Inside Mercedes-Benz Brooklands. Test tracks, heritage floors, AMG experiences and all. Chris Cormier breaks down the leadership techniques he uses to keep a prestigious site performing. From apprentice technician to head of sales, Chris shares the non-negotiables (effort, accountability, humility), why “what you tolerate, you condone,” and how to create a culture where performance feedback is safe, specific and data-led.
We dig into hiring for attributes over CVs, the difference between motivation and discipline, and the story of building a whole sales team from industry newcomers, what worked, what didn’t, and how they tuned the model as the market shifted. If you lead a sales floor (in autos or anywhere), this is a masterclass in fair, calm leadership that still delivers.
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 and welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. Today I'm joined by Chris Cormier. Chris is the head of sales of Mercedes-Benz Brooklyn. And I'm so keen to talk to him about Mercedes-Benz Brooklyn because it's such an iconic sight.
And I want to know lots about how he manages it and his leadership style. Chris, welcome aboard. Hey, how are you going to Skippy? Yeah, I'm very good thinking, very good. So, listen, for those unfamiliar with your journey, can you go back to the beginning and tell us a little bit about how did you get started in the motor trade and what steps led you to be the role of head of sales at Mercedes-Benz Brooklyn? Well, it all started in South Wales where I grew up actually. And my stepdad was a lorry driver and he basically got me a position dream work, work experience at a local Mercedes-Benz commercial vehicle depot. And it was from that that then that led to me having the apprenticeship with them on our left school, did the apprenticeship with them left?
On the tools, were you on the tools? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I was in lorries and vans and I was there when they launched the first Starg diagnostic machine. Yeah, it was good time. It was a really good time actually. But didn't get paid so well back then, but it was a good time to be learning when mechanics were still probably mechanics less computers involved. Yeah. But I was just starting to see the birth of that. And then I moved from South Wales to Bromley with some friends and I've never been back really. That's the point. So got a job as a service advisor with Mercedes-Benz and Christian Palace. If that was for a couple of years and then diverged into sales with Audi, where I stayed for 12 years without is a brand of various sites.
A short stint with Land Rover is as a GSM for them. And then into the world of training development where I worked with a few good agencies on some really exciting global projects, global training from the sales vendors, a really good JNR project for their SBO specialist. And then of course COVID came and killed that classroom environment. Overnight, yes. I opened the open slide. And what was a really busy diary went to nothing really very quickly. And that's, well, you know, what it's like being self-employed. I was in the bracket of people that got no help from the government. So we'll be supporting family support. We did a bit of work through that period. I did some bits with Portrait Retail Group, which was really welcome.
And some bits moving in the savings train from the classroom to online in their Adobe system. And then I put myself up for sale on LinkedIn, actually. I put myself up for sale like a car. And it garnered quite a lot of attention. And one of my old colleagues, a guy called Martin Walsh got in touch with me and just said, look, what we up to? We've got a job as a GSM back at BMW and Ruxley. And the rest was history. COVID ended and I came back into the fold. Wow. Okay. So back into the fold, there's a lot of premium brands there. You've got Audi, JLR, the BMW now Mercedes. How those various experiences across the different brands, has that influenced the way that you leave a sales team today?
It's all prestige there, really, isn't it? Yeah, Joe, I think that working for different brands gives you the status and you learn probably pieces of information that you wouldn't ordinarily get to learn if you weren't working for them directly, you know, quality information. So when you value in a car, maybe a certain land Rover or a certain Audi or a product that I've worked with before, maybe I know or remember something that's relevant for pointing. But also working in that development area, that gave me a different perspective, actually, of how the brands operate and the various stakeholders and their requirements. So yeah, I think it's given me a slightly wider appreciation. Okay. Now listen, this podcast goes out to people in Australia, America, Ireland, where people listen here won't understand the iconic nature, sorry, I should say, of Brooklyn's.
Firstly, can you kind of explain a little bit about Brooklyn's Mercedes-Benz, Mercedes-Benz World on site and also does that create any extra pressure for you and your sales team in that environment? I'd say yes. So it's a... Have you described this site? It's got so much heritage. Well, once you've beaten your way through the A3 traffic and you get to sort of get the approach to the business, the first thing you're welcomed by is a very long straight road called Brooklyn's Drive, which leads down to the building. It looks like you're in Germany because it's a massive building. There's a spinning star on the roof and either side of you are test tracks and skid areas and off-road areas.
So it's a fairly impressive place to arrive at. It was opened in 2006, I think, from memory as a brand experience centre. And then there are three floors. We've got history, heritage cars here, Formula One sections, a whole simulator zone. We've got two cafes, driving experiences on road and off-road. You know, everybody that buys an AMG gets a free day here, driving equipment, cold, one of our road drivers. It's a phenomenal place to come and work. And my first experience with really was when I was doing training, I used to come here once a week on a Tuesday and have 24 new Mercedes-Benz employees who would spend the morning with me learning about the brand and its history and heritage.
And then they'd go and drive in the afternoon before a final recap. And that was their sort of welcome to Mercedes-Benz, if you'd like. Yeah, okay. So, listen, pressing brands are definitely where you are. How do you keep your team's standards consistently high? In that environment there, people expecting the standards to be the crimto or the crim, aren't they? How do you keep your team's standards consistently high? Yeah, it's here is a really challenging place because they're just driving down the drive. Definitely creates an expectation that you wouldn't get driving into an ordinary retailer. Yeah. And of course, it's known as Mercedes-Benz World, so it sort of feels like the expectations are really high. For me, it's the same everywhere.
I like to be really clear about what expectations are. I like to model the behaviors. So, you know, I'm a great believer that there's an on stage and an off stage of the automotive industry. And they're asked to be a kind of safe area where people can talk freely and let the hair down and boast of steam off. But when you walk through the door and you're in there, the environment where customers are, everybody's got to be polished, everybody's got to be on show. And show time. Just having like no tolerance for not adapting those behaviors as well. So, I'm a great believer of what you tolerate, you can go. So, if you're willing to let things slip by, then you're accepting it by nature.
And so, it's about having my view of that premium behavior guide, if you like, really ingrained into the management that I've got beneath me or alongside me. And so, everybody's out there monitoring it all the time. It's out there making sure that everybody's doing what they should be doing. And what I always find is once you get a team to be self-feeding, so when you hear a salesperson give another salesperson some feedback about something like this, once it becomes self-feeding that, that's the moment of where it really starts to have a launch in the direction that you want. I love that approach. Listen, you said what you tolerate, you condone. Okay, so what are your non-negotiables in your sales culture then?
I don't know if it's going to be a universally accepted answer, to be honest, but because I've got some time in training and development, I take it really seriously, especially the team we've got wherever I have it working at any given moment. All I think I can ask for the team is to be put effort in. They've got to be fun having to go and try. They've got to be accountable for the things that they do in the result of the generate, and they've got to have some humility about them because it's a tough place to work. And I really mean when I say everything else is my responsibility. So skills, processes, toolkits, how-tos. If somebody has given effort is accountable and has a bit of humility about them, and they're still failing, it's probably my fault not theirs, or my management team's fault.
So those are the three real non-negotiables for me. Okay, so is there anyone who influenced your leadership style in the motor trade, or outside, but you've been in the motor trade all your life, but it could be someone from coach or something like that. Anyone stand out in your mind, Chris? I don't want this to sound like a, like an Oscar acceptance speech. There are five. There are five really stand out people for me that I've mentioned. First one is a Jack called Toby Burton. So Toby Burton is currently the head of business Hailshan BMW, and I worked in Wales at Cordiality. Toby gave me lots of opportunity, and I think I learned from Toby the ability to be optimistic in the face of change to a bit of belief that things were possible, and he really accelerated my career from being a sales user, through to a sales manager.
I'd mentioned Ryan O'Sullivan, who was my last head of business at BMW. Ryan had a real, I don't know, a method of being calm and collected in all circumstances, irrelevant as how bad the news might be, he just really remained very, very level. Martin Walsh, who was the head of sales with the BMW division, and still is to be fair, he's a real mentor personally and professionally, a really good character, and Martin, if anyone's ever worked in, he's an incredible guy. He can handle pretty much any situation very, very, very well, and he's did a law degree a few years ago, so he really understands the fairness of the world. He understands how to get people from when this is a complaint or a problem, and he does it brilliantly.
Which then is my current CEO, he's a really good aspirational leader, who I look up to, and I respect that I really enjoy working for. He allows me a lot of free space to do what I think is right or necessary, but what I've learned from which actually is how you make people fully accountable in the best possible way. That transfer of responsibility when you realise it is really all on you. And I don't forget, he said to me, if it goes well Chris, it'll be on you, but if it goes bad it'll be on you, and both of those would be okay. Just sort of overwhelming sense of responsibility, I suppose. And then finally, I'd say a link called Wayne Harbitt, who was an executive coach who I worked with on the BMW Head of Business program, and Wayne was exceptional actually, and she threw a series of coaching calls, sort of managed to get from me that I've done a lot of reading and personal development in terms of leadership and management and getting the best out people.
And yeah, she said, stop reading Chris, stop taking any more in, and start what you already know about. So you know now, now stop. And the final lesson from her was, she said, how would you describe your attitude? And I said, well I've got to really get at you, I'm pretty positive all the time. And she said, what about when things are hard, do you ever, does that attitude ever weigh? And I was like, well, yeah, of course. We're human? Yeah. And she said, so do you think it'd be a good idea to change your attitude for each individual environment you know you're going to walk into? And that was a big wow moment to me.
I was like, wow, okay, like I could be really conscious and deliberate about, I'm going to walk into this meeting or this session or this environment. And I'm going to before walking go, right, choose your attitude, who are you going to be for these people, what they need to be? I'm interested to get her view on, stop reading, because we're both trainers. And I'm addicted to pick another latest measurement book, and it's a listen to podcasts and whatever. And her, I suppose she's right. Okay, should stop reading and put it into place, because everyone's got a slightly different thing. And did you take her advice or do you still stop reading? I kind of get the point she's taking there.
But it's funny, I didn't really read a lot at all before COVID actually. And I got into some podcasts, some of the guys from the SS who there's wins series. Yeah. Fox particularly in a venture, what tells even sort of talk to adventures and things like quite like that kind of activities and that lifestyle out at work. That's what I get out to. So it really relates to that. And then read their books, and then that led to Mark Manson and sort of art, not, you know, Yeah, giving a, we can say that on this podcast. It's fine. Okay, I'm sure people listen to it knows the the F word. Yeah. And then many more books actually, and they all got a perspective, probably.
And I think what made this point was was actually it probably wasn't to stop reading. It was not putting enough of it into practice. Yeah, exactly. I'll give you that. It is, we all are, aren't we? Too much theory, just put it in place now. Yeah, I love that. So listen, with all these people there, lots of mentors, okay, lots of reading as we said there. If we were to ask your sales team though, to describe your leadership style in just one word, what do you think it would be? Or what would your hope it would be? Well, I hope it would be fair, actually. I'd like that. I'd like it. One of the bits that we did with Wendy, one of the bits where we did was, and it was really powerful, was to reflect on the type of leadership that we had appreciated when we were coming through his managers.
And then once we identified that, it was, how did you become that leader? Because it worked for you. And I would say, of all of those that I've mentioned, fairness is a real key factor. Fence and calm is actually. So I think I'd like myself to say that, the sales team that I was fair and calm. Am I all the time? There's a job to do, and stakeholders to keep pleased, and I feel pretty emotional about getting the job done. I try my best. I do try my best. Yeah. So I want to get into the real nitty-gritty now, if I can. So based on all the books you read, what Wendy said and what you've learned from lots of those mentors over the time, let's say you got a sales team member who's underperforming.
And you've read enough there. Someone's underperforming. What approach would you have? And they're under performing either in, let's say, a technician, or it's a salesperson who's just not making the calls and following up as they should do. How do you approach that conversation? And the reason I ask that is there's going to be lots of people just step into that role, and they're going to have John or David, who's underperforming, and they go, how do they deal with it? What approach would you take? I think the first and most important element of being our talk about performance. Is that you have an environment and a culture where it's okay to talk about performance. So it should be visible every bench to our site of everybody's performance.
I think it should be normal to have a conversation off the cuff if it needs to be about performance. And I would expect and enjoy it if people were doing performing the same sort of actions in my direction. I want to know straight away if I've made something wrong or made myself. So it's about culture environment. I think the first piece. A safe culture, a safe culture that you have to hide that performance. Yeah, because nobody gets it right all the time. And actually everybody's trying to invest if you kind of assume that that's the case. And most people, if they're getting it wrong, they might not even know why themselves. So it's probably not deliberate.
And they probably don't want to be underperforming. So if it's an attack or it feels like a ridicule, you probably won't get much response out of the injuries or that thing. So it's going to be open. We're going to talk about performance regularly. And I'm like the model where our behaviors and actions generate consequences and our consequences then either reinforce or break up our beliefs. And then those beliefs drive our behaviors and actions. So you've got to try and get a behavior in consequence and belief. And you've got to decide where you're going to get on. So it's someone underperforming because they don't know how. Is it because they haven't been trained? Is it because something's going on for them that's holding them back at the minute?
Has something changed? You've got to really be careful about where you interject I think. And then I just say you always face any feedback on really accurate information and data. Giving feedback to real privilege, I think. So you should take great care with it because you can make a great people with what you say. And then it's about and definitely avoiding any sort of character. You know, you can never be about the character. It can only be about what the character is doing. The action can be behaviors because they're adaptable and learnable. That's so true. That Gavin Hyde's a great friend of the show runs a Joe Duffy group in Ireland. He summed up in a different way what you said, always resonates with me.
He said, I like the singer, but we don't like the song. We love the singer. It's just a song we didn't like. And it's just it's not a character assassination. It's not you. It's what you've done. We're not quite happy with that one there. Come on, you're better than that. Okay, I still love the band. Okay, we still love whoever you like. Tell us where to whoever you want to go for. But that later song wasn't my favorite one. You're really good at working with that. It's a really good way of saying what I just said. It is. I love that. Okay. So actually that brings me on to hiring people. So when you're hiring someone, what do you look for when you're hiring someone in sales department just beyond the CV?
You know, it's interesting, isn't it? Especially in sales, actually, because I think most of the people that we interview by default are pretty good at selling themselves. You're so good. Yes. But that's kind of the job. And believing that it's possible to give people skills that would enable them to do a job well once they land is that old things and it's higher for actually not fun skills. But I expand on that. There's a great book that I read in mid-COVID called The Attributes by a guy called Richard Vivin. I don't know that one. Okay. So Richard Vivin was a, he's an American. He was in the Navy Seal basically. And he was after he was in the Navy Seals, he became part of the head of the selection team, if you'd like.
So his job was to build the assessment process. And if you read anything to do with them, it's not about being strong. This is the best shot. The biggest, the toughest, most muscles. It's about mindset. And they talk about the grey man and all that kind of stuff. But what is the grey man? The grey man. So not obvious. Someone that fades into the background. Someone that is really strong mentally, but maybe not so often he's something outside. I've already subscribed to that. Being the last person to speak and being quite like doing that stuff. But what he's got focus on is attributes. And attributes might be, so attributes are in eight, they're in us.
We're born with them. They're all that they're there. And we kind of dial them up and down as we need to get through our lives. And the premise of the book is that skills inform your behavior in a known situation where you know what to do. And attributes inform your behavior when you're in a situation that you're unfamiliar with and you don't know what to do. So it's who you are really in the middle. And attributes would be things like perseverance. You can't learn perseverance, adaptability, discipline, integrity, those kinds of things. And he goes through in the book how they're applied in their museums. But he sort of switches it into how can you write the business world?
Sorry to cut your head. But he's saying discipline, that's something that can't be learned that's innate in you. Or you can work on it. So it's an attribute. So being disciplined, you can become more disciplined if you want to. You can't teach someone discipline personally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he really breaks it down. You know, you've talked about narcissism in the book about that actually narcissism is your desire to be recognized or what you do well. Now clearly too much narcissism doesn't manifest itself well. But we've got a bitterness. And so you know, it's a really I can't I employ to read it. It's a good read. It's an easy read. And so for me, when I'm recruiting, I like to focus on those bits really, but these can't treat train or teach somebody, but will somebody be will they have perseverance?
Will they be up for it when it gets difficult? Can they give you an absolute time when they've worked hard through a challenging moment and stay safe fast? And yeah, that's kind of why I look for. Yeah, I love the idea of discipline because that self discipline, okay, when it is Sunday afternoon, you're on late, everyone you spoke to all weeks turned to stripes, and you go out and be motivated and enthusiastic. We've all seen salespeople walk the other way. Okay. When you got a with your diary system, whatever it is, inquiry max or CDK or dealer web, it comes up there. And it's like making that next call. You've got to be disciplined in this job to do that and take the easy path sometimes.
So discipline and motivation, they often confuse that. Yeah. Yeah. A bit of discipline is what gets you going in the first place, motivation often follows. So I think it's about starting, isn't it? But if you're waiting to be motivated, I always say when we were training, I'd always say if being motivated is quite expensive, isn't it? Like you go and have some money or you go have a reward or something, you're relying on someone else to do it for you. Whereas discipline is a real concern, you're in control of it, you can do it. Yeah. It's when that alarm goes off at six in the morning, do you roll out of bed because I'm going to go and get on the treadmill before I go to work or not?
That's that self-discipline, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. So with this in mind then, how do you personally measure your success as a leader? Is it not just a sales board? What is success for you? I'd really take some pride in developing the people around me. That's a real win for me, is when I see them winning. Is that that trainer consultancy background still coming out? Because that's why we do what we do, right? We love it when people say, I've tried that and it's worked and it's like I'm now running this business. Yeah. I just, I really enjoy seeing that moment when something just clicked with someone or a new skid or a new ability or then someone would get something.
We did a project that the blocks are getting done where we moved away from the traditional sales role and we employed the group people that ate of them actually, but they've never worked in industry before. They did it in one gun, the whole team in one gun. I won't lie, the first 12 months of that was a really, really difficult period of work. Wow. You would have been low experience, low levels of knowledge, high expectation customers and product. But watching those guys grow, watching them develop, watching them click and get the different roles that they were doing was just the most satisfying thing I've ever been a part of actually in my career. It was phenomenal.
Sorry, can I ask you about that? That fascinates me. Where did you recruit these people from? Because I always love the idea of not just having the two year guy that's been two years here, two years there, two years there, selling, selling, selling without any development. I'm thinking, hold on, that's not what we want. And we would always say grow your own. But we're always, often people are growing their own within the sales team that's already there. Does that make sense? So so much they're learning from their other people, not just you, but having eight all in one hit, did you look for graduates? Did you want to make sure they're smart enough? What did you do?
It's the attributes. So we looked for people that were willing to put some effort in, some people that could communicate well, some people that were clearly up for a change, some people that were willing to receive feedback and learn, people that were, yeah, good people, good humans is how I described them. You want to look in the room at the team and go, I can take this on. It's okay. Let's go. And so we started in, I think it was January 2021, from then we've done quite a bit on that. I'm just thinking COVID times only, that's after COVID, of course, yes. And that was the heyday, so we didn't have enough stock. So time was everything, wasn't it?
Yeah. Yeah. The place allowed us to do that. That experiment, it wasn't an experiment, but that project. And it was really hard. We didn't go well at first. It was really challenging. There was a lot of demands, you know, there was not enough stock. The industry was getting going again, I suppose. It was starting to get some traction about itself. And we had these new guys that really didn't know I remember one of the girls on the second day, she said, what's a trade play? Well, I was like, wow, here we go. You wouldn't have even thought that I've never on a training course ever had to teach someone what a trade play, please. But of course, it's not her fault.
How would she know? No, exactly. I had a good team of managers, so we had four retail managers there with myself. Those four guys, you guys must have been running that whole place for 12 months. Well, it was all us for the first three with the guys, the new guys helping. Yeah. And then naturally, those that during transfer, that's the competency built. And then once we had a year and it was sort of running, we were able to then go out, how do we tune it, how do we find a tree and get better. And then we so we disciplined the retail managers out into kind of a front end of the process of a sales funnel and a back end of it.
So getting the job done and making sure it all went out and got delivered well. And that's pretty much how they operate there now to this day. So I moved out and came to the Sainsbury Brooklands in February this year. They still operate. They haven't replaced me. The same four guys still do it there. I think Will has now been promoted to use car manager and Nathan is a new car manager. Share out what my responsibilities were themselves. And the site's getting a record. So they get the opening hopefully in the next few weeks, maybe a month or so from now with a brand new being done show. Chris, of those original eight, how many are still well, two questions employed in the motor trade and employed there?
I have some people just bailed out and thought selling cars. Not for me, I've gone off to be a state agent teacher blah, blah, blah. Where are those original eight? So at least three or four of them are still there. Wow. Okay. Look at that staff turn over the motor trade. That is. Yeah. So you've got Danny Cole and Chloe are definitely still there. I know a couple of others have gone off into other jobs. So Kate went to work for Arby and Eugene still worked somewhere in a private business somewhere. I think that I'm not a main deal because I'm most of them are still amongst it, I think. But we didn't, we got that team to a point of course there was some turnover.
And then we, but we added more to it actually. We, you know, we got more new young people coming into that team. That's a young lady called Molly that does the handos there. He used cars, Clive was a used car progressive and amazed way to sales team. Took the opportunity where we just went he's got the attributes, but he hasn't got the skills yet. Let's give him the skills and see how he goes. So it was a really good project, a good period. And to be fair to the business there, they've just transitioned from their role that I we saw created for them where they were called purchase advisors. And they've now transitioned to a more traditional sales executive model because I think the timing is right and the market is in need of that.
But it's that ability to adapt against it. It's that adaptability. And ability to prove it when the market needs it. I Chris, listen, we could talk more and more about this. So listen, I just want to say thank you very much for this. And on the next episode, let's continue to explore these ideas. I really appreciate the time and the opportunities to be. Thanks for having me off. 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, through LinkedIn. Thank you.
