In this episode Simon looks at how to coach your team without falling into the trap of criticising everything. Its easily done, but we look at some techniques to help you show them what good looks like, and get the best out of your team.
We want to avoid resistance, much like when we appraise a customer’s part exchange and get buy in.
Here are the highlights:
{02:11} Praise the effort
{03:35} Coach themselves
{06:09} Resistance
{08:12} 4 Questions
{11:33} How often
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon’s words ‘real world’, it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visit
www.symcotraining.co.uk
Welcome to the Selling in 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 cards, 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 with saying thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Hi, welcome to another episode of Selling in the Motor Trade. Hey guys, listen, it just keeps on going from strength to strength. So thank you to everyone who's subscribing. Thank you to everyone that's supporting this onto other people. As Stephen Bile would say, it helps before more than you could possibly know. So I just really, really appreciate it. Keep sending it out to people. And this one here is, I want to speak to you managers. And I want to talk about how to coach your service advisor, your salesperson or what they should do. Heads of businesses, dealer principals, owners of the group, how you get the best out of your line managers. Do you get a situation sometimes where you're telling someone, well, Harding, you got this wrong, you got that wrong, you got this wrong? You feel like you beat them up all the time? I want you to remember that, could you imagine that kid, not your son or daughter, maybe a nephew or niece, comes to you and says, uncle, auntie, I just drew you a picture. You sit there and you say, wow, that's brilliant. What is it? It's a boat. Oh, of course it is. That's a brilliant boat. If you say that to the five year old little boy or girl, you know, you're going to see pictures of boats all afternoon until their mom and dad says, hold on, uncle Simon's seen enough boats now. Okay. Because what's actually happening there is the boat might have been a crap boat, their five or six. Okay. But because you've grazed the effort, you're going to see a lot more of it. And that's where I want to speak to some of you guys because I see this in dealerships all the time where the managers well intentioned. But what they're effectively saying is that's a crap boat. Well, you're five. Let me tell you when I was five, I was drawing a lot better boats than that. Of course, how many boats are you going to see? None. You want to praise the effort? Not just the result. Now we we praise the result anyway. So I want to give you a scenario. Okay. Let's say you've got a service advisor and I was in a dealership yesterday dealing with service advisors who are doing upsell specifically about air conditioning service. Okay. And if I turn around and said, well, actually you got this bit wrong and you should have said that and you should have this. I know that sounds natural. Okay. Because quite frankly, your salesperson, your service advisor have got those things wrong. But if you keep on saying this is wrong, that's wrong, this wrong effectively, you're saying that's a shit boat. And I've been so guilty of it in the past. What we got to do is almost turn around and say, wow, that's a brilliant boat. Praise the effort, not the results. Now I know what you're thinking. Hold on though. One of it is a crap boat. We got to get them to almost, I don't coach themselves, show themselves the mirror. Now in our business, our clients, Lewis and Lewis, you know, we do sim checks regularly. It's one of the most powerful parts of our training programs. What a sim check is, is when we turn up to the business, we teach the guys on a sales process. Okay. They go through the standard training that we call a stand up training where they get everyone together when it goes through and show them what good looks like. We then drip feed a training video every day. They're quick five minutes every day for the next 90 days because that's where it forms the habit. When we turn up, we do onsite coaching. We always say the coaching is where it's the glue that drags it all together. And a sim check is kind of like an airline pilot. An airline pilot would go into a simulator every six months to learn how to, actually not learn to almost inspect what they expect. To show them how to, I'm not an airline pilot, but I imagine fly on one engine. And this goes wrong with that goes wrong to make sure they know how to do it. So a sim check might sound like a mystery shop if you're in the UK market because we record it. We say, sell as a car from start to finish. But this is where it differs. When the salesperson hasn't qualified effectively, we say, stop, time out. Have you found out about the customer's man, their money, authority, needs and wants? And the salesperson said, yeah, yeah, I have. Have we really? Let's go back and review the video. See how you think you have, but maybe this is a more effective way to do it. Again, in the airline industry, they might, I don't know, get them to come in and land a one engine and a horrendous crosswind. And they say, oh, you got it down safely. Was that the best you could do? No, what else could you have done? Let's go back and do it again. When it comes to trial clothes, so often we say to ourselves first of, have you trial closed effectively? Now in your world, you might call it a pre-code, close or a test close. We call it trial clothes at Symco train. And so many times the sales business says, yeah, yeah, I've got commitment. But when we go back and analyze it, we know they haven't, but they think they have. When we actually show them the mirror, so often what the salesperson thinks the effective trial clothes isn't, and we can actually show them how to do it. But if we turn around and just say, you got this wrong, you got that wrong, you got this wrong. Straight away, the resistance comes up and you get all the yeah, but yeah, but yeah, but okay, coaching for me. And I want you to remember this, the sales managers here is what we do with the customers trade in what we do with the customers part exchange. If you go out and knock the customers trade in, you go knock their part exchange. Doesn't the customer defend it? I can see why you're selling it. I'd sell it as well. I hope you didn't bend the chassis when you hit that rose bush. Okay. Oh, listen, those tires on there, they're a result run that tires. That's going to cost a fortune. That's what the poor salesperson does. Because when they knock the customers part exchange, the customer defends it. And when they defend it, they'll almost resell it to themselves. Okay. The smart salesperson will get the customer to knock down car. Now, if you're listening from the service part side of the business, the after sales side of the business, it's called in the UK. If you're listening to this in America, after sales is not paint and fabric protection after sales is the service and parts departments. Okay. And what happens on the sales side will teach the salesperson to get the customer to effectively knock or devalue their own car. If the alloy wheels been used as a parking sensor, we'll just walk up to it and take a photo of it. The customers with us, they'll see what's happening. And so often the customers say, oh, yeah, that was that McDonald's car park in the middle of town. It's too tight. Don't worry about it, Mr. and Mrs. customer. We'll always get that fixed a lot cheaper than what you will. Okay. If we say, well, yeah, alloy wheels knackered, you're going to have to replace that straight away. The customer was not that bad. Okay. That's the technique I want you to think of when you're coaching that brand new sales person or service advisor or actually any part in the process for things I want you to remember. Okay. And these four things I'm going to give credit to Clive Millen. Clive Millen works with one of our groups, the Braille's organization based in the UK. And Clive's based is a sales manager. And by the way, he is a brilliant sales manager. He's on my course recently talking about how to get the best out of people. And he refreshed my memory on what we should be doing. And I want to give you four simple steps. Okay. Number one, okay, when your salesperson gone out to sell a car, we haven't closed the deal. Oh, if you have closed the deal, I would argue Clive, it almost works better when we have closed it. And one, Clive will turn around and say, hey, listen, how do you think that went? Ask your salesperson straight away. How do you think that went? Okay. And get them to say, yeah, I think I did well, but the customer was on drugs. What they wanted for their car. Okay. That's your first bet. How do you think it went? Number one, number two. Okay. You might say, listen, would you have changed anything? Would you have done anything differently? Better. That's question number two. Okay. Oh, I don't know. Maybe I could have gone for a longer demonstration drive. Maybe I could have raised the desire more. Okay. So next time, what do you think you'll do? So that's the first bet. So number one, how do you think that went? Number two. Okay. Hey, listen, what could you have changed? What would you do differently? Or what would you have redone differently if you had your chance to start over? That's question two. Question three is, okay. So next time in that same scenario, what would you do? But this is a bit I really loved from Clive. His last question is, hey, listen, do you mind if I tell you what I would do? And I just love that approach. Do you mind if I tell you how I would have done it? Do you mind if I tell you how I would have done that? Okay. What does every service advisor, what does every salesperson say? Yeah, sure. Go on. They've almost given you permission to tell them where they change it. And then I might say, yeah, I agree with you. The demonstration drive could have been longer. However, I wouldn't have asked the customer how much they want for their car. Because that's where I think they've given you that higher price. Because you've invited the lie. The next time I wouldn't have asked them what they wanted early on in the process like you did. And also at the end of it, I'd confirmed that my trial closed question was better by saying something along the lines of, if everything stacks up right, is that the car you'd like to be driving the next two or three years? Well, maybe. And when you say maybe, it sounds like there's something you're not sure about. Is there anything about that car that you're not 100% sure about? Well, the mileage is higher than what I hoped. OK, Mr. or Mrs. Customer. But that's reflected in the price. If had a lot of miles on it, we wouldn't be asking $39.995. But if everything else stacks up right, then my only drawn that five series. I wouldn't stop you wanting to own that car, would it? So listen, the salesperson you're now coaching next time, why didn't you try that? Not asking people how much they want for their car early on in the process. And then also work on that trial closed. And let's see how that works for us on that next one. So guys, that's what I want to leave you at this time. When you're coaching a salesperson, oh, by the way, this goes without saying. How often should you have a coaching meeting? How often should you have a one to one coaching session with your salesperson? Every single deal. At the end of it, OK, every single time. I want you to do what we do in some go training. We run any stand-ups training course, OK, at the end of it, OK? We go through all the delegates go. If there's two of us on the course, if there's a management team, we actually just do the same things. Hey, listen, how do you think that went? Yeah, really, really good. OK, having a time again, OK, if you start the course from scratch, is there anything you do differently? See, I love that because that's getting the person start thinking about how they're actually delivering it, OK? Number three, so next time, what would you do differently? Listen, do you mind if I tell you how I would have done it? Actually, I would have used their names earlier on their names is when you get people's attention. It's actually used their names first and then ask the question, you turn that salesperson's ears on to make sure they listen to it. That's where you get that interactive sales training course. We just do it all the time. Four things, guys. OK, how do you think that got on? OK, what we do done differently if you had your chance to do that again? So next time, what would you do differently? Listen, do you mind if I tell you how I would have dealt with that? That's the four things I want you to remember whenever you're coaching someone. And that way, the next time, if you get people rolling their eyes at you and saying, yeah, but yeah, but yeah, but it's just a nicer way to get the best out of your team. So I just want to leave you with those four questions on coaching this time. Now, of course, there's so many different ways you can coach people. You can talk about what salesperson you have there. Are they red, the blue, the greens, the yellows? OK, we talk about the lions, the puppy dogs, the snakes and the mouse. OK, of course, you go coach people in different ways. You have different learning styles. Some people are visual. Some people are auditory. Some people are kinesthetic. OK, there's so many different ways to coaching. And this is only a snapshot of how to coach people. So I know some of you trainers that listen to our podcast all the time say, oh, no, we do this coaching. We do that coaching. Listen, we can't do everything we do on our management development program here. So I just want to focus on those four key questions for you. Because I promise you, start using them. And they're probably more important than some of the other things if I'm brutally honest. Anyway, that about does it for now. Thank you again for sharing this and all dealer principles, heads of businesses. This is one of those episodes again. You might want to send it through to your lion managers. Thanks again. That just leads me to say that all details of this episode and other episodes on the selling in the motor trade can be found on our website simcotraining.co.uk. Go there to get a copy of our book, Words That Sell Cars. Go there to sign up to a free trial of our sales fitness online sales training program. Easiest way to get hold of me is Simon Bowkett, food linked in. Thank you.
