Neil Carrahar is back for Part 2.
This one goes deeper on what high standards actually look like in practice, especially on the “nothing special happening” days that quietly define your dealership. We talk about consistency, manager behaviours, and why customer confidence depends on the process you run every single day.
If you lead a team, manage used cars, or sell day in day out, this episode will give you a sharper way to think about standards and performance.
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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 visitwww.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 I'm joined by Neil Karahar again because we went off on a conversation last time and it went on and on so we thought we'd better break it into a couple episodes. So Neil, welcome back to the podcast. Hi Simon, good to see you again. So let's get more what nitty-gritty. I want to get into this, okay? What high standards actually look like? So it's Tuesday afternoon in the dealership. Yeah. I'm going to get a pictures day afternoon because it's just a, it's not Monday morning first thing. It's a Tuesday afternoon. What does high standards actually look like in the dealership? On a Tuesday afternoon. I mean, there should be these same standards that you'd see on a busy Saturday afternoon at lunchtime when it's packed in the showroom, there's customers everywhere. If the standards are always there and what I mean by that is they are genuinely always there. You're going to get a great experience. Your sales process, your customer experience, your compliance process, it's always going to be there because of consistency. And in our industry, the consistency element is under so many pressures from external forces. You've got training courses, you've got sickness, you've got annual leave. You would also have to reasons why team members in sales and after sales aren't present for all of those pressures. And it's making sure that what processes we have in place remain robust and in place even when it gets a little bit tougher, when people cover becomes under pressure, workload because of customer demand brings pressure. And it's making sure that we just don't take those shortcuts because those shortcuts we think we're saving a little bit of time and what we're really doing is cutting margin off without realizing it until later when we do the accounts review. Okay. So let me ask you then. Why does so many manage that bit? They know exactly what to do, but they still fail to hold the line, so to speak. I think it comes back to the point I made a moment ago. I've met some truly incredible people in this industry in the 2020. I've been in it. Some absolutely fabulous amazing people in this industry. So many of them know exactly what to do to a very high level, execute and deliver. And then the real world arrives as in the pressures of Bob's off sick, Sarah is on holiday, somebody else's on paternity, somebody else on a training course and all of a sudden our team of eight people is down to two or three after some day off pressure. And it's where it always seems to become a challenge is when the manager starts to panic. Actually, where I've got enough color for this, right? Don't worry about sitting facing him. Just get the reservation, get the car off sale, and we'll get the business manager to pick it up one Thursday when he's back. Yes, with intention, that is the plan. Usually the reality of it is that that will catch it up later. It doesn't arrive because Thursday arrives and its own pressures come with it as well. And that's where the money gets left on the table. It's just don't save the 30 seconds now just because you can. It's just let's just keep the standards high, stick to the process properly and keep the GP in the till. Is it the difference almost between managing performance versus managing behaviors? Because I suppose behaviors on that Tuesday afternoon, that's a behavior that that person can do no matter what's happening, who's off sickness and blah, blah, blah. Everything performance, we've got the money in the till at the end of it. Can I get your views on the difference between managing performance versus managing behaviors? Well, let's think about that. The behavior creates the performance. So if the behavior on a Tuesday afternoon slips, what you've got to remember is that that salesperson now knows that that manager is going to let that happen again. And the sharper salespeople, there's a lot of them out there, very, very great salespeople. I remember that to Bob, the manager, let me just get away with not talking about funding options and products that time. And I'm in a hurry here because I've got a handover June, half an hour. I'll go to Bob for a deal stack on that one again. And all of a sudden, the lack of integrity in the management team or the consistency of the integrity, the management team becomes an awareness in the sales team. You know, no sharp salespeople, I want to cut the corners and know which manager, if they've got a choice, they're going to go with it. And also, the gravitate into the one that they can control better than the customer. Mum goes, if you don't get the right answer for mum, you get it from dad and vice versa. Absolutely not. Absolutely not. That happened in dealerships. By the way, when we were both selling, I knew exactly the go and speak to Rex Keene at the end of the month, when he was trying to get to a quarter. And I worked hard on selling the deal to him than the customer. I'm really proud of him. Top salespeople will do that, won't they? Yeah, they will. Yeah. And it's been wise to it, aware of it. Make a joke about it that you know about it and, you know, keep it on the console. Yeah, I often say, are you working as hard on me as you, sorry, on the customer as you're working on me? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. You get that laugh. So many times. Yeah. Listen, you describe your role as delivery, not reporting. So, can I ask you, what data actually matters? What's just noise out there? Okay. In your role, delivery not reporting. What do you mean by that? Well, you mentioned data, we're setting the goal of this. I think we've got to think about what data is. We're now in a era where we are swamped and are drowning in data because there's so much of it. Everything's measured. There's a KPI for everything. And you know, over the years, I've heard the phrase paralysis by analysis. And I totally agree with it. What I've also learned is when that phrase gets used, it's usually, it's usually thrown from an angle of somebody that doesn't actually understand what a particular data set is actually trying to tell them. And it's vitally important that we simplify our data set that we're sharing with each other because data is great until it becomes so overwhelming. It becomes noisy and misunderstood. And the more simplified it becomes, the easier it is to understand, the easier it is to buy into what it's telling us. One of my favorite points about this is if you can show a leadership team, a team of 10 salespeople and how your salesperson that's got the highest conversion rate, the highest test drive offer rate, the highest financial offer rate versus the person at the other end who's not converting in the correlation between the basics of demo, offer, clause, and the same conversions of all the F&I things. When you start to show money on the table for a particular salesperson versus somebody else in the same sales team, in the same period of time, you start to show the real money left on the table in real terms all of a sudden that data becomes valuable. And all of a sudden it's not paralysis by analysis anymore. It's just understanding that actually. We need to spend some time with Peter, the salesperson, understand why he's not getting people out in the car, bums on seats, driving around the block. Why is he not involving a manager to first face that customer beforehand? Why is he not involving a manager, a second face, at offer stage? And sometimes there'll be reasons why those things are happening. There's always reasons why they're happening, but there's sometimes really some valid reasons. And what the challenges are and overcoming it together. But when you see a span of performance in the same sales team within a period of time, let's just say a quarter, and you've got somebody performing brilliantly and you've got a number of others that aren't, that's usually a great big indication that management second-facing isn't what it could be. It might be that they are second-facing, it might be that they're not, but it definitely means that something different happens with different members of the sales teams in terms of management involvement. So when you see that big delta, it's vitally important to understand what's the leadership team doing from a second-facing perspective, how effective is that second-facing? What does it look like? What's the quality of it like? And you'll start to close that delta-run performance very quickly once you understand what the challenges are. Okay. So, again, I want a deep dive on this one. That's one metric that most dealerships in your view track poorly or completely misunderstand it. Because I love this idea of paralyzed by analyzing. Is that paralysis? Pinalysis. Love that. Love that. Okay. And I see that all the time. There is almost too much. So on a deep dive, what's the one metric that most dealerships in your view is misunderstood or tracked poorly? It's spectacularly misunderstood is finance renewals and retained customers. Because there's so many different ways of measuring it. There is manufacturer partners that I've worked with that measure the rolling month, the rolling three months, the rolling six months and the rolling 12 months. That's paralysis by analysis, which KPI'd actually want to measure. One month's probably too short and volatile. Three months probably tells you a story as does 12 months. Let's look at two measurements instead of four and start to make some sense of what it is the data is trying to tell us. If your 12 months renewals data is strong and your three months is poor, that's indicative that your recent performance in that area has fallen. Let's get a hold of it quickly. You might look at a one month reduction in renewals performance and it might be because it's February or August, the month before player change. Well, yeah, of course it is. There's seasonalization of fact, we're in a shorter term data. Coming back to the overall question, when you start to look at renewals performance, people go, oh, it's just what the manufacturer wants to drive. I remember having a team of general managers in a conference suite in Leeds, a few years going out and some fabulous general managers in the room. Ask the group operations director who was always in the room. Ask, could you not speak for the next 20 minutes? I don't want you to stay out of what I'm going to do and I'm going to prove a point and I'll pull the flip child up. I went to the first person span, span a core bottle round, first general manager, Gary. Whoa, span a coke bottle around. What are we going back to my child's obitites? You're an old fashioned gamer, spin the bottle around the back of the starter. It's a chap called Gary. Yes, it's Gary. Tell me what's the most important thing about renewals? I even sat on a car, I went brilliant, great. I put a little chalk mark on the board. That's a revenue stream in it, Gary. We sold a car, brilliant. What else have we actually sold? The room's in science. Come on, spin it again. Peter, what else have we sold? What sort of finance case is valuable? What else have we caused? What else has happened? What other revenue streams have we got? In the thinking. In the thinking. Spin it again. Let's go again. What else have we just created? We've got to go again, par XG, new oil and bullets. We've just bought some stock that we supplied originally. That's the best stock we're going to buy. What happens now? Well, we're going to prep that. Who preps that then? Workshop, right? Workshop's going to sell some hours to the sales fields department. The car needs some oil filters, air filters, oil, pollen filter, air conry, gas, whatever. Where they're going to go for that? They're going to go to parts and they're going to sell some parts. Brilliant. What do we then do with that car? We put it on the used car display. Great. We sell it. 40%, 45% the chance of the time we sell another finance case and probably an add on product for both customers. There's eight to nine revenue streams every time you do a renewal deal with an existing customer off the database. Not one, not two. You might look at a used car manager that's not focused on used car renewals, but is desperate to sell the 90 day long stocker non-franchise that's still outside. That's a grand over market average on auto trader. You're like, right, we're spending so much time on this car here. It needs to be aligned with the market. Meanwhile, you've got 24 people in the workshop tomorrow coming in for a service already. Have we since checked? Have we done an equity sense check on these customers? Because there are easiest wins right there. All of a sudden, you get that launch successfully and you really are winning. Love it. Absolutely love it. Listen, let's talk about training coaching now. You've coached at every level. That's what super, super impressed when we first met about what you've done and listen. In single training, we always say to everyone, Tom, teach us anything, give me some sort of coaching. I'm going to get a feeling for how people coach and you absolutely blew me away with what you've done. Let me ask you, when you're coaching, and let's look at salespeople first, okay? What do the best salespeople consistently do that the average ones just don't? Okay. They show up. What do you mean they show up? Yeah. What I mean is they don't show up for work, for the meeting, they turn up. They don't turn up. I mean, they show up. And what I mean by they show up, they come in that day with mind, space and headset off. Right. I need to get a deal of it. I need to get yesterday's deal delivered. I need to think about what appointments I've got for tomorrow. The focus on land three basics all day, every day. I remember my early career selling cars. The first year of me selling cars, by the way, Simon, I was hopeless. I was absolutely hopeless. I didn't think I was going to be any good at it. I did contemplate not continuing with it at one point. But when it finally clicked, what I realized I needed to do was get in the car every morning to go and sell a car. As obvious as that sounds, maybe that's not sometimes the headspace everybody has. I need to go to work. We're finding a customer, a sell a car, and we're going to make sure we do a deal. But we need to make sure yesterday's car's gone out, and it's not sitting around the back for a week because a deal went out, a deal went full over. But down to your question, it's this show up as in every day, that every day that they do a deal, that every day that they'll hand over, that every day that they keep continually carving it out. It sounds daft, but we do have people in our industry that don't do that. I remember working with a challenging sales team in a JLR business five, six years ago, a good while ago now. We had a salesperson that was selling three cars a month on average in a four-way four-way, three cars a month. I remember sitting with a general manager going, what's the story here? Why is he there? Secondly, why is it being allowed to have them? What have you done so far about it? I met the sales guy, what a lovely man. I'd love him as my next door neighbor. I'd never buy a car off him. He was turning up, not showing up. It's literally that's the difference. Consistency, determination, good level of knowledge, great level of confidence, great level of motivation, those three things. If anything's not performing in your sales team, when you go backwards, is it knowledge, confidence and motivation? Once the leadership team understands, I'm going to arrive on site to spend time with you. The first things I'm going to ask you about your own performance is, what's that product knowledge like? What's the confidence line in front of customers? Brilliant. What's the motivation like? The guy that was selling three cars a month for two years, he knew the land rule of product, upside down, inside out, back up front, better than anybody else I've ever met. Was he confident to own the customers? Absolutely. But he had no motivation to sell a car. He was just happy to be there and have a company car and turn up go. The turn up versus show up was the difference. He wasn't showing up to sell a car. It comes back to mindset, doesn't it? I remember a similar thing. A man called Happy Horn. One of the first guys I worked with as a salesperson. He said, a few things to me. Lots of things. You know how you have these mentors along the way that you pick up bits from? Happy was definitely one for me. He turned around and said, Simon, do me a favor. Just always think back one day. Actually, before that, he said, Simon, you can't sell cars. You can't sell cars to the cleaners. You can't sell cars, taking cars to the workshop. You can't sell cars, taking cars to the compound because I was a busy fool doing all this work for other people, going and getting the lunches for people and all that sort of stuff. I always remember that one, but the other one, okay, always think back just one day. What he meant by that is, if you actually sold a car today, if you just think back and say, yes, I sold a car yesterday, right? So now I go sell a car today. Because if you think back, I sold lots of cars for the month, I said, well, what happened is you'll get halfway through the month and you go, look what I've done. And you'll sit back and relax and sit on your laurels. But also, if you look back, okay, two weeks, okay, and you haven't done that many deals, you'll sit back and go, whatever, I lost it. Whatever happened, God, I didn't anymore. Whatever we're not doing it. So I said, always think back one day and whose they personally get sold to today. That's all you got to do is who's today. And I suppose it's similar to what you're saying there. And turn up, show up. Because I go to tell you, I see to me salespeople, you just turn up, they just turn up and so showing up to make the day. Absolutely. Yeah. And it comes back to that point of over retention, customer retention. If we're not calling tomorrow's service department customers today, why aren't we doing that? It's such an easy win. They're already, we don't even need to come in. It's the easiest call you ever make. Why are you in? Why don't we do an account review? Take about 10 minutes when you pick the car from service, no obligation. So we are in your agreement and have an all my people look radio. Such an easy call. I love this. Don't just turn up, show up there. Okay. Sorry, don't just show up. Okay. Don't show up. Let us talk about podcasts. We're on a podcast. Clearly, I love podcasts. Otherwise I wouldn't have started the podcast. And there was a guy that does the American version of Dragon's Den. I can't remember his name now, but it was Mark, somewhere or other. And it's on a podcast there. And this guy, he knows people like Steve Jobs. He worked for Steve Jobs, I think. I might have this wrong. This is a point that everyone's yelling at their radio saying, I listen to that podcast. It's not. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, this guy was definitely worked for Steve Jobs in the past. And he said, Steve Jobs had the amazing ability to separate noise from actually what was important. Okay. And he turned around and said, Steve Jobs, he said, was a horrible, horrible man to speak to or work with. And I suppose he could say it because he worked with it. Now clearly, I think the man's a genius for what he's built. Okay. Steve Jobs done it again and again and again. But he said, actually, he was just so focused on a few different things. Okay. He would consider noise about how is your weekend? What are you doing and where are you up to there? He was just so focused on, get rid of the noise. Just focus this, focus that. He said, there's only one other person I've seen that's got exactly. He calls the signal, signal is what's going to make things work. And the noise was just all the other stuff. And so the only other person like that now is Elon Musk. He said, Elon Musk is almost 95% signal to get all the other noise. Okay. I'm not interested in noise. It's just like, this is what we're going to do. Okay. He mentioned a story about when Elon Musk realized that it was behind an AI. He just turned around and said, right, every single meeting I'm going to have in this next month of July, whenever it was, it's going to be an AI. I'm not interested in anything other than that. Okay. Now, sorry to be fair. That was Mark Zuckerberg who said that same thing. Okay. He just turned around and said, it's that signal. That for me is when you said so many salespeople, managers just turn up and get involved with all the noise all the time. Yeah. It's like, what's going to shift the needle today? What's the needless? Speak to the people in the service department, following up the customers you haven't sold, getting a bum in the seat, putting a deal in front of people and saying, should we secure that for you? Absolutely. And the top salespeople, they focus on that all the time. They're not going out the back, having a cigarette, talking about that football game. And what happened, it's so true, isn't it? It's cliché about all the things you've just said there, Simon. It's just about it. It's so cheesy almost, but it's about being brilliant at the basics. Yeah. Yeah. So, I'm going to make things, basic things. I'm going to make it right. Let's show up and get the basics every single day. Yeah. Yeah. So true. So listen, let me tell you about the basics then. Why does training so often fail to stick once a trainer leaves the dealership or the training premises where they work? Why doesn't it stick all the time? There's a number of reasons. If you've got someone that firstly didn't deliver very good training, they get laughed out of the car, part when they leave and... You see that? It happens and they laugh you often. Naughty dog you, be next to him. Thanks, Lee. We hear about that more than seeing it. I'm going to say in our business, quickly for our clients listening to this, but you do hear about other people that the trainer turns up to actually just show up. Okay. And to click through a PowerPoint presentation, I hear so many times that happens there. Yeah. Long may I continue? Because that's the success of our business. It certainly is. And that is the difference. It's turning up with meaningful content, understanding the real problems, working on it with the leadership team together. But to really sort of cement the answer to your question, the reason these things don't last is if we... Any trainer turns up, delivers really good quality content, the team are engaged with it, the leadership team are engaged with it. But then the message doesn't get carried on after the session's finished. We showed the month later to follow it on how it's went. It falls over when it's not driven or when we're not there. And the reason that that happens is alignment wasn't created between what was delivered to the team and the leadership team. There's so many times, it's happened to me many times, I've arrived at a dealership. I've done a brief with the general manager at the beginning of the day. No management team available to say me have been plonked in an office somewhere with whoever was available rather than somebody strategic for the right reasons. I'd spend some time with that person or team and I'd leave and I couldn't get to see the management team before I left. You'd come back and I'm unclear that there's usually nothing that happened because the alignment wasn't there and it's vitally important. But once we've identified what's causing the underperformance, is it a team member or team members? Is it the management or management team members? Is it a combination of both? Is it a lot of other things are in the way of them achieving their goals? As long as those things are all understood and good, simple actions are in place, we can come back a month later and celebrate the success of the changes. But the alignment has to be there. You've got to inspect what you expect too, right? Absolutely. And the management team has to inspect what you're going to expect. Yes, otherwise there's no clarity. But Neil, so many times people say if the training's brilliant and people buy into it, we know that humans remember what is it? In seven days time, they're lucky to remember 10% of what they've learned on any training course. How do you overcome that hurdle? If you think great training is the start, but the actual learning process doesn't happen in a couple of hours or in one session or in one day, that's part of it. So it's about drip feeding that information over time. So if you think about a team member that's new to industry, they've been through road to a sale or equivalent sales process training. They've got a good manager, they've got a good mentor back at the dealership as well that they're working with. That's given them guidance. And then they get regular drip fed information, coaching, training throughout a period of time. It lets them absorb it better. And a good analogy we talked about in another meeting earlier, the dear Simon was if we throw a glass of water over somebody, some of it's going to land on the person, some of it's going to land on the walls, some of it's going to land on the table. And it's a ridiculous analogy. If they're mines like that sponge, isn't it? That's the analogy. Yeah. And that water's going to go everywhere. Everywhere you need to get that water into there in their sponge as a mine. Into the sponge and then I ain't absolutely. And it's throwing a load of information in one day in a training course is one thing. Throwing a little bit less information in that day, but more meaningful and better aligned and understood. And then followed up by drip fed information over the coming days, weeks, months, good mentoring from the leadership team at site. It forms a learning and development journey rather than just a dump of information that we're going to follow on a month later and hope it's still there. Some people a lot of it will be. Others barely any of it will be. It all depends on how well they've been supported and coached in between. I love as well where you say the way to coach people is, what is it? Is it tell me? Okay. Tell me first what it is. Then show me. Yeah. Then it's let me. Yeah. Then it's coach me if I've got that right. And I love your philosophy there. Tell me, can you run through those steps there? Tell me first. What do you mean by that? So if I came to spend time with you, Simon, and you were not great at selling, let's just say, use car finance. And we talked about what we discussed earlier, representative APR, typical APR, how funding options, how it works, how do we compare the face of a strategy of always make sure the customer's got options regardless. I can tell you all about that. If I show up and tell you what to do and leave, you're going to sit there and nobody doesn't know. Cara Hals here again. We're going to talk about it again next month, whatever. Yeah, you're on. If I tell you, and then I say, look, tell me what, Simon, I'll show you. Right? If you get a customer this afternoon or you want to do a prospect called customer now, I'll do it for you while I'm here. I'll show you how to do it. More than happy to do that. Genuine offer from everyone in your business, anybody listening, I'll show you how to do it as well. And then I'm going to let you have a call yourself. When you get another customer, I'll quietly sit from a distance and listen, get on with some stuff on the computer or make myself look scarce. I'll quietly observe, I'll let you have a go and observe all the things that you did well because I want to catch you doing things well, Simon. I want to catch you doing all things right. Assuming it's not perfect, it may or may not be. At the end, I want to have a big catch up. We insist, I'm right. So we started by me telling you how to do it. I'll then show you how to do it. Now I had to go with a customer because I've let you have a go at it. What do you think went well? This, this, this. Brilliant. Yeah, I picked up on that as well. Hey, something else that I noticed that you did really well, Simon. I noticed that you said this to Mrs. Griffin. Did you see a reaction? Did you see how she responded to what you said? Yeah, I did actually. Well done. That was really well done and whenever you can cover that in the training, you put that in. Off your own back was great work. If you were to get the same customer again tomorrow, what might you have done differently or better? And more often than not, you will get some really interesting answers. Actually, when I said this, she said that, maybe I shouldn't have said that. Okay. Yeah, it's not the end of the world, though, is it? What would you have done differently off the conversation was happening now? I just swap that word out or maybe say this instead or do what we did in the training. That would probably work. The world's better. Brilliant. Okay. Well, we'll have another call and we'll catch up after the next one. So it becomes, tell me, show me, let me coach me. I love it. It's just so much more robust. So it doesn't trainings so often just to tell me a bit. And you see manufacturers do that all the time. Tell me, tell me, tell me this is all this. There's not the show me. There's not the let me or what you see, it's just the coach me. They just come and do the coaching bit at the end. And are those four different steps there, isn't it? To really get training being sticky. Yeah. That's really good. Really good. Now, listen, let's look forwards now. Okay. To the industry where we're going. There's margin pressure out there. Okay. Selling cars with shelling peas. We made a fortune. Okay. Manufacturers have worked out where the semiconductors are now. They're producing more and more of these cars there. Okay. So there's going to be margin pressure on there. We've got ever changing customer's expectations. Okay. We've got AI out there that customers can do so much more research before they even turned up. What skills would matter most for a salesperson and an after sales or service advisor over the next, I don't know, three to five years. Okay. I think there's one standout skill that's not talked about enough with all of the things that you just described there, Simon, and its coachability. And what I mean by that is one hundred percent. Yeah. It's the mindset of we're in an industry now where change is happening on every front all at the same time. There's the move to electrification. There's regulatory changes. There's emissions, you know, pressures from emissions and what the government want people to buy. The industry's going through this, you know, evolution of tech. All these things are all happening at once, all around us. And we've got Bob, the salesperson, done us 350 cars in his best year, but his ego's got the better of him and he doesn't want to learn anything, won't learn anything and he's a closed off book. Guys and girls like him are going to get left behind in the coming 18 months at a rapid rate or not. So it's really vital that anyone on this podcast, no matter what your role is, which company you're in, at what level, we need to stay coachable and open the change because it's happening around us right now. Have I got loads to learn about the industry? Absolutely. Absolutely loads. But we all have at every level that there is so much change happening and it's vital that we talk to our teams at all levels and make sure people are coachable and adaptive to change because the change is going to happen whether we like it or not because all this stuff about AI, my mother-in-law, she's like, I don't believe in AI, it's fake. It's not real and I'm like, all right, okay. And I used a few, I used chat GPT for a few analogies to prove her wrong and she's sitting there, you know, trying to play if we argue with me that it's wrong. And I want to ask me a question, she asked me whatever it was and I came back, oh, well, there's the answer. She came back and she went, I don't like that. I went, I know you don't. She says that's my generation. We all have to, regardless of our generation, move with it because we just get left behind doing it. Yeah, so true. Yeah. So true. It's amazing. Well, amazing everyone where AI is going at the moment. We've got to embrace it because it's not going away. Exactly. It's not going away at all. Having said that, do you think the motor trade has got more complex or are we just making it more complex? Yes, to both. I think it's definitely got more complex. I think we have, as an industry, got some flaws in the fact that we make things more complicated than they need to be. It's like what I said earlier on, we're all drowning in data, use the data simplified to help us rather than drown us. And it's the same with AI. And people are like, oh, AI is going to replace the salesperson. It's not. You've got major, major used car online retailers that have failed recently because they decided the market was going to go a different way that it wasn't ready for. It's exactly the same with the AI. AI, if it's embraced properly, carefully, it's only going to help management teams. It's going to help leadership teams. It's going to help operators of dealer groups. If we understand what it can do to help, instead of trying to compete with it or push it away, let's understand what value it can bring. But one thing's for certain, as the example I gave in a moment ago, some of those large online online or give you tailored groups making big losses and suffering failure, customers still want a bricks and mortar buying experience, but they also want the simplicity of all of the tech that comes with it. So that's why we've got to be ready for change. Can we have a blended retailing process? Of course we can, out of your ages. Can we embrace a digital offer platform better than what we have now? Everybody can. It's tech-exciting until you're scared of it. And vice versa. If we embrace it and we know what it can do for us, it can make things so much simpler. If we fight it, we get left behind. So it's all about being coachable, understand what the future holds and how you can use tech to your advantage. OK. Listen, I'm really enjoying this. I suppose we need to look at wrapping up there. But can I ask you, in wrapping up, what lesson have you learned? Maybe the hard way that you wish you knew earlier on in your career. Is there something you learned far too late in your life? Yes. People, I think about, I've listened to a great number of your podcasts. Simon over the last couple of months. Be specific for me. What do you mean people though? How do you mean? People, we think about systems. We think about sales processes. We think of compliance, regulators, manufacturers, scorecards, training courses, all sorts of things that exist in the day to day complex that you've more to trade it. And so many people will know this already. So many people won't. But people are everything in our business. And as a young sales manager, 16, 17 years ago, if I could go back in a time machine and get the young 20-odd-year-old GSM in a sales department up against the kitchen wall and they can't even say, why did you speak to that person like that? Why were you like that? Why were you sharp with that person? Why were you called with that person? Why weren't you more tolerant with that person? All these things, these things sound obvious, but people are everything. And I remember where it really, really landed with me was I was in a car in Greater Manchester going between dealers with a franchise direct route of a dealer group, a very big dealer group. And he pointed at this dealership up on the hill. And there's this great big premium gen palace of the dealership, franchise dealership. And he says, eh, you want two million pounds a year? That, can you believe that? Look at the investment, I mean, and that. What on earth do you think's wrong there? I don't know the dealer group. I don't know much about that franchise facility. It's look fabulous. But I can tell you this much. The problem is people. Anyway, what do you mean? Well, they've probably spent 15 million quid on that building. We've got a fabulous franchise. If it's losing money, there's either a knowledge, confidence, or motivation problem. Somewhere within that building. Now that might be a leadership level. It might be sales team after sales team, wherever it is. But just somebody hasn't went in and actually found out what was wrong. It might be that the leadership team, well, like I used to be stone cold, heavy handed and not very empathetic. If we can fix that and keep the same team and get them thinking differently, you might have a totally different business. And this person that I was in the car with sort of shook his head and he went, I'm 25 years older than you. I've never thought of it that way. As well. Yeah, but it's true. And I look back to who I was as a younger salesperson and the early stages of the leadership career. I just think, oh, how much further in my career I might have been if I've been a different person about people understanding people, understanding motivations, all those qualities that come with maturity. Let's say you're a salesman. There's a listeners podcast right now today and they want to get a better result this month. What's one of the first things they should do on Monday morning to guarantee that result this month? First thing, ask themselves, do I understand my team? And I know it sounds really obvious and very generic and oversimplified, but really ask yourself that question and ask yourself of it critically. Do I understand Gary and the sales team? Do I understand what makes him come to work? Do I understand his motivations? Do I understand his home life and his home situation? Do I understand what challenges and problems he might have that he needs my support with outside of work? Do I understand Gary in terms of what his strengths and weaknesses are in his role? Have I shared that with him? Have I given him a really high quality one to one and given him feedback? All these things, once you understand that and your team start to pick up on the fact that you genuinely care, not because you're doing it to tick a box, but you're actually spending time with them, getting to know them, doing one's with them to give them out support, encouragement, development, challenge. Once your team understands that you're asking those questions because you genuinely care about them and you're not taking a box, the level of respect within the team will grow massively. Once that happens, your team will naturally start to perform better. There'll be a better team culture that will work together better and the overall performance of the department will be immensely improved. It's all about people, it's all about understanding your people sincerely, genuinely and making sure that when there's success and things to celebrate and we've said it so many times that catching people doing the right thing and it's done right. Not with a sick bucket, but probably. Simon, I noticed that you handled that really well with that customer. Great work. Well done. Don't think you'd have got that deal if you hadn't have said that and do that in front of the team because it's deserved and it's well balanced. The respect in the team will grow, the performance in the team will grow and the feel good fact that comes with it and everybody enjoys coming to work. I remember a long time ago somebody asked me a question similar to what you asked me earlier today. Why did you get in the car trade? I'm going to admit this to the big audience on the podcast. I joined the car trade for a laugh. I wanted to join a fun industry and it's grown into a bigger, more regulated, more financially powerful, serious business. Sometimes we've run the risk of losing the fun and there's nothing to stop us being professional, high performing teams and still have a lot of fun doing it. When you make sure our team know that that's what we want them to come to work, we want it to be fun, we want them to enjoy it, we want them to like coming here in our team, delivering a result together. That's the real thing every sales manager can benefit from, no matter what their performance is currently. Brilliant. Listen, how do people get hold you? What's the easiest way to find you? On LinkedIn I take it. Is that the easiest way to get hold you? Yeah, I'm available on LinkedIn. I'm responsive to LinkedIn messages. I'll be back here as soon as I'm available. You can also reach me at neil.carahot at simcortraining.co.uk. I'd love to hear from anyone that would like help improving their department, dealership or dealer. Brilliant. Really love that. Thanks a lot for coming on the podcast. 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 simcortraining.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.
