Still asking “What do you think?” after you quote a payment? Still apologising when a car fails its MOT? Simon and Stuart reveal how those tiny verbal habits shape customer mood, trust and spend – and how flipping them from negative to neutral (or better, positive) lifts conversions across sales and aftersales.
This episode tells you exactly which words are costing you deals, how to swap them out, and why your brain is wired to default to the negative in the first place.
Key moments:
02:00 – Why humans are programmed for pessimism
07:30 – The “Sorry drink” and the Pepsi problem
11:45 – The trial-close phrase that plants objections in a buyer’s head
18:10 – How managers infect the showroom with hidden negativity
23:40 – Three practical swaps you can roll out tomorrow
Join thousands of salespeople, managers, and dealer principals who’ve transformed their careers and businesses by understanding what drives car sales success.
Tune in now..
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, welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. Today, this is another episode that you might want to share with your salespeople, your service advisors in the dealerships. Because today, Stuart and I, we're going to be talking about the words that your salespeople, your service advisors use in a dealership, and how they really can affect your results.
So, Stuart, welcome aboard. Thanks, Simon. Listen, can I ask you, why do you think that sells people and after sells people, naturally veer towards sometimes a negative language, or do they veer towards negative language? I asked this, I asked people, do you think we have a persuasion towards pessimism or optimism? And most people respond positive. And I think I would have agreed until I listened to a podcast with Damien Hughes. So, he's a well-known psychologist, and he does various podcasts. And he was explaining that as human beings, we definitely have persuasion towards the negative. And the way he explained that was, he said, if you think about cave Mondays, and there's a big empty cave, then let's say I haven't discovered.
I wouldn't go and explore it by myself, because there's every chance there's a pack of hungry bears in there, and I'd be eaten alive. So, I would round up my mates, we go in with fire and pointy sticks, and we would be prepared for the worst case scenario to happen with prepares. And the likelihood is it wouldn't happen, and we carry on. He says, so the human race has survived and evolved by thinking what's the worst possible outcome and preparing for it. And that kind of made me think, actually, because my nine and granddad had a big part in bringing me up. And I can hear my nan's voice now in the back of my head, sharing things like, should you get down out of that tree, or fall and break your neck?
Should you get away from the water, you're falling and drowned? Should you get away from the road, you'll get hit by a boss? It's not true. Yeah. It's always a boss, which is weird, isn't it? I've never been run over, I've never drowned, I've never broke my neck. But I think that's because my nan put the fear of God into me, that that was always about to happen. And then when I became a dad, I'd do exactly the same with my little boy with Jacob. When he started to crawl, he went to the log burner, which was stone cold, it was the middle of summer. But I said, Jacob, no, hot burn. I'm deliberately pointing the fear of God into him because I'm looking after him, protecting him.
So from infants, that's how we're raised. We need to, though, don't we? We have to, because you don't want him going there when it is hot. Correct. So, yeah, it's how we were raised, it's how we were brought up. It's how we brought up our kids. Jacob, if and when he becomes a dad, he'll do it with his kids. So throughout time, we've got this natural persuasion or risk aversion you might call it. Is that really a problem, though? Is that not surely a good thing? Should we not just use this negative language to protect ourselves and our children? Or how does it become an issue in a cardiology? Yeah, so you've mentioned language there, and that's a good point.
So let's part for one second, the fact that we are by default focused on the negative. Let's part that for a second, and let's look at words that we use. So the English Oxford English Dictionary has 175 or 180,000 words in it. Oxford themselves say there could be as many as a million words. There's so many now that are obsolete, and there's so many that we sort of make up over time. Of those 180 or 1000 that have printed in our lifetime, we typically only ever use around about 20,000. So we only ever know and therefore use about 20,000. However, on a day-to-day basis, because we talked about this earlier, we're a little bit lazy, aren't we, Schubert beings?
We sort of do things by default. We tend to use the same words over and over as repetition. So we use about 800 different words in one day. So when you bring those two things together, we have this natural persuasion towards the negative. Our language is very repetitive. That explains why most of our words and most of our language actually is made up of negative words. Okay, so what kind of phrases do you hear in dealerships that unintentionally veer to the negative then? Can we give you a couple of examples out of industry, for example? I don't know if this is true, but a delegate once told me that they were previous a hotel here, and they said, oh, there's a drink in our world that we call the sorry drink.
That sorry drink, what's that? He said, it's Pepsi. How is it called the sorry drink? He said, what typically say could I get a Coke, please? And the answer is, oh, sorry, we've only got Pepsi. So I guess that's quite a problem for Pepsi, that it's almost the second best, you know, Coke helps where you want to be. The best example I've heard recently, I went to a restaurant and it was their opening week. It was the Ivy down on the South Coast. And there was me and two friends and we pre-bocked, which is just as well, because it was packed. It was really busy. It was a beautiful day. The doors were all open.
And the waitress sat us down and she said, thank you for joining us at the Ivy. Unfortunately, we're really busy. So I'm sorry to tell you that this, this and this, we've already sold that in the kitchen. We've only got the other items remaining. So I think I'm a menu that might have been about 10 items. So unfortunately, we're really busy. And I'm sorry to tell you that we've already sold out of this, this and this. Now I talk about that when we're training and I say, what could she have said? Because there's no harm done that, right? That's okay. That isn't anything alarming. But wouldn't it have been better if she said, thank you so much for joining us.
You can see we're really, really busy. So we're glad to have you join us on our on our own week. Here's your menu. We have sold out of this, this and this. The good news is that right now, everything else is still remaining. What I'll do is I'll give you a couple of moments to get comfortable. I'll come back to take your drink order. And if you're ready to order food, I'll take your order there just to make sure that your first choice of what we have available is still remaining. So this idea is that we should, our base rate should be, should be here, or we can go really positive. We should never really dip down into the negative.
Okay. So do you have any examples in a dealership about how that can, we can use this to our advantage and sales? Lots, service advisors. I'm sorry. We'll have to pick on those for a moment because they, that's typically where we hear the most negative language. For example, I'm sorry to tell you your cars failed MOT, or I'm sorry to tell you that the technicians identified XYZ on the VHC. There's a really easy example of where we naturally use negative words. And for some reason, we think that we have to apologize in those situations, which when you think about it, let's take a car failing an MOT. A car is an enamina object subject to wear and tear.
By default, it's going to need things replacing. So why should we be sorry, or it's unfortunate I've got to tell you when we're explaining to the customer, it should actually be great news, because we've identified something about that car that may not have been, but for purpose, the car may not have been safe. Now, I'm not saying we take to a customer, great news. We found a few items on your car that you'd be placing, but this is what I'm saying about the baseline. The baseline should be your technicians carried out the MOT and it's failed on XYZ. The good news is, we've got those parts in stock. We can get them fitted this afternoon, the vehicle re-inspected a test issued and get the car back to you at 5.13 this afternoon.
Would you like us to go ahead? Yeah, I suppose they're kind of like harmless phrases that we use all the time that people might not see it as an issue or actually causing problems there at all. In fact, sometimes, are we taught to be too polite sometimes? Okay, I'm sorry, unfortunately, we're almost taught like at a young age to use those words to... An example of that, if you're if you're stood in the queue at the supermarket and a little old deer comes up behind and bangs the back of your legs with her trolley, we would turn around and go, oh, I'm sorry. I'm not saying you turn around and go, oh, you watch where you're going, but it's funny, you're right.
That's on natural default. Two people are talking and blocking the island at supermarket. You go, oh, I'm so sorry, could I squeeze through? Actually, it's just be, excuse me, to be right. We instinctively are quite apologetic all of the time. Yeah, is that really an issue there? I suppose it causes problems when you turn around and say, hey, listen, I'm sorry, unfortunately, a car has... It's almost like we're taking the blame for their car failing that emoji. Yeah, and if you think about the psychology focusing still on after sales, it's a distress purchase, we all know that. There isn't much fun in spending any money servicing cars. We need to get the customer in as high emotional state as possible.
We're never going to get them excited about spending money in after sales, like we could do at the purchase of a car. But if we're using really negative language from the offset, in terms of their mood, all it's doing is dragging them down. Actually, we need to give them some positivity about how we can fix that problem. Okay. Listen, we love a dramatic question here, so I'm going to throw one at you. In the sales side of it, what's some of the worst language? Now, I'm not talking about four letter words or anything like that, Stuart. What's some of the worst language that you hear salespeople make in the sales department? If we're focusing just on the job, so to speak, probably the worst phrase is around the trial close.
So a really common trial close is, for example, at 36 months, it's 597, 48 months, it comes all the way down to 423. So what do you think? Or some people think they're being really clever trying to introduce a bit of an LP, so they might go, how does that sound? How do you feel about that? But if we go back to what do you think? And again, we talk about this extensively on a training done, when we talk about sort of McDonald's and how much money they make from op-salins, all about the words and the language that they use. But when you say to a customer, what do you think? What have you asked them to do?
Ask them to think about it. And I'm pretty sure they're going to think of an objection, probably they want more money for their car, for example. So what do you think is actually a really dangerous question to be asking at that point? Again, sounds like a harmless thing. What do you think? What do you thought? How's that sound? And you know what, that hit me like a ton of bricks when I heard that, because the first eight years of my sales career, I used to say to every customer, hey, so what do you thought? What do you think? And be surprised or shocked when they say, well, it's definitely food for thought. We never buy a car on the day.
And I was causing the issue. Yeah, that happens all the time. Anything else specifically in the sales department, you hear all the time? Okay, from the strip it down to basics. And I guess this is this, this got beaten into me. How are you? Yeah, I'm not too bad. Not too bad. Isn't great. Now that applies to all of us in all communication. Thinking more about the job specifically, leave it with me, I'll see what I can do. Or I'll do my best. Now we hear that in sort of sales and after sales, but it just invites a lot of ambiguity. But sorry, I'm cutting off there. There's another one just jumped in there. Even when from receptionist, the phone in, can I speak to shirt wall banks?
I'll try. It's the same type of thing, isn't it? Sorry to cut off there, but I'm just here with those. So continue to give us a example. Let's say I'm engaged or unavailable. The receptionist will say, oh, I'm so sorry, he's unavailable. And that again, should we be apologizing? I'm not sure, we should be quite normal for me to be tied up doing something. You know, we spend most of our working days with our phones off because of the job that we do. So the answer would be quite simply, Stuart's currently unavailable. I'll take a message and he'll call you back at his earliest convenience. Whatever you might say. Well, yeah, this, I'm sorry, or I've tried.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It happens all the time. It's like also, you mentioned before, the phrase, what's the worst that can happen? I suppose that's going back to how we're wired as humans, isn't it? That's great. Yeah. Again, this natural persuasion towards the negative. Okay. Could this negative language bias? Can that affect internal communication as well in the dealerships, not just customer-facing? Yeah, definitely. I'm thinking of two things we've asked me that question, how the managers or the leaders of a business talk to their teams very much sets them up for success or not. So as trainers, at times we might critique an email or a video or a phone call. We do that a lot, don't we, in what we do.
And it'd be so easy to say, how could that have been better? That kind of implies it wasn't great as opposed to something that was really good. Why do you think the opportunity is to make it even better? So those small tweaks in terms of how the leaders and the managers communicate to their teams, but then also the language that we use, all of us typically gets copied. Would you agree? I'll tell you what I'm thinking. We train that we don't use the word trade. Trades are dirty word, it means cheap, right? If on the radio you heard an advert that said, tile giants got all trade prices this we can get yourself down, it means low, it means cheap.
So we talk about market value, for example, as opposed to trade price. But then in the offices where we're not custom-effacing, how many times are the management using the word? I'll get Bob the trader on the phone, let's see if he can give us a strong bid or such. Yeah, it's trade prices. Now, while the managers aren't saying to the customer, go and use that language, it's the words they've just heard. So quite naturally, they're probably going to repeat those words. Do you know, I'm thinking that Jacob has just said that's funny, his kids are growing up and they're starting to really expand their words. How many times have we said something we really shouldn't have said and a little four-year-old in the back repeats it.
They've learned a new word. So I guess again, that might just come from infancy. But we see that a lot where the communication, the words and the language that's used in the office where we think it's a safe environment, some of that negativity can find its way out onto the shop floor. So, Trades, we would always train. Don't say to a customer directly when you look into a buy car. Because we know a customer can say, oh, it's early days. First place of being just started the process. Now, if you want to find that information, firstly, I'd assume they're there to buy a car until you're not. But if you really need to find out, you might use Nick Sittle's approach.
Have you normally changed a car? Do you keep it for a certain amount of mileage or a certain amount of time? If it's time, how long do you normally keep your car for? Oh, three years. You look at their car, they've had it for 18 months. How do you change that earlier, Stuart? Why is the change earlier? Or mileage, an normally keep it to 60,000 miles. Okay. And your car's got 59,000 miles on it. We don't have to ask when they're looking to buy. So actually, I still hear so many times, business managers, transaction managers, sales managers say to a customer, so when they look in the buy, and again, that same phrase gets repeated directly.
A grain, another one, business managers listen to this. Yes, we want to know how the customer is funding the car. We never directly say to a customer, how you're funding the car, because every customer says, cash, then you're on the back foot. Where's the cash coming from? A savings account or loan account? You're almost calling the customer a liar. So we'd go down this something to the root. But again, business managers, how often you say to yourself, how they funding the car, whatever you say to yourself, your service advisor tends to be almost word for word. What they're going to say to your customer? Yeah. I suppose we need to watch the language everywhere, don't we, Stuart?
Yeah, you could go deeper with this in terms of positivity and and positive language. I personally don't believe in manifestation. That's not for me to say it doesn't exist. But there's people out there that strongly believe in manifestation. And it was on a podcast, Roxy Nafuzo, I think the ladies called who's sort of an expert in manifestation. And I very nearly didn't listen to the podcast because I just thought, that kind of isn't for me. But I'm glad that I did listen to it because she started off by saying, people manifest for the positive. I bet that some of you listening right now that don't believe in manifestation. And I'm thinking, yeah, that's me. It's that here's a thing, though, anything that's living.
So me, you, a cat, a dog, a tree outside, we're all atoms, right, that are most basic former atoms. And it is a fact that atoms resonate, they vibrate. And it is a scientific fact that positive atoms resonate faster, if you like, than negative atoms. And atoms are attracted to each other based on resonance. So to strip that back at almost basic level, positivity attracts positivity, negativity attracts negativity. Isn't it true, isn't it? If we have a positive mindset, positive disposition, we use positive language, we're always looking for the positive, positive things seem to happen. Whereas those are which are focused on, oh my goodness, what's the worst that's going to happen? Well, do you know what that customer looks like a tie kicker, he definitely isn't buying a car today.
Guess what goes out and talks to him is a tie kicker, he's not bought a car today, but he's almost manifested that all she has because of that negativity, as opposed to what we train, anyone approaches the business is that by car today. And the buying a car today, until they say no and mean no. And what we mean by that is we don't burn. But we understand that sometimes a bit of a smokescreen, you know, I'm just browsing its early stages, even though we they know that they're looking to buy a car today. So if we approach every situation positively, use positive language, then typically, better things happen. Yeah, I suppose I've never heard about the atoms, the positive and negative atoms that we're made up of.
It makes some sense. And I'm more simplistic, if you, I kind of find we find what we look for. Yeah. And we really do an episode that I train regularly with managers. If you turn around and say, that's crap, this is crap, that's crap. If you keep on finding everything, that's crap. Okay, you'll find a lot of crap. So the exercise I do is I get the guys out into wherever the training venue is. So have a look around the room and tell me how much color brown you can see, color brown. So everyone gets the brown in their head. I said, right, shut your eyes. Now you can focus where the brown is. Okay, cool.
Keeping your eyes shut, how much blue can you see? And very blue, not that much. There's a bit here, there's a blue car there. There's a blue shirt you're wearing. So right now, open your eyes, tell me how much blue you can see. And really enough, there's blue everywhere. Now, say, hey, guys, when I asked you to look for brown, did you turn beige into brown? So you could find more brown, invariably, they start laughing. So yeah, you know what, if you look for shit, you'll find shit. In fact, sometimes we'll turn shit into shit that's not shit. Okay. And I want to get your views on this. I see this happening all the time if you've got a technician or salesperson that's always late.
Okay, if you turn around, say, Johnny, you're always late, turn up to time. Okay, otherwise I'm going to have to sack you. Because you're always late. They might turn up on time. Because you're told them you're going sack them as they don't. But how long will it last when you keep on telling them, you're always late. You're always late. You're always late. Don't people live up to the reputation that they've given, good and bad? I like to listen to better talks for, and I like the Jim White, Simon Jordan. So it's typically on in the morning. So I listen to it in the evening, I'll catch up. And Simon Jordan, ex-crystal, Phallisona, he says, over, you've only got to get out of bed early a few times to convince everyone that you're an early riser.
Once they think you're an early riser, you can stay in bed as long as you want. It's kind of what you're saying, isn't it? Once you get a reputation or you give a reputation, Billy, you can never sell gap. What's wrong with you? You're the worst person in my team at selling asset protection. Billy ain't ever going to sell you any asset protection because you're the self-fulfilling prophecy, isn't it? Yeah, is it? How many top salespeople are top salesperson? Because they're told all the time, right, Darrell? You're the top salesperson. You're when the challenge, you'll do it again. They live up to a reputation they're given, good or bad. I don't have the stats on this.
But one of the books I read along the years said, something like 90% of people are in prison. Someone they looked up to, a guardian, a parent, a loved one said, but you'll end up in prison one day. And it becomes that self-fulfilling prophecy. You'll end up in prison. You'll end up in prison. And it really does. So I suppose we've got to be careful the language we use with our salespeople. If our sales teams, our service advisor teams, believe they're the number one. They do things the best. I suppose that's going to rub off from the customers, isn't it? Absolutely. So it's, I mean, we've covered two things there. It's positive behavior. It's looking for the positive.
But I've just made a mistake. The word bought, there's a dangerous word. Simon always a sensational trainer, but arguably the more positive I was before I said the word bought, the more negative the next statement becomes. So Stuart, your car's lovely, but so people say to me, I use, I use, we use the word bought all of the time. It's kind of a word we use to link sentences. So people say to me, so what word would you use instead of bought? And the only word people can find is and. Simon is a sensational trainer and Stuart, that's a lovely car you've got there and and is a really positive replacement for the word bought.
So it's positivity, focus on the positive, focus on what people do well, what the language that we use, the words that we use sort of, sort of underpin all of that. Yeah, it's quite interesting to talk about language and how we change it. Let's just talk about how we present a balance to change a monthly figure and also the trading price. Do we actually mention the numbers or not? So I'm going to take the the figure 17,386. Okay, we're going to use that figure completely different if it's a part exchange price, a trading price. Great news is the market value in your car is 17,386 dollars or pounds or euros whenever you are. If it's a balance to change, okay, great news that word to a balance change is 17,386.
It's the same numbers but it's how you say it. If it's the payment, the monthly payment, by the way 17,386, that would be a very big monthly payment. Okay, but the monthly payments was 635. If you say your monthly payments are 635 pounds, the word payment, the people want another payment in their life. I don't want another payment. I've got enough of those. Actually, that works out at 386 a month or whatever the figure was, 335 a month. Those, how you mentioned those figures there in a sales environment, they really do change things all the time, don't they? Yeah, so in terms of accentuating it, pounds and pence, the only numbers you want to sound big primarily is customers, products, chains, the market value for their car, any incentives or discounts, and any finance contributions or FDA's that we might be getting from the finance house on a four square when we train that really the only three figures that you would ever find that you really want to make sounds as big as possible.
And you're right, everything else is simply said is a numerical value. It's just a number. Yeah, yeah, so true. And you just hear that all the time where salespeople get that made, they could do a lot better. Okay, to use the positive language that we're talking about there. Okay, they definitely should. Now, also, while we're talking about some of these different phrases that we hear all the time, okay, if you say to a customer, so I'm running late, I'm running late, for me, it implies that you're sloppy, you're not on time, I bought this car, I'm picking up my lovely new Range Rover Sport and they're late. But you know what, in dealerships, you're going to be late sometimes.
What I'm putting the call is a hatless on running behind schedule. In one-fow swoop, one phrase is almost like they're sloppy, they've got things wrong. Running behind schedule, we're a professional organization that runs behind schedule there. It is, again, that language there takes making difference all the time, doesn't it? Yeah, I give you an example. You've, somebody's called in, a customer's called in and they've spoken to the host and to get to speak to the person that they've called for may take several minutes. If when they connect, there's no apology for the wait. That's just quite rude. Now, in your world, you know, time moves quite quickly, but when a customer's on hold on the phone, seconds feel like minutes.
So what would be better, you would think, would be thank you for holding. But I think all that does is reinforce the, yeah, you should be grateful, up and on hold for five minutes. How much more powerful is thank you so much for your patience? Yes, I have been patient, haven't I? It's these small tweaks when we really focus on the words that we use. They make a massive difference. Yeah, this is an endless subject and we're always in the danger of giving one of our training courses. Okay, on those hard cars there. But again, guys, go and have a look at words that sell cars. There's a whole chapter, dedicate all these words that you shouldn't, shouldn't use there.
Okay, listen, go on our sales fitness programs. We talk about all of this sort of stuff there. But still in wrapping up there, okay, I just want to ask you, what's three practical takeaways? Someone listening to this could go back and put into a dealership, an implement tomorrow. What's up, Danoon? Listen to yourself. We talk a lot about active listening and that refers to listening to all the people. What do we actually truly listen to the words that we use? I know that the listeners having listened to this podcast the next time they're going, oh, I'm sorry, I think I'm going to go back and go, Danoon, probably the need to use that word. So really listen to the words that you use.
Secondly, it starts at the top and I'm thinking inside the businesses here, the owners, the drivers, the management team, it's upon those to make sure that they create that positive culture, which as we've discussed is underpinned with positive language. And number three is remember the self-talk cycle. We talk about this a lot of training, don't we, do we affect emotion and that does affect the outcome? So remember the self-talk cycle. Yeah, absolutely. Sure. Thank you so much, there's a real-to-do appreciation. Thanks, Simon. All right, and see you next time. 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.
