Fresh off the plane from the 2025 NADA conference in New Orleans, Simon talks about his take aways from NADA, and why we attend year on year. There was such a lot to discuss, so this is the first instalment with another to follow the week after.
This year’s conference was definitely one to remember, with snow storms and flight cancellations delaying the start. Anyone attending was glad to get there in the end!
We always come back from the convention with new contacts made, fresh ideas and the motivation to implement them.
Here are the highlights:
{08:40} Plan
{16:42} Ryan Leak
{27:47} Chasing failure
{30:32} Joe St. John & Kerri Wise
{39:50} Decision Fatigue
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 and welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. Has we're different this time and people who are watching this on YouTube or something like that as opposed to just listening to it on a traditional podcast, you'll see behind me this is all about the NADA show, the Nada show with some people call it 2025.
I just want to give you a bit of a rundown of what we see in the show, what was good, what was bad, a lot of people, a lot of clients say to me, hey Simon, you go to the Nada show all the time. Why do you go for it? So I started thinking about how many of these shows have I been to. There's a man called Brian Milstead that introduced me to the first NADA show and I believe that one was San Francisco back in I think it would have been 1999. Why do I mean something like that is before 2000, the very first one. I'd heard about this show from my one of my good bosses in Australia, a man called Tony Island from Tony Island Holden.
He came back from one show and he was raving about it. I was a brand new salesperson. Tony himself was doing lots of training with me and he was going through all the notes he had from the show and one that really stood out is buying a selling a dealership, how to do it, how to get the best valuation from it. At the time, Tony had bought Tony Island Holden, he was looking at acquiring other businesses. That didn't really float my boat at that point but went, wow, they actually have training courses on how to value business, succession planning. He went through all the stuff on parts and service. Now, I was in the sales side of it.
He then went into some sales side of it and he said there's a man that he seen out there called Tom Stuka and thought he was really, really good. Now bear in mind, I want to go back in time here. I started the motor trade in 1989, I think it would have been. So, it's going back a while and he was raving about this man called Tom Stuka. Little did I realize all these years later, in 2025, I considered Tom a friend. I see him at the NADA show every single year. He meets up with a good guy called Patrick Tessier that runs the Australian Automotive Dealers Association. So, I've been going to it lots and people say, well, what do you actually get from it?
And that's a good question. If I'm brutally honest, I probably should only go back once every sort of three or four years and see what the trends are and what's new and what's exciting coming through that. I suppose I go every year now because there's a group of people I meet up with and there's as much a social side of it as it is going to the show. Now, having said that, you do get lots of dealers turning up just for the social side of it and sure, listen, that's fine. But we got a group of friends that we catch up with because we hit the show hard every year. I really love to go to as many of these breakout sessions as I possibly can to get as much information as I can.
I suppose the way I sum it up, there's two things I get from it. Number one, what I get from it is a aha moment. Aha, that sounds good. Aha, I like the idea of that. Aha, that's quite cool. And every so often, I've seen those aha moments. I remember when I first seen a video in the sales process. Now, I'm going back sort of 15 years ago. That was aha, I like the idea of that. I've preached about video everywhere before Stiette now come along to the UK market and so forth. I seen some of the early AI models. I thought, aha, that's really cool. I remember some of that stuff and, by the way, some of the early AI stuff was crap.
Hasn't it got a whole lot better? I thought, aha, that's the future, that's coming. When I've seen lots of the systems there, there's lots of aha moments. But the other side I get from it is lots of, oh yeah moments. Oh yeah, we used to do that. Oh yeah, that makes sense. Oh yeah, why did we stop doing that? So I suppose at our business, because we run a sales training company, we're just going to look for lots of different ideas. And I call a lot of it R&D. You may have heard an R&D called Research and Development. I call it Rob and Duplicate. I go and have a look at lots of good ideas, lots of stories, and we come back and we put that into our training programs.
We believe as a training company, we need to remain cutting edge. I don't remember working for a training company in the UK. And the very first training company I worked in the UK, I was so excited about working for a training company, because I thought their training must be sensational if these guys are training people all the time. I got disappointed because I realized very quickly that actually the training company wasn't doing any training themselves. So we like to go on training courses as much as we can to find out what's fresh, what's new, what's exciting. People have been listening to podcasts for a long time. You'll see, I end up interviewing lots of people from David Anderson, which I'd love to Sean V.
Bradley, Jennifer Suzuki. What's these big name speakers that you hear about in the American sales training market? I've normally spoke to these people at an NAG conference, an ARDA conference. I thought, yeah, I like them, that'll work. I've got to say, sometimes I go out there. I think, yeah, that speaker might be better for the American market, but I don't think I'll suit our market there. So that's one of the reasons why I'd just love to go to the show. The other reason, if I'm brutally honest, it gives me time just to work on the business, not in the business. It's one of the few times a year that for people who work for themselves and the investors in listening to this, you know, it's like, I don't value, but I never kind of switch off.
I'm always thinking about that client, what can do with this program? How do we improve that? Online model, how do we get that right? What do we need to do? And we all do. When you work for yourself, that's what you do. Senior managers, you do that yourself as well for the department, the business that you're running. The NAGA show, it gives me time just to work on the business, not in the business. And what I love more than anything is what I call walking the halls. I try and do it by myself. I try and walk around the halls and I go to lots of the different vendors selling software solutions, selling keytacking, tracking devices from, I don't know, when cars roll in and they measure the tire and they measure, I remember seeing some of that stuff from Hunter years ago thinking, wow, how cutting edge is that?
And it just gives me time to work on the business, not just in the business. So that's why this has been my NAGA. It's got to be my, I think it's 25 of them, might have been 26 of them. I know I missed a couple during COVID times, but the show wasn't on. And I missed one after the first COVID, but on that, I've been pretty much to all of them. And will I be in Las Vegas next year? Yeah, I'll be there again. And half the times, you know what, I'll listen to a speaker. Yeah, okay, I'm going to walk out of this little session, not because it's not good. It's just that I've seen them two years ago and their message is still very strong.
But I've got that. I want to go to something new. So how does it work for a NADA newbie? If you want to go to Las Vegas next year to get the most out of it, do your planning before you get there? There will be an app that comes out and there are some keynote sessions where they start off and they have some big note speakers in these keynote sessions. Some of the people I've seen over the years is amazing, okay? You get people like a solly, the man who landed the plane on the Hudson. We had a chance to listen to him and the whole story about how he actually did it. You'll listen to them.
Some people might have seen, catch me if you can, the move where Leonardo DiCapco is a, tends to be a pilot. The real guy comes and tell us the backs ground of that story and actually some of the stuff he did in the real world is better than what's in the movie. I remember one thing he said that if for those of people who listen to the movie, he hired a security guard uniform. He sat outside a night safe. You might remember those night saves, those big brass metal things on the side of the bank that you could book the takings from a retail shop in overnight. He sat there with a clipboard and a piece pen and said, well, I'm sorry, the night save is broken at the moment.
Give me your money. I'll take your details and leave. He said, that's the one he made the most money out of, okay? So you listen to these people at him, Hillary Clinton. Lots of big politicians will come along there. Bill Clinton, George Bush, they've come along and done some of the keynote speaking, okay? Some of the great football and coaching and basketball legends. Some of these people that I might not even know the names of these guys because I don't understand American football. But there's this guy called Coach Sibil I mentioned and was in a movie, Blind Side, that has got Sandra Bullock in it. But actually the coach in it is Coach Sabian, I think it is, sorry.
We've actually seen the coach giving his philosophy on what he does. We actually got the guy that was at Blind Side. Lots of these different things. It's just amazing the keynote speakers, okay? But then you have the little breakout sessions. And the breakout sessions, you can't go to all of them. Without an exaggeration, there might be something like 150, 200 little breakout sessions from what's the motor trade going to look like in 2035. You'll have discussion groups on how AI is going to change the motor trade. You'll have discussion groups on things like is the franchise model, still the right model. They'll talk about legislation in different states in America. A lot of the stuff you'll think will hold on how relevant is it to the UK market.
Most of it is. Sometimes you've got sift through things and say, well, that doesn't really translate into our market. One of the things that always gets me is the American motor trade in some places seems to be so far ahead. In some instances, I think they tend to be behind. One of the sessions on the internet goes through and review with you. They talked about the number of deals the average salesperson does in the American market. And it shocked me when they said it was actually 8.9. That's what the average car salesperson in America sells. Now, some of you is in the Irish and the Australian and the UK motor industry. Listen, listen, listen, it's thinking, what?
How is that so low? Speaking to lots of people out there, I think their world is different. They have a lot bigger dealerships than what we tend to have in Europe. They're staffing. They still have a lower basic and a higher commission, where in a lot of European markets, we've gone to a higher basic and kind of less commission. Actually, it's kind of cheap for American dealer to fill up a sales department with salespeople. Why wouldn't you if they're cheap? Put as many as you can on there. That's where there's some differences there. There's one session I went to. The guy quite rightly was talking about, if we can get people from selling an average of 8.9 cars, if we can just get them up to 15, then 16, then 70 cars a month on average, what does it do to your bottom line?
Easily, it's half a million extra because you've got the same cost base. Some of the stuff you just need to sift through the data and see does it fit in our market. But I've got to see, most of the stuff I've learned on stock turn. Use car sell by dates. Highlighting the cars going in over age cars. People like Tommy Gibbs. Tommy Gibbs is one of the best trainers ever on use car stock turn. We've had him on the podcast. You've got Dale Pollock. This guy here is one of the geniuses talking about the motor trade. He's probably the guy that's instrumental about talking about the importance of stocks turn, measuring your stock, realizing when the cars got to go, and putting a real lot of science into it.
Last year, 2025, I listened talking about, hey, maybe I got it wrong with the race to the bottom. My message was right when no one else was doing it. Now that everyone's doing it, actually, maybe we have to have different levels of either use by date or a stocking policy, depending on the car that we've got there, because otherwise it's the race to the bottom. Stuff that actually makes so much sense. So today, I'm going to go through and we might do some of these sessions next time as well. Just some of the sessions I went to and what I got from it. And this is not going to, I don't know, give you everything I learned.
I've just got my little trusty notebook here that was given to me when I walked in there. It's eBay Motors is on it. This is why I scribbled down from all the sessions some of the things that I got from it. Now you've got to be careful. So many people get other things from the session. One of the things you'll love if you're a newbie, you go to NADA, reach out. But what's so good is the conversations after the sessions. We sit down in the international lounge and so often we'll sit down and say, hey, Jeff, what did you get from that session? What did I get from it? It's so amazing how many people got different things from it.
I remember a real good friend of mine, Jeff. We went out last year. Again, it's the 2024 and Las Vegas session who is talking about recruitment and recruiting. He said, hey, Simon, I really want you to go listen to this guy. I think he talks a lot. I said, yeah, okay, I'll go and listen to it. I come back and Jeff, I just wasn't buying it. I was just saying, I just think sometimes they're almost buying employees and almost the wrong ones. He said, no, no, but we need to get them. We've seen it from a completely different angle. He's seen it from an investor looking to get quality people and he got some really good nuggets from it.
Bear in mind, this is just my take on it. If I could get one thing from this, from you listening to this now, it's to inspire you to go out to next year. 2026, I want to see you at the NADA show. I'd love you to come up to and say, hey, Simon, I'm here because I listened to a few of the ideas there. I thought, right, that was a lot of crap. I need to go back and find out what I can get for myself from that. So let's start off with, okay? First one's made a good Ryan Leake. Never heard of Ryan Leake. He done one of the first keynote speeches. This is a guy that wrote a book and if I get his book title here for a second, so you can go and buy that.
What I learned from failing, okay? Don't let me go through this guy. This guy became famous almost by a bit of a YouTuber. He's claimed to fame his wife now. His girlfriend said to him one day, I tell you, it'd be so romantic to be proposed to and married on exactly the same day. That was two years down the track. So he had that idea for, oh, I'm going to do that. So he goes through the whole plan, how he turned around and said, right, I'm going to plan a wedding, get all of her family, all of my family to Miami. He's going to plan the whole wedding from start to finish, okay, propose and get married on that same day there.
He said two years to plan this and he was talking about how he was trying to find out wedding cakes or whatever. And he one day he said, oh, that looks like a nice cake, just trying to get some information from her. And she said, that's not right. I've a look at this on Pinterest, okay? And he thought she had on Pinterest 300 wedding ideas, went, man, I wish I knew this two years ago, would have made life a lot easier, okay? Listening to this, okay, he said how he did all the planning, he turned up there, he videoed it and of course this video went viral on YouTube, okay? But listen, here's some of the things he got, that's what he's claimed the famous, okay?
And then he gives some ideas about what he did and how people fail, okay? And failing's not a bad thing. So here's some of the points I wrote down once listening to this, okay? He said, listen, everyone has lots going on their lives, we know that, okay? He said 74% of people in a survey consider themselves to be less complicated to work with than the average person they're working for. So he said, think that's true, 74% of people think everyone else around them is hard work to manage to work with them, whatever. So actually we all think that we're the easy ones, okay? But actually, if 74% of people consider themselves less complicated, actually, do we actually see ourselves, okay?
What we've got to do is look in the mirror, okay? So question one he said to ask us, have he said these are the questions all the time, what's it like to be on the other side of me as a manager that would quite like that? Do we do that enough? What's it like to be on the other side of me? How easy am I to work with? Okay, so that's one question that he said he would ask himself. Question two, he said, ask yourself all the time is how can I be intentional on what I'm doing every day? Be intentional on what you're trying to achieve, okay? Now again, this is lots of, oh yeah, I remember that, okay?
He said no one gets good at their job from being a good person, okay? Yeah sure you want to be a good person, but actually no one gets good at a job from just being a good person, okay? What you need to be is the chief responsibility officers, okay? What you need to be is the chief responsibility officers. People get good by being responsible for what they do, okay? They need to be responsible for what they do to get good at it. I quite like this, okay? I had a lovely little thingy pattern in there about as a leader if you always think you're going to be right, okay? That could leave to hard work.
So he said, a phrase he loves uses, I could be wrong, but I think we should do xyz. By saying I could be wrong leads to, at some point saying, yeah, you know what? I am wrong. And by saying, you know what? I am wrong, it leads to saying, you know what? I'm sorry about that, okay? And that's something that he says all the time. You know what? I could be wrong about that. Question three, he loves senior managers say, how can I pave the way for someone else? And how this lovely thing that just resonated to me? And he said, how did I end up in this room? And so he's a keynote speaker.
I don't know what he's getting paid. He's a best-selling author. He's done well. How do I get paid in this room? He just went through. He said, well, this guy called Bob, and then Bob introduced me to Dave, and Dave introduced me to someone else. He just went through the process. I got started thinking, so many times I get managers, salespeople, dealer principal say, hey, I paint you love your job. Yeah, I do. Okay. How do you get your business? Well, actually, at this point now, simcoe trains have been going since 2000. I can say, most business finds us. People listen to the podcast or someone else I've trained at somewhere else said, these guys really know what they're talking about.
They took us from here to there, and it just kind of happens. And I said, well, how do I get doing this podcast? And I just sat there and I thought about it. Why? Okay. How did this work? Well, firstly, okay, and this is a long-winded thing there. Firstly, there's a man called Danny. I went to school, Danny. Danny really liked cars. I liked cars as well. So we talked about cars all the time. We jumped in our bikes and we rode around to car dealerships when they were after school on a Saturday morning. And I bumped into a guy called Rod, here, Rod Pethad Motors, he had a brother called Russell. And we talked to Russell most of the time.
They tell us to get away with the bikes. Don't scratch the cars. This guy called Russell. We spoke to him for a long time about how did you get in selling cars? What did you do? And he said he worked for a car dealership called, I believe it was Paris Nissen or something like that. Okay. After that, I ran into a guy called Ron, and Ron actually ran a car dealership. Ron, I turned around and said, oh, I want to come and do some work experience. This guy introduced me to a guy called Mark, who owned three dealerships. I did some work experience with Mark. From Mark, I got introduced a guy called Ian. Ian worked at Tony Island Holden.
Ian introduced me to a guy called Rex. I went along to an interview and Rex had your far too young to sell cars. Okay, you look too young. You look like a baby. Rex introduced me to go go to Tony. He said, I'll take a punt. I'll give you a job. Tony Island then trained me on how I'm going to cadet ship. Okay. Tony introduced me to a guy called Pat. Pat Casey was a mate of mine. We started at the same time selling cars. He was a diesel fitter beforehand. Pat talked about traveling around the world. Okay. Pat and I said, let's travel around the world. We travel around the world, end up in England.
They introduced us to a guy called Ken Stucky. Ken Stucky. We found out, I said, hey, Ken, we want to sell some cars. Okay. Ken introduced us a guy called Mike. Mike was a regional director for a dealer group across London. Mike introduced me to a guy called Roger Kullif. And we ended up working for a man called Roger Kullif. Roger Kullif got some training and introduced us to a man called Brian. Brian Milstead. Brian Milstead was a trainer. Brian Milstead then introduced men called Guy, a guy called Guy. Guy ran his own training company. So I liked you to work for that. Couldn't work for Guy because I were doing training for this particular dealer group.
And they didn't want to employ one of their managers. He introduced me to Guy called Will. I started sales training for a guy called Will. Then I started working for Guy again. Okay. From there, a man called Brian, I said, hey, I want to run my own boat. Brian went off and did something with a guy called Richard Dickey. I think they called him. I had to put my big boy pants on and started my own training company. I started doing that. And guys, it goes on and on. And from there, he went on to how did you get into this room? Okay. Actually, is it all coincidence actions? Could be. But here's the funny thing that dawned on me.
I wanted to be a sales trainer. I liked the idea of this from the conversations I had with Tony Ireland all those years ago when I still 17, 18 years old or something like that. So it's actually intentional. It was intentional what I wanted to do and where I got to this podcast. Did I know it's going to do a podcast? I didn't know podcast existed back then. But I actually knew I wanted to be in the space of helping people. Some will cast make more money. I enjoyed that side of it and it's just grown from there. So actually, how did you get into the room there? Okay. And then he said this, he went through his process.
I said, you know what, each one of those stages, he wasn't ready for the change. I go tell you, when I went from being a sales person, sales manager, I definitely wasn't ready for the change. But Man called Roger Conliffe gave me a shot. When I went from being a sales manager into be a sales trainer, I definitely was not ready. But Man called Wil Holden gave me a shot. I remember the interview with them was horrible because I was so far not ready. From there, when I started my own business, let me tell you, I definitely was not ready for it. When Patrick Tessier asked me to go and speak at the Australian Automotive Dealers Association, I definitely wasn't ready to stand up in front of 6,000 people, 3,000 people.
What I was when automotive management asked me to speak in front of their conference, I definitely wasn't ready. When someone said, Hey, listen, write your own book, I knew I wasn't ready for it. Okay. But actually, I've got given the shot. And then when I started the first podcast, go back and have a listen to the first of these. We're over 200 now. The first one's I definitely wasn't ready to do this. But someone gave me a shot. So you just said, Who in your business can you give a shot to? Because someone gave you a shot and that really resonated for me. Okay. Now, these keynote speaking, there's not so much direct things that you learn.
They are quite motivational, but I tend to get lots of them. Okay. But then he said, Don't talk yourself out of being great. But this is the real bit that really hit home for me. Chasing failure. He went back through the list over on the gave him a shot and he said, How many times he failed on it first time round. And of course, we learn more when we fail than when we succeed. Actually, when you succeed, you don't really know what you've done that worked well. When you fail, you've actually got a lesson. So this is where he wrote the book Chasing Failure. Okay. And he said, Chasing failure took him further than chasing success ever did.
And there's a great video out there. And there's a book where he decided to play basketball for one of the leading basketball teams in America. And he tried to try out for one of these basketball teams. Now, how did this happen? He did a video about asking his girlfriend to marry him and get married on the same day when viral. He ended up on some talk show. I don't remember if it was Alan DeDangis or I'm not sure who was probably Oprah. Okay. And part of Oprah, they got his hero. Kobe, basketball players, you all know this is a Kobe Johnson. I don't know. I'm not a basketball player. Okay. And he come on to say, well done.
I appreciate what you've done. And he said, hey, listen, by the way, we're going to say, why don't you come out and watch me play basketball? It was all excited. When was that playing basketball? He said, Hey, I've got this idea. I think we learn more by failure than success. I want to try out. Okay, for all of the American basketball teams. And Kobe Turner said, just do it. He's quite funny. This guy, he said, I thought he's just giving me slogan for Nike. He was sponsored by Nike. Maybe it was just on point with it. But he said, just go and do it. He said, gave him the ability just to phone up all of these teams and say, can I come and try out?
Can I come and try out? He eventually got someone to leave and come and try out. Okay. And they went somewhere else and tried out somewhere else to try it out. Okay. And he was playing basketball and he knew he was going to fail. Okay. But he said, hold on for a second. I'm now failing at a Chicago Bulls, wherever it was. I'm at their tryouts. I'm actually doing this. I've got a lot further forward by chasing failure than I ever did success. Okay. So they want the keynotes. Okay. Is someone who comes along there and I kind of like the motivation and what I get from those are other stories, stories of what I could.
And if you sat on any of our training courses, okay, we update them all the time. And I love these stories. And that's why I go and find lots of those. Okay. Now, one of the breakout sessions. There's a guy called Joe St. John's and Joe St. John's did a one of the little breakout sessions with a lady called Kerry Wise. Now Joe was coming on the podcast. Okay. He's going to do his content a lot more justice, what I will. Okay. But this is what I got from his session. So Joe St. John and Kerry Wise was talking about reinventing the showroom as the new digital frontier. I quite like Joe St. John's. His speaking style is very good.
He's very engaging. Okay. And he definitely does know how to command an audience. First time I've heard of Kerry, but they did this great double act. Now, part of his message was most customers, they don't actually want an end to end digital process. We know that people want to start their journey online and then they want to finish it in a dealership nowadays. Okay. If we go back around COVID times, there's lots of people saying it's going to be end to end the magical bullet where you put a little button on your website and people go through the whole lot, click the button and we don't need salespeople anymore. That really hasn't been the case.
Okay. So he has some stats here. Okay. Most people, they still want to end up in the dealership. He talked about the time that we're in a dealership. So he went back to 2015. Okay. And he had a look at how much research people were doing. Okay. And they'll end up spending 187 minutes physically in a dealership before the deal was done. So he talks about when they turned up in the dealership, 187 minutes. Okay. Oh, sorry. I've got that wrong. 187 minutes from when they come back from the demonstration drive to the deal was secured. I shot you how long that was. Okay. But of course, you think about it's the back and forth and all that sort of stuff.
He then went on to talk about how much more research people are doing nowadays. We know that. They know more about the car. They know more rough idea what their car's worth. Okay. They've been online to see what they're selling for. They've gone and had a look at the PCP, the PCH, your manufacturers, all of your OEMs have got calculators out there. So that time of 187, that must have come down lots. But actually in 2024, that figure was 172 minutes. I think that's through. It's gone from 187 to 172. He said there's still far too much friction in the sales process when we're trying to get the deal. There's so much friction in the negotiation process.
So many of the decisions are still to manual. Okay. So he said, of course, dealerships have to evolve. Even look at the mighty Netflix. How did Netflix start? Netflix started by shipping DVDs. We're DVDs now. Netflix was the competitor just to block the video, shipping them out and posting them back to them. They evolved into what they are now. Okay. So actually, we need to evolve then. This is one of the things he thinks we need to evolve, not radically change. Okay. And I really got a lot from that 187 minutes. Okay. Down to 172. It's still far, far too long. Okay. So this is what I like. What Joe did is he went all around for a whole lot of dealerships.
He put his family into campervan. He traveled all across America. He had lots of different disguises. He went in as a brand new salesperson to all these different dealerships. So the management team, the business managers didn't know that who he was. Okay. Now he had to put disguises on because Joe St. John would probably be well known in the motor trade. No, he is in America. Okay. So he had to put disguises on. So the sales measures, business measures didn't say, look, where are you? He started as a brand new sales person saying, I don't know anything about the motor trade. He teach me how to sell. And he was treated like the newbie and was given the back and forth, back and forth, back and forth as the newbie.
He was sitting there thinking, hold on, as a brand new salesperson, I've got no autonomy. I'm having to go back and forth to the management all the time. He talked about the friction of waiting to get a price. Okay. He's talking about how the guys were beating him up and saying, you got no commitment. I'm not giving you a price. Okay. I'm not just a pricing service. Okay. All these things that you're kind of still here out there. Okay. So that's what he was talking about and how you really need to slow that process down. So he said, how long does it take to get the figures to the customer? Okay. So on, he said, just do this, isn't so true.
If you sat in a dealership for 20 minutes in any shop, not speaking to anyone at all, what are you going to do? You're walking out of that shop. Okay. And customers sitting there by themselves still in 2025, far too long. Okay. People are more likely to trust the screen. Okay. That's what we talked about how we're offering the deal. Okay. Why aren't we allowing salespeople to turn around and say it's X amount per month. It's that. This is something I feel the UK motor trade we're probably further ahead on because so many times a car salesperson will go out with the first offer with full finance figures with the deposit with a PCP and a HP comparison.
Whereas in America, they still have the what I would call the bolt on business manager. They keep going back to the business manager. They give us a figure. We go back to the customer. And he's talking about getting the sales people be able to do that. I was speaking to some Australian dealers. And again, they would still have that process where the salespeople sell the car. Once the car's sold, then they go into the business manager and the business manager starts selling a finance. Okay. That might not be the same process everywhere in Australia. But again, I really do believe that's a stop if you're doing that. I don't think people would buy a house without knowing how much a month the mortgage is going to be.
In fact, I don't think people buy canneh Coke without knowing how they're going to pay for it. Now, maybe a Coke's not a good analogy, but he talked a lot about how we have to allow the salespeople to show the customer what the figures are. Give them three different choices. Okay. The magic number is three. Okay. And the customers that I also say, okay, over the 48 months, that's far too much. What's it work out over the I don't know, over the six months? Or what if I do it over the 42 months as opposed to 36? What if I change the deposit from this to that? Oh, yeah, that makes sense. And the customer's actually working out the movement themselves without discounting the interest rate, which, of course, they still do in America.
In the UK, of course, we can't do that. But or taking money out of the metal or bringing more the trade in price in higher there. Okay. So, you talk lots about the power of giving choices and salespeople giving the choices there. Okay. So that message is a, oh, yeah, message. I will take that one there. But then he talked about so much proof where he said, when you take out the bottleneck, who was the management team, when you speed that process up, when you get people to put a deal in front of people, when they come back within a short period of time, he has a figure here of higher profit by $765. What I like about Joe, when he throws a figure out there, this figure he's got from evidence, and it goes through the AutoFi system, where it's one of the systems where they allow people to stack the deal very, very quickly.
And they have some real figures on that. He talked about how pieces of paper and a four square, he showed a picture of a real four square, which was a piece of paper with scribbled notes on it. You won't be able to see this on my phone here. But this is a 2024, remember, and it still happened in America. That's where I think sometimes things are still so far behind there. So listen, that's a Joe St. John. Okay. He's a great one. And this hit home, he actually talked about deal, or sorry, no, let me rephrase that. Decision fatigue with our managers, your sales manager, your business managers, your share managers, call them what you want.
How many decisions are they making every day? Okay. They're in there trying to stack this deal. The phone goes and someone says, can I have a trade? Can I trade, stop that car? I need that car. What can you swap it in for? Something like that. Billy, the sales person comes in and says, do you remember that triangle that I tried to sell three weeks ago? You know the one and he's like, which bloody one? I'm in dealing with like eight different deals. I'm trying to stack every hour. And you want me to remember one from three weeks ago. And he's just put up this exercise. He said, guys, just work this out for me.
No calculator. What is 375,000, 153 divided by 277. Just go. And it's quite funny. We're in the front row there and in the front row, I knew the guy sitting beside me. Okay. And Kerry Wise actually stopped there and said, you know what? You've got right now, what happens when people have a decision, which is really hard. You got one person, it was my mate, Jeff, was like, I'm determined to work this out. And he was kind of working out. He had me that went, I ain't even starting. I have no chance of working that one out. Yeah. Someone else that had a guess. Okay. And I think the other one is that someone else to try to cheat.
Look at what everyone else was. Okay. Someone on their phone there. And listen, big decisions like that. Okay. When you're under pressure, hard work. Our sales management teams, they're making decisions day in, day out. Okay. Very, very quickly. And we get fatigued making those decisions there. So actually, we need to make the decisions for these people as easy as they can. Of course, we talked about selling their IT device and what they actually do there. Okay. So that was Joseph John there. Okay. Again, all of these are not doing that justice. Okay. Just Google some of these people. Some of these people are getting on the podcast and Joe is definitely coming on. I think you're going to love him.
So guys, I hope that's inspired you to come out to the National Automotive Dealers Convention Show, call it what you want in 2026. It's in Las Vegas. If you're out there, let me know, DM me. I'll tell you things to go and see. Okay. We will be hitting the show. We hit the show pretty hard. We don't just sit there to go for a drink. Okay. If you want to do that, fine. But listen, go to Las Vegas another time. There's lots of boring car dealers there. There's so much good things they actually get from the show. Anyway, that's about that for now. I'll 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 symco training dot co dot 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.
