What’s your memory like?
Hermann Ebbinghaus first introduced the idea of the Forgetting Curve over 100 years ago.
This theory states that we are lucky to remember or retain 10% of knowledge taught.
Now that’s not good if you run a sales training company !
Our job is to get as much stuff into the people who are training for you as possible.
Now as a company, we’ve been told that we have an 82% retention for the stuff we teach the guys after a training session – and that was 90 days after the training itself!
How are we hitting that target?
In this episode I offer some tips and tricks to help you achieve this level of knowledge retention!
(Just don’t tell our competitors, right?)
Here are the highlights:
(03:37) Repetition
(04:10) What was your name again?
(08:09) SPACER
(11:51) Sales Fitness
(14:21) Making the link
(20:06) Memory Tagging
(23:39) Memory pegs and Association
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 inspiring 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 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 and welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. Today we're going to be talking about how do we get so much information into a sales person or a service advisor, a sales manager, a dealer principal's head. Listen, you've probably all heard before about any training course. You're likely to retain what is it, 10% or something like that. In fact, there's a famous guy called Ettinghouse, I believe his name was, and he talks about the forgetting curve. Now on the forgetting curve, after seven days, I think the figure was 10%. You're likely to remember 10% or retain 10% knowledge. Now that's not good if you're on a sales training company. Okay? Our job is to get as much stuff into the people who are training for you as possible. In fact, I'm going to blow my own trumpet here for a second. We work with a manufacturer or an OEM in Ireland and they target us that we have to have an 80% retention of the stuff we teach the guys after a training course, which is pretty much straightforward. I'm really proud to tell you we got 82%. I know what you're thinking. So what, 82%, that's not that much better than the 80% that they target you on. Here's the thing. We did the 82% retention 90 days after training course, not like it normally happens. You know what it's like. You've been on that training course where before the course, they give you a little bit of a test on what you know. They do the course. At the end of it, they do the test. You've got a return of what? Two days at most. In fact, I did one of these naughty boy speed awareness courses. It was actually driving lunch at care and attention. I think it was. I hit my brake pedal really hard and there was a police motorcycle behind me. So I had to go on to one of these naughty boy courses. Now right at the beginning, they give you this little test. What do you know? And then it was all on Zoom, I think, was two hours afterwards. At the end of it, they tested you again. Now I'm guessing they're doing that to make sure they can go back to the government and say, listen, this guy's been on a naughty boy training course. This is what his knowledge was to start with. This is what it was after we've trained him. So he's going to be a lot better, safer, driver now. I'm sure that's how they get paid as well. So most courses, they do it immediately after the course. But we got this in 90 days and I'm super, super proud about that. So how did we do it? Well, actually, throughout our training, if you've ever been on any of our training courses, you'll know that we use lots of tricks and ideas to get people to remember as many things as they possibly can. There's big flash words called neuro-linguistic programming. There's anchors. Have you been on a training course? You might know that I'll say things like, hey, listen, what was where that car? They put it on your shopping list. And hey, listen, that's just not feasible. Or how flexible can you be? And there's these weird clicks, which, okay, tell you, probably a bit annoying. No, I know it's a bit annoying. But there's a few key words we're trying to anchor in to get into people's heads. Also, we talk about repetition. Repetition. But a few key bits that really, really works. Let's take a quick example. You can go back and put it in place today, now, straight away. Who's struggling remembering people's names? Yeah, I'm one of those guys. I really struggle remembering people's names. I can remember I was a young salesperson. I must have been 18, 19, something like that. And because I was young, I kept on saying, yes, certainly, sir. No problem, sir, this way, sir. I got to the end of selling him a car. I can remember the car. I can see his face this day. I forgot his name. Now, we all know how to get around that one, though. So no problem. I just need to fill out the paperwork. How do I spell your surname? Isn't it embarrassing when they say, S-M-I-T-H? Yeah, sorry. Oh, I did this one. So I just need your license to fill out the paperwork. Because once I got the license in my hand, I know that I've got everything I need to fill out the inquiry form back there. Well, actually, it would have been the order form back in those days. And I looked up and he had a huge grin on his face. He said, Simon, you can't even remember my name, can you? And the wittiest I've ever been in my life, because I'm not naturally a witty person. I said, no, sir, I'm about to give you a name if you don't give me that bloody license. Which, when he started laughing, he said, yeah, listen, the name is the most important part of any sales presentation. I can't remember this bit, but I think he was an insurance salesperson. Might be in the state agent, something like that. Okay. I said, yeah, I know, but I struggle remembering people's names. Okay. And a bit of advice he gave me, he said, well, the first one, the shortest pencil will always be the longest memory. I should have jotted it down straight away. Okay. And that was some good advice. But here's the other bit that really hit home for me. He said, here's a process. And he taught me, this is a customer teaching me how to do this. He said, repeat their name three times in the first 10 seconds. It sounds like a lot, but it's not really. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't introduce myself. I'm Simon, you are Andrew. Ah, Andrew, why are you here today? Are you looking for an X or a Y? Andrew, what was about the Y that put it on your shopping list? So there's your three times in the first 10 seconds. That really helps. But then one that really cements it for me is he said, most people's names are a repeat of something else. So if I want to remember Andrew, I would picture some other Andrew, I know. In fact, my eldest boy, his middle name is Andrew. So I might picture that when I look at his face. Okay, you might mention, I don't know, or think of Prince Andrew. Or maybe not, let's not go there. But some other Andrew that you know, okay, to remember it. So when you see that person's face, just picture that other person. Now, of course, you don't need to know them personally. Some character from some movie or in a book that you've read or a TV program. It'll work just as well. So use that there, okay, to try and remember it. Also, here's the other trick. This is how we got 82% retention, 90 days afterwards. Okay, we use lots of acronyms, or sorry, they're not acronyms. They're called mnemonics, aren't they? Give an example for the, when we're qualifying a customer, we say we need to make sure we always qualify the customer's man. Now man is an acronym, mnemonics. I'm never sure which one that is. You guys will tell me, whenever I get something wrong in these podcasts, everyone likes rights in it and says, oh, you got it wrong. But it's man stands for money, authority, needs and wants. Okay, so money, authority, needs and wants. So the salesperson sits there and thinks, right, I'm speaking to the customer. I need to find out about their money, their money. What qualifying do we need to do around that? Authority. It's anyone else going to be involved in the choice of color of the car, or maybe accessories on the car. And then that needs and wants. Hey, what was about that car? They put it on your shopping list. And listen, what do you like most about your car? What don't you like about it? Why are you looking at a change? To help identify the customer's needs and wants. When it comes to presenting a car, we have another acronym, okay, called Spacer. Some of you guys might have heard precise before, Spacer is just an acronym that stands for S is for safety. So is the customer interest in the safety on their car? Do they have child seats on the back? Are they asking about the isofix child seats? So I'm going to be talking about not just the isofix child seats, but all of the safety on that particular car. The NCAP five safety rating, the active lane departure warning systems, all that stuff. Because that person might be interested in safety. But Mr. Boy Racer, 18 years old, okay, interested in how fast the car goes in reverse. Are they really interested in safety? Maybe not. They might be more interested in the performance. My eldest boy on his 17th birthday, he was saving his money up for his own car. Insurance for people in Australia, America, you won't realize there's this, but insurance costs are extraordinary in the UK. People in Ireland, you know how expensive it can be in Ireland as well. It's really, really expensive. So to ensure a car, all he could afford was a one-liter car. As a dad, I was quite happy with that anyway. So I want him to be nice and safe. But when he looked at the car, he looked at a little Citroen C1. One of our clients helped us out with this. Thank you, Mr. Andrew Wakeland, who really appreciate that. But he wanted the one with the taco on the side of the instrument cluster. It had to have the alloy wheels on it. I mean, guys, this is a one-liter car. I don't think it does zero to 60 times, but performance was still something he was interested in. So S is safety, P is performance. Another P is practicality. Speak to my wife about her car. She's always talking about range anxiety. Can she get to Edinburgh from Cheshire and see her mother without having to stop and charge? She's worried about, can you get mountain bikes on the roof rack of the car there? Because we've got, well, two teenage boys, one's moving out of home now, but it's like mountain bikes are important because that's what we like to go and do as a family there. Can we get enough stuff in the back of the car? Can we do the rubbish tip run and all that sort of stuff and fold all the seats back down and get enough in there? That's all the practicality of the car. SPA stands for the aesthetics of the car. And again, if you're on any of our training courses, I can never work out how to spell aesthetics of the car. So I call it appearance, which, if I'm brutally honest, I don't think I can spell that either. Okay, SBA C is the comfort of the car. E is the economy and that's high up on lots of people's agendas. People coming from diesels to hybrids and they want to know all about the economics of the car. Now the economy, if they go EV, of course, it's not the fuel they're putting in, but it is still important to them because what power tariff are they going to be on? How much is it still going to cost them there? SBA C, E is, and then all we've got the R4, reliability. But do me a favor, this is just all about memory today. We talk about that, okay, to help the salespeople remember when they're presenting the car, they're presenting the right feature to the right customer at the right time. And they're not feature dumping, okay? And listen, when you talk about qualifying a customer, make sure you just don't put people into one box with Spacer. I want to talk about memory today. But here's the other, and by the way, we use lots and lots of those tricks throughout our training to get people to remember man and Spacer and the four fundamentals. When you walk into a car, we say, right, remember four, four time, four, four, four things for value-added products, four things for urgency on the customer's car. So when we're going out there, there's little memory tricks and ideas to remember four, four. But here's the real way that we get people to remember so much. Now, if you're one of our competitors, listen to this, wondering, no, how we got 82%, the real key is sales fitness. You see, we drip feed the knowledge in, regulate because the human brain cannot absorb everything we cover on a two or three-day training course and remember it all. No one's can, or should I say, very, very few people can, okay? So what we do is imagine that salesperson, that service advisors, brain is like a sponge. I've got a whole lot of water and I throw it on the sponge, okay, to get all that water in the sponge. If I just throw it on in one hit, like in a two-day course, a one-day course, okay, a three-day course, the water's gonna fall on the desk and the floor and everywhere. What we do is we slowly drip feed it in. That's where we send people a little training segment, a little video every day for the first 90 days after their program. And because we're dripping in slowly and we're layering the knowledge, that's where people get an 80% retention and it's really simple for us. If people can remember more stuff, they'll use more of it and they use more of it. They're more likely it's gonna help them sell a car and improve the service environment and they'll get a better result. And if they get a better result, guess what? The person who pays the bill will get us to use us again and again. But we can go a bit deeper on this and there's something else that we do throughout our training programs and advertisers do this all the time. The way they get people to remember things is there's three key things really, okay? Number one is we remember things that are different. Take one of the highest returns on investments, one of the TV commercial ever. It's a gorilla playing the drums to piece of music. What with advertising? You're right, you got it, it was Cabry's Chocolate. Do you know that first aired? I think it was something like 19 years ago. But we tend to remember it because how many gorillas have you seen playing the drums? Not that many, so it sticks in your head. Also, they linked up to a famous piece of music, okay? I can feel it coming there tonight. Doesn't music take you back to a point in your life when you first hear something, okay? I've said before, Cheryl Crow, all I wanna do is have some fun. Whenever that piece of music comes on, I'm immediately transported back to Townsville, North Queensland, where a good friend of mine, Pat Casey said, should we travel around the world? Yeah, let's do it, let's do it. That piece of music come on. I was like, that's an omen, we gotta do it now. And I'm always transported back to that, okay? So if you come on our training programs, we try and make them different. Listen, no disrespect to any other training company out there, okay? I'm not one of these guys that knock other trainers. I know there are people out there that say, what, I don't like you does this, I don't like that. The world of trainers, we all have huge egos, but I really don't knock other training company. I've learned so much from everyone. I say, I take a bit of everything from there. But our training courses, we try and be different because we find that lots of people think manufacturer based training courses are boring. As soon as that PowerPoint comes up, people go, oh no, here we go, death by PowerPoint. In fact, in the lockdown, the very first lockdown and the pandemic, we had to transition everything online. A lot of people say, oh, I don't like Zoom training. Don't like Zoom training. We have so many of our clients now saying, this is still really interactive. How do you make it so interactive? Well, I'm in the studio that we do the training now. If you're watching this, we still have a flip chart here. We still get up and about and move around. We have a huge plasma on the end of the studio wall here. I think it's a look at it now, 75 or 70 or whatever size. So we can see everyone's faces there, but we make it different. So it's not death by PowerPoint. On our traditional stand up training courses as well, okay? No one will fall asleep on our training courses because we try and make it different to death by PowerPoint. In fact, so many times, and of course, we haven't even opened up the workbook until about one or two o'clock in the afternoon or day one. How does that happen? Because we're going out of way to make it different and sticky and get things into people's heads, okay? So difference one way. Number two, the way that we tend to remember things is when we laugh. Don't advertise this, do this all the time. There's a funny little joke or something like that at the end of it. Because when we laugh, apparently endorphins flow. That stuff to flow to make you feel good. So many TV and radio commercials have that funny, a little joke there. Ah, that's funny. Again, you've come on our training course. You know what? We will use humor. We will get people laughing, okay? I'll do everything to get people involved and laugh. Now, I'm going to tell you, I'm not a naturally witty person. Not at all, okay? And some of the jokes. If you come on one of our training courses, again, you'll hear the same little jokes, whatever. The same little stuff. Because I know when we laugh in dwarfs and flow and people tend to remember it. The way it was explained to me, it's like a, you get a person down the pub that could spit out joke after joke after joke. I can never do that. But as soon as they start saying the joke, oh, I remember that one. No, remember this one. No, no, no, remember that one. And the third way appetizers gets to remember things is the phrase, and you've probably heard it before, sex cells. You've heard that, okay? Now, again, I think this come from someone called Ogilvy. And it's been changed over time, but apparently, he said, we as humans are bred to breed. Have a look at some of the Christmas time adverts that come up. John Lewis is a department store in the UK. And every year they have a Christmas advert. They were always a famous piece of music, sung by someone different, a bit differently. So it sticks into people's heads, okay? But they were already a, always a bred to breed type advert. They're talking about how we as humans. Oh, in fact, let's think about some of them. There was one of them. You're always a woman to me. It was a Billy Joel song, famous song, sung by someone else differently, but you knew the tune. And was this little girl growing up into an adolescent, okay? Then getting married, then being a mother, and then a grandmother. It was a growing up. There was a keen song sung by Lily Allen. I think that one was the bear, and it was a bunny rabbit. And the bunny rabbit was looking after the bear. It was that parental type looking after. The man on the moon, the man on the moon, I believe was meant to signify the grandfather figure, and was a granddaughter, but again, a famous piece of music. So no training courses. We do use humor. We are different. We use anyone knows sometimes to get people laughing and giggling. Look at every perfume commercial that's happening at Christmas time right now. They spend fortunes on these many movies. So we do that to get people to remember things as well. But also is the last bit. We do a lot of memory tagging. Let's say you've got a sales process. Call it your road to a sale, the steps of the sale. It's 10 stages. It doesn't matter. And you want people to remember those 10 stages when they're under pressure. I'll say, right, give me the 10 stages of your sales process. And they go, we meet Greek people, and then we put a deal in front of them. No, you do a few steps before that, don't you? And because I'm putting them under pressure, it just goes out the window. And they say, oh, yeah, I know that. I know that. Okay. And then we talk about memory tagging. You see, I started learning to fly a little line aircraft. Must be 20 years ago, something like that now. And coming into land, my instructor, Chris Cople, taught me that we had to do some downwind checks before we land. Now these are checks that you can't read through a check list. You have to know I'm off by heart inside out, back to front. I kept on getting them wrong. And he said, listen, I want you to read a book on memory skills. Okay. And memory tagging. Now, here's the thing. Is that bad my memory is? Do you know, I can't remember the book that he recommended on memory. That's how bad my memory is. Okay. But on memory tagging, they talked about putting 10 different memory hooks on your body. Okay. So my toes number one, number two is my heel, three is my knee, four of the parts, five is a belly, six, a little up handle, seven is the heart, eight is my mouth, nine is my eyes, tens are topping my head. And we put them on in a stupid way. Now, and we can't do the whole lot now, but we talk about how good people's memories are. We talk about the different ways people remember things. Five steps. We remember firsts and lasts. Do you remember the first car you sold? Of course you do. Remember the last car you sold. Yep. But you don't remember all the other ones, do you? No, but we remember first and last. That's one way we remember things. Another way we remember things is repetition. So great way to remember things. Okay. If things are repeated again and again and again, tends to sink into a head. Think about doing the times tables in primary school. Spelling exercise, spelling beads, that just repetition, repetition. Another way we tend to remember things, we remember things that are different. Do you remember that first car you sold? Yep. You remember the last car you sold? Yep. Wasn't the same one, was it? Maybe if you brand you. But you don't remember all the other cars you sold. But don't you remember that customer that was different? I had a lady once. I was in Townsville, North Queensland, and she said, the numbers are said, yes, I have to go ahead with it. I said, sorry? The numbers are speaking to me. I'm a witch love. I don't normally get that to this day. I'm a bit scared. Okay. But remember that one, because it was so different to the norm. Okay. So first and last, okay, repeated, different. Then we remember things that are linked. So we'll talk about a thing of 20 different things people need to remember. Okay. And I'll say shirt and tie, gay shoes and socks. As soon as people think shirt, the tie comes through because it's linked. If they're selling the Audi range, okay? Towards the end of our say, things I want you to remember is an Audi A1. And then an A4 and an A6. And I do it in ascending order. Most car sales people, especially if they come from that franchise, they remember all those because they're linked. And last one is we do lots of association. See, in this book that I can't remember, said our recall is absolutely the key to remembering things. Our recall, not remembering it. Our memory's perfect. We need some way to recall it. So we then go and put 10 memory pegs on our body. Now, if you want to remember the downwind checks, the light aircraft, okay? Firstly, go and get an instructor to do it properly. Okay. But these 10 memory pegs that I've now mentally put on my body, is just 10 different buckets of memory. And number one, you need to land with the brakes being off. Landing with a morn is really hard. So the brakes are light aircraft on your toes. So right on my toes, sitting here doing this podcast, I'm imagining pushing the brakes on my plane. Guys, the number one breaks off. Number two, the undercarriage is down. Okay, landing with that up, that's not gonna be pretty. Okay, so the undercarriage is down and to prove it's down, you got three green lights. Okay. And here's the thing. My plane I'm flying at the moment, the undercarriage, in fact, sorry, every plane I've ever flown, the undercarriage is welded down, it's bolted down. But my first instructor still got me to touch a screw on the panel to say that undercarriage is down. So why are we doing this? He said, at some point in your life, you're gonna fly a plane where the undercarriage does go up. Unless you get in the habit now of doing it, if you get in the habit of never checking it and then you start flowing that plane, that's when things can go wrong. So I wanna teach you from day one to do your downward checks in the right way. So breaks off, undercarriage is down. Next one is mixture is rich. Oh, by the way, there's some pilots screaming at the podcast now saying, I was taught bumpfish or whatever you are. Again, that's an acronym. Oh, I think it's an acronym, I'll go check that word there. My education wasn't the best, but breaks are off. Undercarriage is down, mixture is rich. So bumpfish or there's lots of different ones. Chris Cobble told me memory tagging. So it's breaks are off, undercarriage is down. The mixture is rich. Next one, the fuels on, the fuel pump is on and the carburetor heat is selected. So it's hot. Then the altimeter is set. Now, if you're watching this video, I'm still touching the different areas, the different memory hooks on my body. And again, I've been flying for so many years now. Yesterday, being Sunday, I was doing an aerobatic flight with a new instructor I've not flown with before. I was doing some advanced arrows, which I wanted to get my head around. And again, as I'm coming into land, I'm still going breaks off, undercarriage down, touching the different areas. You must have thought I'm mad, but it works because it sticks in my head. And then you need to make sure the altimeter is set, cure fee, which is the height above the airfield. You need to make sure that you're secure, your passengers are secure. Okay. Then it's going to be golf in the echo down window or whatever the registration number is on the aircraft. So I have those memory pegs. We do the same for the salespeople on the sales process. And they'll remember the 10 stages, the road to a sale, inside out, back to front, upside down, without ever being able to forget it. So number one, we talk about their attitutors. Right now, this won't work for you now, but go and look at some of this memory stuff if you really need to. But this is how we get 82% retention 90 days afterwards. Okay. When number one on their memory pegs, we'll say attitude. We put a set of scales mentally in their mind on their toe for attitude. Don't know why that works? Works for me for good attitude, bad attitude. Meet and greet, think of your feet. That's number two. Okay. Number three is needs and wants, that's the need. We call that qualification. Number four is the part exchange appraisal. Okay. In the UK and Ireland, they call a trade-in, a part exchange. On our memory tags, we might be on our part. Sounds a bit rude and naughty, but guess what? It tends to work. Then that needs to be the presentation. We morphed them into a tele-tubby. Then it's a demonstration. Love handles to turn into steering wheel. Then do they love the car? That's called a trial closed at the heart. Then they negotiate with the mouth. They use their mouth to negotiate. Then we're going to close the sale and we close our eyes. If we can't, we follow them up. Now listen, that just works on the 10 stages we try and get into them for that particular dealer group or manufacturer we're working with. We use lots of these other memory tags. So I just thought I'd give you a bit of an insight to what we do as a training company. It's not just presenting the information, hoping they've got it and they've gone. It just doesn't work like that. For you to get your sales people, your service advisors to do all these things, it needs to come out of their mouth without even thinking. It's not just to pass a test. This needs to be something that they're doing day in day out. So when someone turns around and says, I want to think about it, I'll go a lot better price down the road. Okay? Oh, grandmai-ga, I'm not taking that for it. Whenever they get that objection, okay, without thinking, the response needs to be there on how to deal with it. And that happens if they're using it all the time. Anyway, guys, I hope that helps this time on a few different memory ideas there. By no means am I the master of this. If you come on now, training course, you'll notice we don't use tent cards for the naming of all our sales people. We'll use everyone's names. Okay, I don't get it right all the time, but normally if there's a room of 20 people, I remember everyone's name and they say, wow, how do you do that? It's just these techniques. Okay, and what's quite funny, after that training course, it tend to go out of my head anyway, because my memory is not the best. I have to do these things to be able to remember as much as I can. Anyway, listen, I hope that helps. This is, again, another one of those episodes there that send it through to all yourselves people, okay? And urge them to go and look at different ways to improve the memory. Anyway, that about doesn't now speak again next week. 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, food linked in. Thank you.
