Training Your Sales Team: The Dirty Little Secret to Great Training There’s a secret that some industry trainers don’t want you to know. It’s a secret about how to provide the best training possible for your team. They don’t want you to know it because it’s 100% free and available to you any day you […]
How to Solve 99% of Customer Service Issues: Empower your Front Lines If you’re in the service business, there’s a simple way to solve nearly every customer issue that you’ll ever create: Empower your front lines. Many of the issues, in fact, are created specifically because your front line is not (or does not feel) […]
Cheat Sheet for Free Car Dealer Training Resources About once a week I get asked if there is a place where someone can go to see all of my free training resources cataloged in an easily digestible format. For car dealers looking for just video training, we created a Suggested Training Curriculum for Car […]
You Don’t Have Sales Managers; You’ve Got Deskers! Most dealerships I work with seem to suffer from too few managers. They don’t have enough managers to control the sales floor, monitor phone calls and other activities, oversee the basic Road-to-the-Sale, ensure the CRM is being used properly or even train their own sales teams. Why […]
The Solution to the Never-Ending Car Dealer Staffing Problem So much has been written about the decades-long issues of turnover and staffing in automotive retail that I continue to be amazed when I read headlines like this one from Automotive News recently: Dealership turnover squeezing profits – NADA study spotlights struggles in recruitment and retention How […]
One of the great things about what I do is that I get to speak to a lot of dealer groups. It’s something I really enjoy doing; but more than that, it’s something I feel needs to be done. I believe an educated dealer is a successful dealer; and there is just so much misinformation […]
The Best Way To Overcome Today’s Price Objections Whether training sales managers for an OEM or a call center for a single-point dealer, the concern posed more than any other recently is how to overcome price objections on the phone in today’s transparent environment. Most dealers, you see, do a decent job of managing objections […]
The 5 Car Dealer Sales Call Situations (and why a BDC is best) With today’s connected customer, there really are only a few types of phone calls your team will find themselves involved with. Gone are the days of a customer phoning and saying, “I need something good on gas for under $8,000; what do […]
I recently received an email from a colleague asking about a pay plan for an automotive BDC that I describe as a “Hot Mess.” Why a Hot Mess, you ask? Plainly stated, a dealership’s sales structure and associated process flows should be simple and straightforward. When these flows have multiple forks upon multiple forks […]
We recently received the comment below on our Young Managers – How Do They Lead Older Subordinates post: Hi, I am a female, 28 year older manager leading a mix team of 8 people who are 15-25 years older than me in finance operations. I have slightly different situation. I am an EXPAT from […]
The Great BDC Robbery: How Reconciliation Allows Your Business Development Center to Steal from You Do you have any idea what your BDC is doing right now? A few weeks ago a general manager I’ve known for some time was bragging about the performance of his group’s Centralized BDC. He was almost gushing about how […]
Six months ago I watched a service manager struggle with the amount of customer complaints he had to deal with on a daily basis. Most of the complaints were just silly, and almost all of them should have been solved at the advisor level. Unfortunately for this manager, he was really, really good at […]
NEWSFLASH: Consumers are tired of wasting 3-5 hours of their lives buying a car. The average prospect today has done more than 19 hours of research before they ever set foot on your lot; so they know what they want to buy, they just don’t want to spend an entire day buying it from […]
Quick Quiz: If you’re part of an automotive dealer group comprised of anywhere between 2 and 290 stores and you do not run a centralized sales BDC, then you’re: A. Wasting Money B. Losing Sales C. At a Competitive Disadvantage D. Not Leveraging Your Economies of Scale E. All of the Above If you […]
While I tend to do a lot of phone training, it’s not my favorite skill to teach. This is not because my phone skills training lacks substance or robustness or even uniqueness – it provides all three (and you can even get most of it for free online) – it’s because that no matter […]
5 Simple Rules… for Eliminating Skating Forever If the only place you’ve ever worked is for one of America’s car dealerships, then you may not be aware that other industries don’t reward those who steal from their coworkers. Only dealership employees enjoy the added perk of being rewarded for cheating each other at will. We […]
Perception is reality. I wish I was the first person who ever uttered this unbelievably accurate view of the world. I guess I almost could have been the first, since the quote is most often attributed to political consultant Lee Atwater (who is only twelve years older than me). I find that odd, of course, […]
If you’re like most dealers I speak with lately, you’re either looking to add a Business Development Center (aka BDC) or trying to find ways to make your current BDC more successful? If so, then there are just a few simple “must haves” that are truly non-negotiable if you’d like your BDC to succeed […]
We recently received the following question/request from a reader: How do you approach your manager? I was offered a better position at my company and also had another interview elsewhere. I took the job at my company, because I hadn’t heard from the other company. I just got a call from the other company […]
The Internet is (finally) introducing progress to the car business… whether automotive retailers like it or not. While the Internet itself has so far been little more than an evolution of how car dealers do business (think about it: dealers have been receiving and responding to sales leads from Internet customers for more than […]