It is plate change month in the UK, and Simon is in the studio rather than a dealership for this one. The subject is a question a lot of aftersales people are quietly worried about. When oil sales go, what replaces the income? Peter Smyth at Swansway Group rang after the tyre sales episode to ask exactly that, and this episode is Simon’s answer. Tyres are worth doing, but they are a retention and trust play more than a profit play. Air conditioning servicing is the one that carries real margin, and most dealers already have the kit sat in the workshop. Simon walks through the full process, the knowledge your team needs, the objections they will hear, and how to price it against the cheap regas down the road.
- What Peter Smyth at Swansway asked about replacing oil income, and why the number worried them
- Where tyre sales genuinely help, and where they fall short as a profit replacement
- Air conditioning servicing versus diagnostic work, and why the difference matters to your comeback rate
- How often it should actually be done, and how to get one consistent answer across your whole department
- The five touchpoints where air con can be introduced, from pre-call through to the follow up
- The ‘I hardly use it’ objection, and the boiler at home explanation that lands with customers
- Why customers cannot feel the air con getting worse, and why they notice straight away once it is serviced
- How to compare your full service against a £99 regas without getting dragged into a price fight
Simon Bowkett, or Skippy to most of the trade, founded Symco Training and has been coaching service advisors and sales teams in UK dealerships for years. Everything covered here comes from air conditioning programmes Symco has actually rolled out inside dealer groups, not from theory.
Service advisors, service managers and heads of business will all get something out of this one, so share it with your team before your next department meeting.
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
Hi, and welcome to another episode of selling in the Motor Trade. In partnership with Kizana, improve your margins with real-time, data-driven, retail valuations backed by the largest rule of data set in the UK. There are an evidence-based guide valuations for main dealers, car suit markets, and independence, along with sim code training, where we took that training in the real world, what's happening in the market today, not 10 to 15 years ago. Together, we're going to share tips and ideas on how to sell more cars, improve your service and parts operation, and generally put more profit into your department, dealership, or dealer group. Now, I'm your host, Simon Boca, or some of you might already know me as Skippy. Firstly, I just want to say thank you for the people who died right from the beginning of this, because we're past 250 episodes now, and interviewed so many great leaders in the Motor Trade. Thank you for taking the time. For people who are new to this, please ask and just subscribe. You can't believe what it does to the algorithm and gets this podcast out to as many people in Motor Trade as we can. Hi, welcome to another episode of Selling in the Motor Trade. Today's the first of September in the UK, so that means it's a plate change month. If you'll listen to this in Canada or Australia, New Zealand, there's two plate change months in the UK market, March and September, where lots of people took a while for me to get my head around this when I come from Australia, they like to buy a car with a number plate which shows the year, and they like to pick it up as soon as they can. It's not quite what it was like in August for the people in the UK market when I first come over to 95, where in fact back then they still had midnight pickups, and given a different market honestly, people would come in at midnight to pick up their car because they wanted to drive to work or to school with the number plate on showing that it was the latest car out there. In my market in Queensland, a number plate was just a number plate. It didn't mean anything, but consequently, I'm not in a car dealership today, so we're in the studio, and I want to talk about a conversation I had with Peter Smythe, and he's senior directors, David, his brother was there as well, just last week in Swansway Group. Speaking to Peter, in fact, Peter reached out and picked up a phone and said Simon, I was listening to your podcast all on tyre sales, and I'm sitting there thinking, we're going to have to replace a lot of oil sales going forward. Now they have a back-end bonus of oil sales, and the number, let me tell you, it was quite a big number, and I think, and they're thinking, shit, that is a big old number that we're going to have to replace. Now don't get me wrong, in the past we've had to replace other things, and like the finance department, some deal groups are not selling gap anymore because it wasn't worth it with all the regulation and who's we had to jump through. So, oh goodness me, are we ever going to replace that income, and you know what, by and large, we really have. So I think we will replace the oil income when we go to 100% of EV vehicles, okay? If that happens, again, that's a caveat, if it happens, when it happens, who knows what government's going to be in charge, has Mr Trump taken over the world and made sure that EV vehicles are banned, I don't know, that's a joke. Obviously, please don't bite my head off, my friends in America there. But let's just say that we have to start moving towards replacing oil sales, and Peter and David and myself, and he's after sales director, another senior director, we'll kick around some ideas about, well, tyre sales, okay, what about tyre sales, and guys are good to you. You just won't. The profit in tyres, I just don't think you're going to replace that. You don't get into tyre sales for the profit you're going to make out of tyre sales. Now, that doesn't mean that I don't believe in tyre sales, okay? I actually quite like the idea of tyre sales because it's not the first point of defection a customer goes to an independent. I believe getting in tyre sales is great for customer satisfaction, net promoter scores. I believe tyre sales is great for transparency for the customer and treating the customers right. I think there's so many reasons why I personally would get into tyre sales, okay? And by the way, is there profit in tyre sales? Done properly? Yes, of course there is. Is a huge amount of profit in it? I think there's other things you can look at. And I just said to Peter, smiles, well, air conditioning servicing, how well are you guys doing with air conditioning servicing, okay? Is that an area of growth? Now, actually, in your business, is it area of growth? It's something we've been doing at some good training for a long time. And we've honed that process and that's a multi-point process. It's not just getting service advisors to offer it. Oh, and by the way, air conditioning servicing is not diagnostic work. Twoing times I go into the business and service advisors say, oh, yeah, yeah, we do the air conditioning, okay, talk me through the last time you sold one. Yeah, customer coming here because the air condition wasn't getting cold. So we said we'd get it serviced, re-gassed. No, no, no, no, no, that's not air conditioning servicing. That's actually diagnostic work. And it's the kiss of death, because you sell someone, what, two, seven, nine, two, four, nine, nine, whatever it is, three, nine, nine, some business out there to get the air conditioning serviced, okay, to fix the problem. But actually the problem is because the stones gone through the condenser, okay, and if leaking out the gas and no matter how much you put in, it's just going to keep coming out the other side, okay. So there is a difference. Also how often should air conditioning be offered? Now do yourself a favor, go to your manufacturer or pick up your favor, AI, just ask Claude. I'm using Claude a lot more than at the moment. I am chat GPT, but you decide, Gemini doesn't matter. And just say, hey, listen, a Land Rover business, okay. How often should my air conditioning be serviced in a Range Rover Sport and the reasons why it should be done? Tell you what, I'll spit out and tell you exactly what it is. By the way, that's every two years is recommended, okay, but speak to your manufacturer. But then make sure that everyone in the process knows why. You see, we teach on our today's service visor course. We teach that we have to have from the booking or the pre-call. So we talk about both there, the booking or the pre-call, because some of our businesses that have huge call centers, they actually deal with that all the time. Some do not. Some people have a CSC's customer services executives on site that just takes the incoming booking and selling of the Amble work down the track, okay. Some businesses, the service visor has to do it. So actually, do we sow the seeds there and then? Do we actually sell the advantage of air conditioning service? Do we actually go through the time and say, ah, our record show the air conditioning wasn't serviced last year, okay? We didn't do that for you. No. Okay, listen, Mazda recommends the time every two years. There's a nasty bacteria that builds up in the air conditioning system. It's the same bacteria that causes Legion-Aze disease. But listen, what I'll do is I'll ask the technician what their views are. We always are an advocate of the technician is the expert. The technician is the person that knows what should be done. Here's the way we look at it. In the motor trade, there's this weird situation where we build a wall between the expert and the customer. The expert is our technician, okay. The customer, we get a service advisor to go and speak to them. It'd be so much easier sometimes. In fact, think about if you were ill. You went in the service, no, not the service department, the doctors, and the doctor does all the tests on you, okay? Blood tests, urine tests, blood pressure, all that stuff. So, right, okay, no problem. Thanks a lot for that. Go and grab a seat in the corner. And then the receptionist comes over and says, oh, then Mr. Bokett, we've got your results here. Sorry about this. Ebola. Well, sorry. I didn't want to give myself a Ebola, but when you sit there and think, well, hold on, why isn't the expert telling me, why aren't they doing it? In fact, if you look at some of the trust surveys that happen out there, look in your country, they're out there all the time, how trusted are we as a professional as car sales people? Last one I seen on the scale of one to 45, we come in at number 43. 44 were politicians, okay? 45 were telly salespeople. But you think about our service advisors are on the phone like telling salespeople. They're asking for money like and dress like and speak like car salespeople. But where did technicians come on that last survey? Last one I seen, they come in at number 17. And technicians have so much more credibility than what your service advisors do. In fact, your service advisors still have a lot more credibility than what your sales people do. Service advisors out there, how often have you had a customer come in to you and say, this new hybrid technology, what's it really like, sorry, new and hybrid, but you get the point, okay? These EV vehicles, what are they really like is that my first time looking at one, okay? And we just have a lot more trust on the after sale side of the business, the service side of the business than we do on the sales side of the business. So what we'll do is sometimes from the book in or the prequel, we can talk about that, or when the customer drops the car off, we still need to set the agenda. Hey Mr. and Mr. and Mr. customer, why are you vehicles with us here today? We're going to carry out a complimentary vehicle health check. It's going to look like this. Now there'll be three different colors on it. And if it's green, this means it's good to go. It's as it should be. If it's amber, it's just something that's going to require attention before your next schedule service. If it's red, it's something that requires immediate attention. It might even be a MOT failure or an NCT test failure, okay, a roadworthy certificate failure if it was going ahead for that. Listen, what I'll do is I'll pop a call into you once the technicians have a chance to do that. But then actually time permitting and if you're a investor listening to this, if you're ahead of business, listen to this, let me tell you, your service advisors, it's a business job in a dealership. But don't, don't let, if you're a service advisor, listen to this, don't let them tell you that, ah, you've got an easy job there. It is the business job in a dealership, in my opinion, okay. So actually, we talk about introducing air conditioning on the pre-call, but also when they drop the car off. Hey, listen, our record show, the air conditioning hasn't been serviced. And then run through the reasons why air conditioning needs to be serviced. And you know what, too many times when we roll out an air conditioning servicing upsell program within a dealer group, it goes right to the top. We have heads of businesses, okay, that go, well, hold on, isn't it a sealed unit? Okay. What do you mean that has to be serviced then? Okay. Well, actually the refrigerant gas naturally permeates from the system, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just physics, it how it works. We sometimes tell them about, you know how a gas gets cooler, it has to be compressed. We talk about that, hold on when it gets compressed, you've got a whole lot of molecules in a gas. What happens is the molecules, they rub up against each other. That creates friction, friction, of course, is heat, okay. Think of an old fashioned bicycle pump, okay. You get the pump, you start pumping up, it gets really hot to start with. If you felt the air coming out of the back, it gets quite cool. That's because when you mechanically manipulate the molecules, they all get excited and rub up against each other. There's the heat. But when they cool down, there's less space, less space to move, less space to bump into each other, less friction. And the light bulb comes on and people are, now that's not what we're saying to a customer, but knowledge is important because if you've got a service advisor sitting there thinking, well, they're covered on the warranty anyway. Do they really need to get that air conditioning serviced every two years? Oh, by the way, I was in the dealership recently, I asked, when should the air conditioning serviced? I promise you, I had three different times, okay. I had a service manager say every three years. I had a technician say every 12 months, I had a service advisor say, I think it's two years, but I'm not sure. Let me have a look at this manufacturer's website, oh, I can't find it. You need to make sure there's consistency there. And like I said, on the tire sales program, okay, you need to be in the tire sales business or not. I'm going to say the same thing with air conditioning. If you decide to do this, you need to be in the air conditioning servicing business, because when you first start, you will get the objections, well, I've never had it done before. Why do you recommend that in the past? It's been fine, okay. You will need to make sure that your service advisors are armed for the objection. They know they're going to get, okay. I'll tell you, people say, well, hardly use my air conditioning. You know, I love my customers, said they hardly use their air conditioning, and so it wasn't worth doing. Until they found out it's the inactivity causes issues, not the activity. It's like your boiler at home. People don't get issues with the boiler in the middle of winter where they're using it all the time. They get it at the start of winter where it's been off for six months over summer. Some is the air conditioning. You see with the refrigerant gas, the refrigerant gas carries the oil to lubricate the compressor. The oil also puts an oil film over all the seals in the system, and gas over time will leak through the hoses, the seals, and all the joints in it. If that gas leaks out, there's nothing carried the oil to lubricate the compressor, and the compressor is the most expensive part of the air conditioning system. In fact, Mr. and Mrs. Customer, it's the inactivity causes issues, not the activity. As I'd hate to think down the track, we're asking for a lot more money for work to a compressor as opposed to 279 just to get the air conditioning service. Doesn't make sense to spend a little bit extra now, I suppose to, a lot more down the track. Its knowledge is important there, okay, and we will show from technicians. Technicians will be licensed to have to deal with refrigerant gas, okay, because you know what, you can't just open up and let us off into the atmosphere, okay. That just doesn't happen. Oh, which makes a real strange point. Why can I, as a customer, go to Health and buy refrigerant gas, okay, without any license and know what I'm doing, plug it into a system and just put some gas into my air conditioning. And by the way, how much of that gas is going out in the atmosphere? Because I guess maybe the consumer's gone to health, it's because the air conditioning system's not working and maybe a stone has gone through that condenser and you can fill out the gas all you want, it's just going to leak out again. We have to be licensed, but anyway, that's a side note, okay. We need to know, make sure that the service advisor knows when to offer the air conditioning. Who recommends it? Now, if they're too busy, oh, our record show, the air conditioning hasn't been done over the last couple of years. We didn't do that for you last time, did we? Great, okay, well, XYZ manufacturer, Audi recommends that's done every two years, because there's a nasty bacteria that builds up, it's the same bacteria that causes lead to an air's disease. But what it does, I'll get the technician to get their opinion up what they ask, what they recommend, okay. You can do that. Or we have some dealer groups, the service advisor, if they're competent, we'll deal with it there and then. Some Peter said to me, and thank you, Peter, I know you listen to this. And by the way, it's about time you come back on the podcast as well, we'll talk about that later. He said, Simon, I've just listened to you selling that air conditioning service. I went through the whole spiel with them very, very quickly and he said, you know what, as a consumer, they'd buy that all day long. But the trouble is, I can't afford to have you as each one of my service advisors. I said, well, Peter, you don't need to, okay, what we do is we just show the service advisors how to do exactly what we did there. Because I promise you, it's not rocket science. It's so easy to do, but it's easy not to do. That's why you go and give the service advisors the knowledge as to why it needs to be done first. That gives them the belief that they believe in it. Sure, we can give them a script now. Listen, email me through and I can give you the exact script that we do, but it won't work for you because we need to make sure they're comfortable with it, okay? And we'll coach them and show them how to do it and how to deal with the objection they know they're going to get, okay? And they really do. You've got to raise design why it needs to be done. You've actually got to talk through. Oh, by the way, and it's when we get this air conditioning service. Now we talked about the touch points, okay? There's five touch points in the service department. I'm patronizing this from you guys now. It's the prequel. When they drop the car off, the vehicle health check call, all three of those, you can either sow the seeds on air conditioning. You can talk about air conditioning, okay? You can actually go through overcoming objections, those three points there. And then also, when they pick the car up, that's where if it's Amber, you can actually talk about, hey, bear in mind that air conditioning. We really do need to get that done for you this time next year when we service the car again. Tie it up for next time because again, you need to get the customers in the habit of, actually, this is something that it just needs to be done all the time. Last one on the follow-up call, would we do it then, no, but actually, Amber work. Having some co-training, that pot of the third work, that Amber work, we don't sell Amber work on the day. We don't want to, actually, because now you can offer it to a customer if you want to, but actually, that Amber work in six months time, at three months time, at nine months time, how good are you as a dealer group of getting that work back into your dealership? In fact, I know you're sitting there thinking, ah, we've got these lovely follow-up systems, we send an email out and a company comes along and helps us do that and we really get an engagement. Yeah, brilliant, but are those things just helping the independence? Oh, by the way, air conditioning servicing, your service advisors will drive past QuickFit. They will see an air conditioning regas for 99. Do they know it's not what you're going to do, not just to top up? They know everything we're going to do, a complete air conditioning service, as opposed to just that top up. Knowledge is important, they need to know that knowledge and how to do it. The last thing, service manager, head of business, investor, listening to this. Why should you get into the air conditioning business? I'll tell you why. Okay. It's one of those things where we bring the car in. We set the machine up, we click play, it takes all the gas out and environmentally friendly way. It pressure tests the system. Okay. It puts the right gas in that needs to be done there. It'll put a leak detecting guy. Now legally, it's not a leak detecting guy in the UK. We work in other markets, don't bite my ad off. Okay. Some markets still use it. It still goes in there. We put the oil and the leak detecting guy into the systems there. Okay. Yes, you can do both. Depends what air conditioning system you got there. Okay. We work in different markets around the world there. Okay. But you click play, it does its job and your technician can get on with the rest of the job there. Also, it's something that a customer can get a noticeable feeling difference almost immediately. You see, when the gas leaks out the system, it's just not replaced with nothing. That's called a vacuum. The gas leaks out. It's replaced by air. You see, air will still compress. It won't get the same compression as the refrigerant gas will. But actually, what happens is the temperatures doesn't go cold, cold, cold overnight. It's just not as cold. It gently drops off. So customers don't feel a difference. It's kind of like the boiling the frog analogy. I don't know who's ever done this. I hope not. But apparently you get a plot of boiling water. Sorry, I'll frog into it. It'll jump straight back out because it's really hot and knows it doesn't like it. You get a plot of boiling water, put a frog in it and bring it up to the boil. Apparently, it will cook because it doesn't know it. I don't know who's ever tried that. Please don't do that. Okay. But same here, customers. The air conditioning doesn't get colder like cold to warm overnight. If it is, that's because there's a leak in the system there. It happens slowly over time, okay? And also, we're talking about the pollen filter and where the nasty bacteria builds up and how that side of it needs to be cleansed out as well. It's education, education, education. You're sitting there thinking, hold on, what is this? Listen, reach out to me. We'll make sure we've got all that for you. But I want you to commit to getting into the air conditioning business. If that's a business decision for you, okay? But actually, it's so worth doing because when a customer jumps back in the car, it's something they can often feel straight away. Ah, that is a lot colder. Ah, the stuff I spent, that extra money I spent with Swansway Group, it's definitely been worth while. So guys, oh, even by the way, when you do your follow-up call then, okay? The amber work, re-booking it in there and then and get that sale there. There's so many different times you can do it, so many different touch points, okay? And to have a proper process, if you just get your serviceiser started offering it, you'll solve a few, you will, but you'll get resistance. The technicians, okay, if you just get the technicians start putting it in their video when they do the see it in our video, you'll get a few, okay? But it's got to be a seamless process from start to finish where we have, guys, we send out videos to customers explaining why it needs to be done, knowledge, knowledge, knowledge. We make sure that everyone in the process and the bookings people, the service advisors, service managers, technicians need to be explained that actually why it works as well. Now, again, I'm not saying that the technician doesn't know how to fix the air conditioning, but actually the underlying reasons why behind it and why it's so important there, price pointing, how much you're actually doing it for. It normally works out at X amount, but because you've got it in the dealership, it's on the ramp. Peter can do that. It's probably your service today for Y amount. That's not going to affect your pick up time of fourth or third afternoon. That's a bit of comparison and a bit of urgency. But then the objections your team's going to get, make sure they can deal with it straight away. Let's not hardly use the air conditioning, I'll leave it, you know, a lot of my customers said that. So they found out it's that inactivity causes issues. It's not the activity. Boiler at home, people are going to get issues with a boiler rather start of, sorry, in the middle of winter, it's at the start to winter where it's been off six months. It's the same the air conditioning system. It's the inactivity causes the issues because if the seals dry up, the get refrigerant gas will leak out, but the refrigerant gas that carries the oil to lubricate the compressor. I'd hate to think down the track, we're talking about a lot more money to replace the compressor as opposed to 279 to get the air conditioning fully serviced. It doesn't make sense to spend a little bit now, I suppose it's a lot later. But guys, if you want our whole process from start to finish, reach out to me. Okay. I'm on LinkedIn. That's the easiest way there. Get holders. There's SIMCO training in the office there. One of the trainers can talk through how to do it, but you need to really commit to get into the air conditioning servicing business or not. Anyway, that about does it for now. I'll speak to you next time. That just leaves me to say that all details of this episode and other episodes on the selling in the motor trade can be found on our website simcotraining.co.uk. Go there to get a copy of our book, Words That Sell Cars. Go there to sign up to a free trial of our sales fitness online sales training program. The easiest way to get hold of me is signing Boca through LinkedIn. Thank you.
