You’ve told the team what needs doing. You check in later. Nothing’s happened. Your blood boils… then you realise you might not have been clear enough in the first place.
In this episode, I’m joined by Stuart to break down OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) in plain English. It’s a simple way to set a clear goal, define 3 to 4 measurable checkpoints, and keep everyone pulling in the same direction without turning into a micromanaging nightmare.
We cover the difference between “good intentions” and real alignment, why teams still drift even with high effort, and how OKRs stop chaos like the classic “let’s refresh the pitch” situation, where everyone does something different, and the whole thing goes sideways.
What you’ll get from listening:
- What OKRs actually are, and why they’re so popular in high-performance businesses.
- How to turn vague goals like “improve customer experience” into clear outcomes and measurable results.
- Examples you can use in a dealership (NPS/CSI improvement, response times, reviews, complaints handling).
- How OKRs reduce emotion in performance conversations, because the numbers don’t argue back.
- How to keep autonomy in the team while still checking progress properly.
Listen and then use it to set sharper goals with your sales or service teams this month.
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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.
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. 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 Stuart Wallbanks and we're going to be talking everything about getting people to do what they should do in a dealership. Now, I can remember too many times as a general sales manager, a sales manager, ask my guys to go out and do something. I'd come to the end of the day and say, has it been done? And of course, it hadn't been done. And I get frustrated my blood would boil with the person there. But actually, how much was it my fault? Because I had told them exactly how they should do it, why they should do it, when it needs to be done. And people listen to the podcast, you know that we talk about the six steps to get people to do things. But the day, where can we talk about? OK, so Stuart, welcome aboard to the podcast. Morning, Simon. And I'll go say, OK, I'll say something quite new to me. OK, we talk about goal setting, lots of times in the past, about smart goals and the six steps to getting people to do things like make sure you tell them what's expected, make sure you tell them when you want to do what's expected, make sure you tell them who you want to do what's expected. We talk about asking them, is there anything, something to do and what's expected, show them how to do what's expected. And of course, inspect what's expected. And whenever I get things wrong, I haven't done one of those six things. But talking about OKRs, because I'm new to this, what are OKRs, Stuart? But I really like those six steps that we talk about. And I think they're very simple. And actually, when you stumble across OKRs, it was quite a surprise to me how even simpler it would be. So it stands for objective and key results, very simple. So where exactly do we want to be? What's the goal? What do we want to achieve? And the key results are almost the measurement tools that we'll use along the way to make sure that we get that. OK, well, who developed them? Where did they come from? And why have I had my head in the sand for so long? They come from tech. So it's not an automotive thing, but then most of these management tools are so. It's Andy Grove of Intel. And I think they were popularized by Google, Guy called John Doea. So the foundation is in tech, which makes sense, because if you think about it over the decades, our tech has moved on incredibly from sort of audacious goal to audacious goal. They've clearly got some good management techniques in place to make that happen. OK, so let's break the sound. The only there is really what you want to achieve, though. OK. Yeah, objective. So if you take Google, for example, what would their objective be to dominate the world? Can you give some example? It would have been some kind of market share, wouldn't it, to be, I don't know, the number one search engine. I don't know exactly. I can't give you a Google specific example. But they've used OKR and clearly other organizations, other industries have recognized how businesses like that have dominated and have looked to copy some of their managerial processes. OK, so can you break it down for me then? OK, so you've got the objective. Yeah. And then the key results. How do you use these in the real world, then? Right, so I think for me, a better analogy would come from our Darren. He said to me once, you've got a ship that's set in sale from A, and it's intended to land at port and B. And the direction is it set sail is just one or two degrees off, and nobody ever actually checks along route. By the time it gets to where it should be at its destination, it could be 100 miles away. So the objective is it's the port, if you like, it's the destination where exactly do we want to land. And it needs to be specific. And the key results are those checking in along route to make sure that we're absolutely on track. So I want to sail from Liverpool. I want to get to New York. OK, so New York is, that's the objective. We want to get this boat Titanic to New York. Maybe not. Maybe not. So along the way there, if you're only one degree off when you're passing island, it's not the end of the world. OK, but it is when you try and get to New York and you realise you've missed it, you're landing in Florida or wherever it is. Exactly. Yeah, OK. So the outcome is getting to New York, and the key results will be the milestones along the way. Is that right? Yeah, so I've never worked with, and we don't work with laser sales teams. I know it was individuals that have lazy days, we all have a lazy day. But I would say from experience, everyone I've worked with has always been full of enthusiasm, full of effort. They've all wanted to pull in the same direction. So ultimately if they're selling cars and making money, then they're any money. So it's not about a lack of effort. But when I think about the poor months or specific things that were meant to be done that weren't, actually, it was a lack of this. It was a lack of absolutely understanding, categorically, as a team, what we wanted to achieve and defining the actions, the manageable actionings along the route that we'd get us at. OK. Do you have any examples, real life examples? I can give you a real life one that's specific to me. I'm thinking of a particular Sunday in Dila, and the team agreed amongst them that they would refresh the pitch. The pitch, we were a very large multi-franchise site with some premium brands, and the pitch was sort of a living, breathing monster as they often are. So I was really impressed with their enthusiasm. And I had no doubt that, left it around devices, everything would be harmonious. A couple of hours later when I checked in, why I was asked to check in because it was anarchy. And everyone had got their own idea of what a refreshed pitch would look like. So for example, some people thought that car should be in size order. Some thought they should be in brand order. Some thought they should be in order of how long we've had that vehicle in stock and where the urgency is to sell that car. And you've got a couple of people getting really frustrated because they thought they were the only one moving cars. People who were trying to get the price boards together were upset because they were the only one trying to sort out the prices. There was a small team in the office checking that the prices that we were putting in the cars reflected the latest price online. So everyone had got their own idea. They got their own measurement stick, if you like, of what getting the pitch sorted would look like. But no one had actually checked in with anybody else. Everyone was full of enthusiasm. Everyone was full of effort. But actually two hours in, we were worse than when we started. I suppose let's work backwards on that. So the outcome, okay, so the objective, the outcome, what you want to achieve is the pitch or refresh. I suppose. That's the problem. Yeah. What does that mean? So it's not specific. Identifying exactly what it looks like. The people know exactly what it is there. And that's that goal, that vision. Does that come back to that smart goal? I'm sure people listen, we've heard about goals that smart, they should be specific, should be measurable, achievable, realistic and timed. So that is still the objective, the outcome, isn't it? Like any manager, if your team designs amongst themselves, right guys, we haven't got that many appointments today. So let's refresh the pitch. And you see enthusiasm as a manager. You think, I've done a good job there. You know, the team are coming up with solutions themselves. They're energized. Crack on. I'll do whatever I've got to do, forecasting or whatever. But actually that's when you look back at that, that's poor management practice because just letting a bunch of enthusiasts, people crack on clearly wasn't the recipe for success. Yeah. So if it was identified, then you can almost work backwards, can't you say, right, that's what the refresh pitch looks like, okay, in data order or in brand order or colors or whatever that's decided. But then it's working backwards and say, what needs to happen then? So working backwards is what are the key, the key results along the way, okay? Yeah. You've got prices for all the cars there. We have the age list there. I suppose working backwards, it's kind of like the example you're talking to me about JFK. Will go to the moon this decade, not because it's easy because it's hard there. I suppose the outcome was, what's the main language? It's a big example that, but it's one we're talking about. So from memory, the book is Shoot for the Moon by Richard Wiseman. I don't know how I stumbled across it, actually. It's not a management book or anything like that, but I think a delegate recommended it. And it's basically how we landed on the moon. I think it was Apollo 11. And the start of that story was, Kennedy was renowned for making some quite big statements. And as part of his presidential campaign, he said, if you vote for me, then I will advance us in space. Think about that time. If you've heard of Spudnik, do you know what Spudnik is? The Russians were well and truly ahead, weren't they? All they were pretending to be ahead. And the point of Spudnik was it was a satellite. They didn't do anything. It was made out of reflective material and just had a radio beacon that beat. And it was simply to put the fear of God into the Americans that, well, have you seen what did he know? So the space race was a real thing. Kennedy is voted as president and is called to account. Right. You said that you were going to advance us in space. What are you going to do? He claimed that before the decade was out, so before they hit 1917, I think this would be, would it be 1962? He said that he would have put Man on the Moon. It's that famous beach, isn't it? We'll go to the Moon, not because it's easy because it's hard. We'll do these other things. Yeah. What a great speech that is. Yeah. But interestingly, at that point, the closest Man had got to put in anything on the Moon was keeping a dog alive in orbit for a couple of hours, you know, he's a million miles away. And so from that point, that goal itself was impossible. It couldn't be done. So what they did was, and they would have known at the time, but they used OKRs. And that was so what's the objective? We want to land on the Moon. Okay. What are the key results that we need to achieve to get to that audacious goal? What was quite interesting there? They worked it backwards. So to put Man on the Moon, what would we needed to have achieved prior to that? No, I don't know this specifically, but it could have been put a landing rocket on the Moon. Okay. Well, if we're going to do that, what do we need to achieve before we do that? And to do that, what do we need to achieve first? So they worked backwards from putting Man on the Moon all the way to the point that they were, and they got a set of very defined clear goals. Each needed to be achieved in order to get to the goal of putting Man on the Moon. And interestingly, they were constantly measuring themselves against those key results. And when they hit each defined key result, they celebrated the book, said, as if they walked on the Moon. You know, that's how analytically and closely they were measuring their progress. What I like about this, it's not relying on the manager to have to micro manage. Okay. Because people say, you know, micro-measuring that really frustrates people, they want to have their own autonomy. Okay. Still does this, doesn't it? Because it's like, if one of those goals is, we need to, if we put Man on the Moon, we need to make sure there's a way to get them back off the Moon. Okay. And then you can work out how you're going back off the Moon. Okay. But that is one of the key results there. I suppose looking at Google again, they wanted to launch Chrome. The goal is Chrome needs to be launched. So actually, what steps do you need along the way there? Let the engineers decide what they want to do. Because I suppose I'm always worried sometimes with these smart goals. Do we micro-manager? And I love the six steps that we talk about on our management development program. And so many managers get so much from that. But there's also some people say, hold on, are you not micro-managing with that? And it's such a tough one for me. But I suppose you think, okay, I'll remove micromanagement. It does, doesn't it? Because you're not, you're looking at the more defined clear goals. So I'll be talking about putting Man on the Moon is, you know, a very audacious. So let's put it back into a dealer. Let's say that we wanted to improve customer experience. So right, right team, it's really important to us, all our customers have a really good experience. That's the focus for this month. There's no doubt that every manager, sales manager, listening to this would count on all members of their team to do something to improve customer experience. But what does that actually look like? Is it how quickly we greet them in the showroom? Is that how we interrupt them? Line? Is that how friendly we are? It could be a whole bunch of things. So taking that as the objective, I want to improve, we need to improve customer experience. Then the chaos could be, well, let's improve our CSIR, MPS from 80 to 90%. Let's improve how quickly we respond to complaints from 48 hours to 24 hours. Let's make sure that 90% of all our customers give us a five-star Google review. I don't know. This would be some of the, here is some of the, yeah, that if we knew that we were hitting them along the way, then by the end of the month or the course, whatever it would be, then the customer experience would be better. And if you just take one of those increase MPS from 80 to 90%, I don't think you'd have to micromanage that every second of the day. You would just have to check in every now and again that what have you got in place to improve CSIR? Where are we up to? Are we any further from 80 towards 90? So I think obviously we check in. That's part of the management training that we do. But I don't think it would be micromanagement. Yeah. I suppose someone wants to buy their own house. That is what we're going to, the big audacious goal or whatever it is. I want to get my own house there. So work it backwards. What are you going to have to do before you actually do that? You're going to have to get the mortgage in place. You get a mortgage in place. You're going to need, what is it, 25% now, 20% deposit. Great. I need to get that there. What else I'm going to have to do? Make sure my credit rating is the best that possibly can there. So you could break it down to, okay, I want to do that in two years time. That's what I want to be in my own house. I can't pay the mortgage off. I've just thought of a good analogy actually. I complete quite a long journey down the country last night and I've put a sat in a video. I use Google Maps. I don't need Google Maps. I know the route, but it's there in case there's any traffic. I could argue that Google Maps is micromanaging me because literally every second of the day it's telling me exactly where I am, exactly how long I've got left to go, exactly what the time looks like. But it's there for me to check in on every now and again. So the objective is I wanted to get home in a timely fashion. And there were key points, I guess, a long-nut journey that I would check in. Right, I need to be mindful that in 12 miles and turning off the M1 for the A14, that's in the back of my mind. So I think that's a good analogy of an OKR. It's a destination. There's key points for us to look out there along the way. And all we're doing is just checking from time to time. Yeah, I like that. It's like we've talked about this on previous podcast, the monkey on your back, okay? And it's, I still love people to start thinking for themselves because as a manager, if everyone keeps coming to you with their problems, okay, not developing people. And I won't go over it again now because we've talked about it before, but when people come to you with a problem, don't come to me with problems, come to me with solutions. Boss, this car's going to be delivered, but we actually haven't got the spare set of keys for it. What do you want me to do? And so often I would go into, right, let me go and get a key cut. What can we do? Put the carster off. Deal with it. Because they're just breathing more problems that people come to me. So now we talk about, hey, don't come to us with problems, come to me with solutions, two possible solutions there, okay? We could do X or Y. Which one do you think I should do, boss? Because that's where you start to bounce many people. And that's great. I love when you were talking about Okey hours because it's like the key results, it's acting. You've not hit that target of improving your credit rating, but they're back to the example of someone buying their house then, okay? That journey from up north to down south there, okay? You've got to Birmingham and you had to go on the toll road, okay? Because actually the main road, the M6 is all jammed up there. So actually you decide what to do when you get there, okay? It's not a manager's sake. No, no, now I want you to go on the toll road. No, now get off the toll road. The key results are just for you and the person who want it to do it. So I suppose, someone likes the idea at least Okey hours. It sounds major, listen to this, the service manager now listen to this. What advice do you have? What should they get back and put in place? Because it's budget time of years, people are being looked at, well, they've got their budgets now, hopefully, and they're told, get on with it. What can the manager do? But the budget's in place and told to increase them is what happens at the start of the year. So the example of the pitch is a good one. The goal has to be defined, like it needs to be absolutely specific from what I've researched and understand about Okey hours, you don't want too many milestones along the way, okay? We want to keep it quite simple. So key results, ideally only three or four, otherwise it just becomes a little bit too complex. It definitely isn't a performance weapon. You said you would do this and you haven't done this otherwise. Like any management tool, if we start using it as a weapon, it can engage the impact. So it's a very defined goal, three or four key results to measure that we're on track and Budan is a manager, which, and I think this is where it nicely sinks in with the six steps to management that we train, you'd still want to touch base. You wouldn't just go, right, you know what the goal is, you know what the key results are along the way, get on with it. As a manager, we still need to inspect what we expect. Well, those conversations are made easier because we've already agreed what the key results were looked like. So it should be a very simple conversation just to check in from us, which again, negates or removes any micro management that you were concerned about earlier. The other thing with any management tool, it should always be about tangible things, not emotion or thought. I don't think you're on track. I don't think you're doing it right. I think you should do it like this. It also needs to be like all of these tools. It needs to be tangible. It needs to be specific. And therefore, as we touch in on those key results, it removes any emotion. Yeah, the key results are actually you've achieved it or you're not. Okay. So that's a beautiful part of it. We need to get our net promoter score to X percent. We've either achieved it or we haven't. There's no gray area or anything like that. It's not we got there or we haven't got there. So that's the key part of that. And it's again, so many times whenever we talk about management stuff, I'm talking to myself more than anyone else there because we do get things wrong all the time, don't we? And it's making sure that it's what someone's actually doing not with person. Okay. Too many times I see a man saying useless. You haven't done X, Y and Z. But of course, whenever you tell someone you're useless, the subconscious mind cannot not answer the question. Okay. So the subconscious mind says, don't tell me I'm useless. How dare you? And the person's not even heard what you want him to do. Gavin hides, runs a very successful dealer group in Ireland and he says it really well. Always remember, we love the singer. We might not like the song. Okay. We love you as a person, as an employee, absolutely brilliant. But actually, the way you've done X, Y, Z, we don't like that part of it. I always remember that to make sure it's not personal there. We love the singer. We just don't like the song. And the key results do that. She's going to be going back to the net promoter score. We've agreed by such a date will be at 19. We started off at 80 and we slipped back to 78. Well, there's no emotion in that. The facts dictate that we've gone backwards. We need to identify how that's happened. We need to discuss plans to get it forward. Or maybe we're towards the end date where we should be at 90 and we're 83. So we've moved it forward, which is great. That's success. The facts tell me that we haven't moved the needle quite as far forward as we agreed. Therefore, what are we going to do to address it? So it just backs up everything you've said. It just removes the emotion from those conversations. And we're right in the same as well that OKRs are more, again, taken away from individual goals there. OKRs are kind of big or dashes for the stuff there where the business is going to go from we're going to go from owning 25 dealerships to 40 dealerships. That is the big or dashes goal. And it's allowing everyone in the business to know that that's where we're going. OK, and they're the key results along the way there. Because our first thing is when you started talking to me, I thought, well, that's a mission statement, isn't it? But it's not quite a mission statement at all. It's not a mission statement. It is. We will achieve X. There might be some key notes about what we intend to achieve along the route. But in my experience, there's no accountability. There's no agreed set of actions per person. You're right. And the context we're talking about OKRs should be for large, relatively large, ambitious goals. On roads of sale, and we talk about how the business plan and we talk about how much money do you want to earn, how many cars do you need to sell, and we kind of work the activity backwards. That's an OKR, isn't it? It is. If how much money they want to earn is smart. Yep. And assuming it is, we then work back taking their, now, in my experience, no sales exactly I've ever done this actually knows their metrics. They don't know exactly their conversion rates. They know the bit of data that maybe inquiry max or their CRM gives them. But then we also know that that data is as good as what we put in the first place. If you know exactly what your conversion ratios are from demonstration drive to sale, from a meaningful presentation of demonstration drive all the way back to the start of that funnel, any sales exactly can work out exactly what their activity needs to be to achieve the defined results. That's an OKR, isn't it? They do work in a smaller personal way. But typically they're great as a management tool. Yeah, cool. Listen, I love these conversations there. Thanks for bringing it along there. OKRs, I'm definitely going to dive into those. I'm going to look into them as much as I possibly can there. Because it's, I suppose that's what this podcast is all about. Showing tips and ideas on how to sum up cars, improve the profit, sell more value added products there, and improve our after sales department. OKRs, I'm definitely going to dive into those. Thanks a lot. 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 through LinkedIn. Thank you.
