In this episode Simon and Andrew Clark (Operations Director, Symco Training) delve into the challenges of recruiting.
Attracting the right calibre of staff is becoming increasing difficult, and with agency there is the risk of losing quality sales team members.
How do we deal with these issues going forward and where do we try and recruit from?
Here are the highlights:
{02:10} Challenges for the trade
{02:56} The right people, the right mentality
{05:17} Talent Drain
{06:46} Where do we recruit from
{10:13} It’s a people business not a car business
{16:21} Grow your own
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon’s words ‘real world’, it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visit
www.symcotraining.co.uk
Welcome to the Selling 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 would 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. Listen firstly, a big thank you. We've had the most growth in the last three months than we have in this podcast for a long time. It just keeps on growing and growing and growing. So listen, do me a favor. Everyone on podcasts says, go and subscribe to it. Most people subscribe to it so you get this all the time there. But if you're one of the people who haven't done it, just go and subscribe to it. We love you to comment and we're getting so much good information. I just want to say thank you, thank you, thank you. And that's what this podcast is all about. Now today, I'm joined again with Andrew Clark. Andrew Clark is our operations director for Symco Training. And we're going to be talking about the difference between time and money in the motor trade. So Andrew, welcome aboard. How are you saying? Yeah, really good. Thanks, Simon. How are you? Very good. Very good. Now, the reason for this episode is we were talking about promoting our open course. And so many times, most of our clients will know that we deal with manufacturers and dealer groups that are quite frankly big enough to afford for us to go in and do a program. And all the time, we get lots of people saying, I've got one dealership where just one or two dealerships and we can't afford to send people away for a long period of time. OK, well, we can't afford to get you guys in to do bespoke training. So we run open training courses where there's lots of people from lots of different places there. And we're talking about the challenges that some of these small dealers have had. And Andrew quite rightly said, it's not the challenges that the small dealers have got. The whole motor industry has got these challenges. And Andrew, let's talk about that challenge time and money. What's the real challenge that deals are finding there? Yeah, I think the biggest takeaway I've had from some of the industry leaders and some franchise direction bigger groups is that when they're recruiting, they're changing the whole philosophy from that normal five and a half, six day work a week. And guys want to be in there, eight o'clock in the morning, two late o'clock at night, and they're just smashing through deals. They've since since COVID. They just seem to be a complete shift. And now people are now going, I don't know work weekends. I don't know what I work five day a week. They're really having a big challenge around recruiting the right people, the right mentality. And then on the back of that, they're then saying that they're struggling with that kind of training under it because they don't know where these guys are coming in from. And there seems to be just a bit of a dying kind of breed of these real hungry sales people that maybe traditionally would have in the industry who would work that six day a week. Yeah. Who would be coming on the days off. And I remember I had a great sales executive who worked for me called Grant. Now, Grant was phenomenal, but every day Grant had off, you've come in, you have two deals done. You know, he's coming on Thursday morning, go, can you go and reserve those? Oh, you'd be getting the telephone calls. And I just think that's starting to die out. I think the hunger has gone. And people now rather have that extra day off. Let me ask you a question. Where are we going to get people from to work in the industry going forward? Does agency change that? What do you use? Yeah, I think agency is going to have a huge impact on it. And from my opinion, we've been in and out of dealerships, you know, over the last few months, and we've taught people around the industry. I've got a number of friends who've been looking at cars recently. And they said the journey into the Mercedes-Benz world when we talk about agency is not what they expected. Really? Okay. Very nice, very polite, but just the one even asked for the business, they just advised them about the car. There was just no kind of desire to try and close them or get them down a process. It was, the car can do this, they can't do that, and they'll be this. And if you want to have luck online, just go have luck online. Just no real desire to try and close them. And then my recent experience, I know we had a conversation that's one about electric cars. Yeah. I had a very brief look at the Ford Mustang Mach-E in a dealership. And that's furthering that through the agency model. And the sales executives wasn't interested. It's quite interesting. You might remember a great friend who's shown James Vortman. He's the CEO of the Australian Automotive Dealers Association. And he said, one of the things the Mercedes-Steelers, or sorry, I'll go back, the Honda Dealers first, because agency in Honda Win Australia about three years ago now from memory. He said there was definitely a talent drain. Right. Because the hungry salesperson, the guy that you could rely on for 30 cars this month, because George going to get me those 30 cars, he said, they just left those franchises. And we're going to other franchises. But again, if you are an investor listening to this, you're going down the agency route. Do they need to pay salespeople like they used to pay salespeople? Or can they actually employ people that were at curries? People working in John Lewis. I can remember for recruitment, I'm going back in 95 when I come over here working in that Nissan dealership and I, we can. Roger Kundliff, my first dealer principal. Hi, Roger. How are you, sir? When I first come over here in 95, OK, and Roger Kundliff, my first DP, I was looking for good staff. And he said, go to the local mobile phone salesperson, go to local curries or comment. If you remember that store in the olden base, he said, find someone who's good at selling that TV or that, whatever you're looking to buy, OK? And say, listen, why don't you come and sell cars? That way, you're going to earn more money. You're probably going to double what you're earning there. And we give you a company car and it was a great, great recruitment. And then I can tell you, when I was in that Nissan dealership, I think that's what we did for all recruitment. We didn't use recruitment companies. Does that work now, Andrew? Does that still work? Or are we not as attractive as working out of John Lewis? Yeah, I'm not sure. I think, I mean, if I go back to my many days and work for the many UK, we had a really successful mini franchise. We'd actually gone recruit the person from the restaurant that gave us fantastic levels of service. Yeah. We went recruit our product, Jeannie says, from the hotels where you go in and the person go above and beyond because actually, let's go back to that people buy from people. Now, listen, lots of podcasts and lots of, I guess, actually talk about that. It's a personal touch, it's a communication. I think Alsohorsh has talked about this on the last podcast. People buy from people. And if you can deliver a fantastic level of customer service, well, that's where we start recruit. It wasn't for the sales album because we thought we could coach mental and train that. Yeah. We can't coach the attitude. That's where we went with it. I think there's a difference. And always attracted. I think maybe we are. Well, these people aren't as hungry as the guys that maybe we used to have from the codes and the college and the car form warehouse. Yeah. Can I play devil's advocate now? Again, I want to go back in time. Okay. I went to a, I was running a train because I can't even know where it was. And we're talking about process and the importance of a process. And I still believe that's as important today as it ever has been and will be. And we're talking about this and we went into a Kentucky fried chicken or a McDonald, I think it was a Kentucky fried chicken. And the lady there was brilliant. Okay. Because we had, I don't know, 15 of us or something like that. I don't know what happened. That was right. Lunch never turned up or something like that. There was something went wrong with the lunch. So I said, come on, we'll go to this local Kentucky fried chicken. Okay. And I'll, we'll get you all something we hear. Okay. Keep the course going. And every time they turn around and said, hey, would you like to try the popcorn chicken today? Okay. And the next one, and this lady was really, really good. I said, what sort of training do you guys get to do that? And she said, training, she just picked up the sign that was on top of the till that said popcorn together. You have the customer facing side of it, but she turned it over and it just said free phrases. Would you like to try the popcorn chicken today? Okay. With the milkshake, we've got the special of that. We got the Oreo thing. Would you like that with that today? And we're just three phrases there. They said, they just tell us to do this all the time. And I thought about how much extra do they pay her to upsell? Do they beat her up with a stick if she doesn't say it? I don't know. Maybe, maybe they did. How much was she earning? She's probably not earning a quarter of what you can earn and the motor trade. So actually, do we have to pay big wages to get people to do what they should do? What do you get people to want to do it? I think it's the want and it's the passion. When we were on courses, we see lots of new sales ex-comitant industry work for different dealer groups. And it's interesting when they do the introduction of their background, where they've come from. Yeah. Look, what you'll find is you'll get so many of these new guys who've just got a passion for cars. Yeah. And they love cars. They want to talk about cars. They couldn't get a better job. That's right. They call people. It's not a car business. It's a people business, isn't it? Yeah. And then you get people who are really greedy and you'll sell anything. Yeah. This seems to be real in balance. We get a lot more car people and people people rather than the greedy people now. And agency model, I've worked for those people because they get the chance to talk about it. And try to drive that hunger and desire to do what about yourself and create that, I suppose, that better lifestyle for yourself. Because back in the day, the harder you worked, the more money you were, the better the older you had. Well, now for people who are in this podcast later on, we're actually recording this right at the end of June. And Car dealer magazine, hi James, how are you, sir? Car dealer magazine has just interviewed the people from Mercedes Benz UK about agency. And he was actually talking about the difference between what happened in Australia and how they got wrong and how smooth the introduction of Mercedes UK agency model has been rolled out. But again, he then went into some of the numbers there and the amount of pre-reg vehicles, this force market, the demonstrations they're doing, they're going into that daily rental leasing place that Mercedes had to do. And the retail element would appear to be a lot lower there. Do people still need to be asked for the business? Now, again, the managing director of Mercedes Benz said, hold on, because we own all the stock, we own all the demonstrations under agency. He said, of course, there's going to be a distortion there. But again, if you look at the retail numbers compared to BMW and Audi, it would appear the first quarter was not strong for Mercedes Benz. Are you noticing the same thing at the sharp end on the ground? Yeah, absolutely. I think if you look at, again, Audi's registrations up to the end of May were 16.8% ahead of prior. Wow, that much. Yeah, huge, huge job. And BMW went quite as far. And I think certainly some winds have changed and some challenges around supply still. But you could really see a big difference. And it will be when we talk to a stormstorm in Volkswagen, and they're watching with a bit of breath, what's happening with the Mercedes Benz model, because they're holding back. And do you know what? If the whole of the old board of industry in the UK turned tomorrow, first of July, we all go to agency, I think it'd be different. Because then the whole book now, of course, if they go to Mercedes Benz and they get looked after the nice, but they won't ask for the business, then the go to BMW dealership or an Audi dealership or an Volvo dealership. I can promise you now, those sales execs will be asking for the business. Of course, there's so many different levels of agency as well, because what's agency for one manufacturer and not the manufacturer, completely different thing. And again, with the Mercedes Benz in the UK, sorry for our listeners in America and Ireland, whatever, Mercedes UK, they were actually talking about customers are loving the approach in the main. But actually, you know what? Aren't you going to love the person that shows you all the stuff? And that's beautiful and it's nice. And then just go and buy it from someone else. OK, I still think our job as a salesperson needs to say, should we secure that for you? Should we go ahead with it? Of course, the man from Mercedes Benz said, you know what? And there are special offers that we can give to people. So it's not no haggle. Agency and no haggle is kind of two different things. It is definitely going to be interesting. I think the tide is coming on agency. I think the manufacturers, despite what they'll say, they're looking at cost reductions because of EV vehicle. Again, on the podcast, I think there's been lots of people talking about that's the real issue of what's actually happening. So it's happening. I think we're just going to have to adapt to it. And as an investor, can you actually say, do you need that hungry salesperson? Do you need that person? Or could you actually have that person from McDonald's? OK? Or that hotel industry just looks after people really well. Interestful and see what happens then? It is. No, it really is. My personal beliefs, I still think we need that hungry salesperson, I'm sure. I think we need that person to drive that desire and build the emotion of the customer and build their rapport and get to the point where the customer won't say yes into that brand. I think there's a big difference between that. Yeah. And I think your hungry sales person will push and push and push. The customers' emotions along that line as well. So it's a different one. But you're right, that agency model, when you look across it, it is coming in varying degrees and it is coming over. But lots of manufacturers are trying it now on the EV range, only. So the introducing agency to the electric vehicle. Yeah. Some would say agency by stealth. OK. If we have to go EV by 2030, yeah, it'd be interesting. But there's also now, if you look also where the office on the marketplace, they're all on EV. Lots of finance, deposit contributions, immediate stock delivery. So there's got to be something there as well. Yeah, be interesting. So listen, we always like to give our listeners a takeaway. OK. Someone listening to us thinking, I need stuff. Where do we get them from? Anything else you've tried or heard out there that you think, ah, that's something to, because getting quality people is what we need to do. And, oh, again, we're just talking about the sales side of it. I mean, let's not even start with technicians. Let's just leave that can of wounds for another day there. But some of the listening to this, looking for quality salespeople and keeping quality salespeople. Anything you can do to that you've heard out there. You know, the best success we ever had in our businesses was growing our own. Yeah. It was really growing our own. And you know what, when you mentor and support and coach that young person into the business and the group within that business and you give them the chance to develop and adapt and start that career path, they're the ones that stay. They're the ones become not just brand ambassadors, but the business ambassadors. And then your next senior sales index, your next transact managers. I've got a fantastic friend of mine now, like call them, Frank Greg. Greg starts my product genius in 2012. And 11 years down the line, he's now the general sales manager for that big BMW site. And that growth and that retention of in the loyalty has been repaid back for every night they've done with him. But where did Greg come from? Where was he employed? He was at Ace. He actually got his mum bought a car from me. Yeah. And she said, my son would love to do something like this. So we said, well, give me a CV. Come and talk to us. He was a German student. You've been studying at Edinburgh. And you've got to think about cars. You just have the biggest personality you could ever have. So straight from education. Straight from education. Education, to get them straight from there. Yeah. Listen, I've got a 20 year old and a 17 year old. So they're looking at their start in the career. And it's quite interesting. My youngest one, Sean, I almost, I'd love him to go through what I've gone through. Okay. And you learn in the motor trade and selling in anything he does for us in life is absolutely going to be brilliant. But again, I speak to him and he loves his cars. It's not even on the radar. The motor trades not on the radar at all. Which is interesting, isn't it? And it's a sale of my two children. Neither of them have even had any consideration of the old one who went straight. But they said that because they said the time I spent with the fund when I was coming through my career. Yeah. I was always at work. So can you see now maybe that balance of money and time comes from? Yeah. Well, listen, I just want to say thank you very much for your time. Here's a little offer for the listeners. If you've got this part of the podcast and we want to say thank you because you're the people that really take the time to invest in this. So here's a little thank you for you. If you got into this, send me an email. Email is really simple. It's Simon at Symco Training. Okay. And mention that you got to the Andrew Clark interview to the end. Okay. I'm going to send you a free book. Okay. The words that sell cars and the motor trades. You know the book there. Let us know where to send. Send me an email. Okay. And we're going to get one of those through to you just as I thank you because you're the loyal people. Okay. And Andrew, because we're speaking to the loyal people now, why don't you tell them about this open course and what we're going to cover on the sales training program. We're doing first island first. We're doing another one in the UK after that. This is your first deal. I think you're doing. Yeah. So we've really seen a strive for some training in Ireland from these are from the more independent who got one one site, maybe a site or a master site where it doesn't stack up to have us in for the full team. So we're putting on this open course day. So we're going to cover the full rope cell. We're going to look at everything that goes into selling cars. But we're going to look at starting with the attitude. The right person. We'll look at why do we need a sales process, the structure behind it. The part that I love about it is that people behavior, the understanding why customers lack and say, we're actually understanding our own behavior, how we can influence that customer's journey. The importance of effective qualification, the static demonstration, the demonstration drive right the way through to the trial clause, make sure it's effective, make sure we've got the right car and then getting to negotiation close as quickly as possible at that point. If we can package it up and do that and deliver an open course, I think we'll see some massive benefit for the industry and certainly for our partners. This is a pure plug, guys. So if you're still listening to this, thank you there. But so many times you might think, well, our manufacturer does their training for us. You're right. But so often the manufacturer is so focused on product training because let's be honest, there's so much product in that modern vehicle, the electric vehicles. Let's look at all the technology. And sometimes we find the sales, the soft skills. Sometimes that's what's lacking. Depending on your manufacturer, obviously some are great, but that's the one that's actually lacking there. So that's what that course, that's what we're going to focus about. So listen, drop Andrew a line, speak to the office there. Again, when you ask for that free book, we'll tell you all about it and where the dates are and what we're doing. So Andrew, thank you very much for your time. Oh, thank you. 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 link to him. Thank you.
