Eight-Car Alan & Thirty-Car Theo: What Separates Top Sellers from the Rest

Eight-Car Alan & Thirty-Car Theo: What Separates Top Sellers from the Rest

While entire books have been (and continue to be) written on what it takes to be a top car salesperson, the fact is that nearly all the differences between your 8-Car Alans and your 30-Car Theos can be boiled down to two very simple realities:

• Attitude and Activity

More than anything else, attitude and activity are all that separate the 8-Car Alans from the 30-Car Theos. Regardless of what else ails the 8-Car Alans that you may want to add to this simple list, chances are it finds its roots in (and can be solved with) attitude or activity.

It All Starts with Attitude

Simply put:  Salespeople who sell 30 vehicles expect to sell 30; and they’re not satisfied with 29. Meanwhile, 8-Car Alan begins every month expecting to sell 18 (at least that what he tells you he’s going to sell when you ask him for this month’s goal); yet he is absolutely thrilled when he ends with 12.

By contrast, 30-Car Theo would be extremely critical of his own performance and would either triple his efforts next month or possibly seek other employment in the unlikely event he ended this month with just 12.

Of course, it’s not only the mindset and belief in their individual goals that make up the entire attitudinal difference of top and bottom sellers: 30-Car Theos arrive to work excited and ready-to-go regardless of the day of the week. This is why you’ll occasionally see a 30-Car Theo score a Hat Trick on a Tuesday – they bring their winners’ attitude to every single workday.

30-Car Theos like selling cars; they like the car business and they especially like their customers – and this shows in everything they do. Customers, you see, feed off this positive attitude and they enjoy buying from 30-Car Theos.

8-Car Alans look at the calendar and lament how “Tuesdays suck around here” as they go on to prove exactly that with their lackluster performance. 8-Car Alans don’t particularly like selling cars or the car business. Oh, and ask any 8-Car Alan about difficult customers and they’ll bend your ear for an hour complaining about last week’s Ups.

Activity Drives Sales Success

When you’re in a good mood and you enjoy doing what you do, completing the tasks necessary to sell thirty cars a month comes (relatively) easy. While a 30-Car Theo, for example, might prefer doing something other than making phone calls (wouldn’t we all?), he makes his calls because he knows that phone calls are an activity that lead to selling thirty this month.

Standing outside in the smoking circle is not.

30-Car Theo gets his 29 or 30 or 35 every month because of activity. 30-Car Theo is always busy doing something productive. He is always active. He is always moving forward; never standing still; never crying about yesterday.

Every 30-Car Theo I know keeps busy with moneymaking activities throughout the day.

In the past, I’ve called this pulling out your moneymakers. When I’m training a group of sellers doing 8-10 cars a month who genuinely want to get to 20 or 30, one thing I ask them to do is to create a list of moneymakers. That is, create a list of those activities that can take you closer to selling 20 or 30.

Moneymakers are simply those activities that make you money. The opposite of moneymakers, of course, are timewasters. 8-Car Alans are great at timewasters and not so good at moneymakers; while 30-Car Theos excel at moneymakers and rarely get caught up in timewasters.

When pressed to compile their own moneymakers, most every salesperson knows what to do and can very quickly put together a list of activities that (when accomplished) would easily take them to 30 or more cars in any month. Activities like:

• Calling their sold database and Be-Backs
• Networking – the old-fashioned way – handing out business cards everywhere they go and asking for referrals
• Sending birthday cards & personal notes via snail mail
• Doing a Facebook live video
• Reading a sales training book
• Watching video sales training

There really are no mysteries to becoming a 30-Car Theo. In fact, every 8-Car Alan will admit (when pressed) that they know what to do, they’re just not doing it. They prefer the “fun” of timewasters; they prefer activities like standing around complaining.

This is where attitude meets activity – and why you need both to be a 30-Car Theo.

Knowing what to do is one thing. However, you simply won’t do those things (or won’t do them well) if you don’t bring the right attitude to work. This means that if you don’t like selling cars, you need to start liking it. This means if you don’t like Mondays or Tuesdays or whatevers, you need to start liking them.

Liking something is a choice; it’s not a feeling. And, the biggest difference between 8-Car Alans and 30-Car Theos is that the 30-Car Theos have chosen to like what they do; to like coming to work on a Tuesday; to like where they work; to like their customers.

The 8-Car Alans, on the other hand, can tell you why all of that sucks.

Good selling!