're going to sell that on, let your son run it, you're going to go and buy your own dealership. What would you do in the next 90 days, the first two years of buying that dealer? What would you focus on? And the reason why I asked that question, because if a dealer is sitting there listening to this, you're in dealerships day in day out. You see the good, the bad, the ugly. You see the trends happening. Someone who owns their own dealership might just be in one. So that's why I want to ask you, what would you focus on if you bought your own dealership with your own money? Focusing on the sales area would be the lead management. I think there's a lot of leaky jut there in terms of leads that are coming into the business. If we're managing a leads and we're getting all those leads to go into the funnel, we're knowing how many opportunities we're getting, right? That's selling 101, right? You need to know that. Second thing is I keep my teams accountable for every lead that they take. And that's not just did you take a lead? Great. Did you log it? Great. Okay. I know that's there. That's only part of it. But how well are they engaging the guests when they're actually calling the dealership? Or when they come into the dealership, are they burning through people? You know, or are they taking the time and are they valuing every lead? And it was said to me before, like every leak costs around 250 to 300 Australian dollars to generate. And I've said it to people before. I said, if you had to pay me 250 dollars to pick up that phone, would you have done a better job? They go, oh, yeah. So, yeah, imagine that five titties going on the table. I can't want to answer that call. How engaged is that person going to be? So you need to be measuring what the outcome is on the call. So are we greeting? Or are we just saying, use cars? No. Are we answering the phone? Because a lot of time, and I'll give you another start on this in a second, that we've got a measurement called unavailable consultant. That means a guest calls the dealership, speaks to reception, wants to talk to a consultant. Guests, the receptionist tries to find a consultant and can't find a consultant, for whatever reason. And then the receptionist takes the message and the guest has to be called back later. Sometimes that can be around about 20% in the dealership. During COVID, it was around at 40% because we dwindled our showrooms down and we had all those challenges. But still today, it's nothing to see 20%. We'll look at 100 leads and 20 were unavailable consultant. So making sure the phone's being picked up, right? Another basic, but we missed the basics, kind of looking for the silver bullet. And then making sure we're qualifying worlds, who are asking, is the vehicle for themselves have actually seen or driven one before? How much do they know about the product they're calling about? Will this vehicle be replacing another vehicle, the suburb that they're calling from? Have they dealt with the dealership before? Did we saw the benefits about buying from ABC Motors? Did we invite the guests to come in? Or if they were a couple of hours away, did we ask them if we can do a face-to-one around the vehicle to show them we really do have that car in stock? I'd say measurement would be the next thing like on my staff before me. And then making sure that my managers are connected after the call. So does the call sheet go to my manager? Does my manager have a look at the outcome? If we don't get an appointment, is that process type? Are we following up that guest together? So a lot of managers out there will give their salespeople some information to go back and call the guests on because I missed the appointment first time around. The reality is if they missed the customer the first time around, probably going to happen again. So my rule would be that if we missed the appointment first time around, we'd set up a follow-up time with the guest. So I'm a dream, I want to go talk to my manager. I said, I can make that happen. But when we do the follow-up, we call from the sales manager's office in front of the sales manager. Because we know if the salesperson goes back to a desk, they're going to change a bit of the information that the manager talks about. So sharing a load with the salesperson, so the salesperson makes that follow-up call and tells the guest straight away, hey, Mr. Customer, I'm with my manager. He's named Simon. He's asked me to give you a call back and offer you some information about the demo strata, some great opportunities financially for those demos, which you can see the one of those. And the guest might say, look, I just want to buy a new one. I just want to know what my trade's worth. It's worth driving half, you know, come and see it. The salesperson's going to say, look, I put Simon on the phone. He may be able to help you a bit more than me because I'm only a salesperson. Here he is, it's a Simon. So as a manager, you jump on the phone. Now, I don't know how often does that happen out there? 5% of the time, how often does it happen if a dealership? Probably 90% of the time when as I walk in, why is it so different? You know, why not try and turn that three and a half going to call into a one-hour opportunity, face to face opportunity? And time and time again, it's no different over there in the UK than Australia. A manager will talk to a customer at the dealership in a double close or a manager turnover. The manager will close the sale, customer signs up and says, I didn't think I was buying a car today here. Okay, great. They will call for it in a salesperson says, Simon, I asked exactly what you said. The guest said no to me, but said yes to you. I don't get it. And you said, don't worry about it, Steve. It's just good. It's just because I'm the manager. It's the second person. Right. They're so sorry, they're fundamental need for comparison. I've got it. Yeah. It is. And a salesperson reiterated this to me the other day. This is where it's good when you talk to the guys that actually do all the selling. They said, what happens when my manager talks to the customer, is they can let themselves out of any little lie that they've told me on the initial phone call. So, yeah, Red Hot Tip there, again, don't spend any more money. Just do the little things that they cost you any more money and you will make more money. Right. So, that's right. Start. Yeah, great little nuggets, great little tips there as well. Listen, thank you very much for this really appreciate. How do people get hold of you? What's the easiest way for them to find you, Steve? LinkedIn would probably be your LinkedIn or on Spotify, but LinkedIn, you can reach out to me. Go and find Steve current. Look for Steve Curran. See you, double R-A-N on LinkedIn. I imagine go and Google total selling solutions as well and even get hold of you. Yeah. We also run a podcast on Spotify called Keep It Real by Total Selling Solutions. We pump it out every week just like you do. So, I'm in and we try and keep it real. Keep it real. Keep it real. Is that is fluffing around? You know, in the in the motor industry where we're we're we're just like the good straight information. I had a good friend of mine used to say and he was in the industry for a long time and just a phenomenal forward thinker. He'd say, look, I'd like to talk about the stuff that you know, where the rubber meets the road. Right. The real, the real thing, right. So, everyone could tell you how to do it. You know, and there's some ways you've got to do it some, but when you really hit the spot when you can have people take some information away and they go, I really liked how that guy said that. I'm going to start focusing on my people and have better conversations. Right. So, yeah, that's what we like to do. Keep it real. Right. Keep it real. Thank you very much. That really appreciate it. So, Simon, yeah, I want to thank you for having me on here and all the listeners out there that sort of subscribe to your podcast. Hopefully we can all catch up one day in the flesh. It sounds good. Well, we'll definitely do it again in another NAGA. And I'm coming out this year as well. So, be sitting on, see if I can get there under Sydney and catch up for a beer. It'd be great. That'd be great. Okay. Thanks, Simon. That just leaves me to say that all details of this episode and other episodes on the selling in the motor trade can be found on our website simcotraining.co.uk. Go there to get a copy of our book, Words That Sell Cars. Go there to sign up to a free trial of our sales fitness online sales training program. Easiest way to get hold of me is Simon Bowkett, food linked in. Thank you.
