Hello, there it’s christian younger, and i want to welcome you to another automotive best practice of the week.
Back when i was a general sales manager.
One of my responsibilities was to meet with the various vendors that would come by to discuss dealership products and services.
Now one of my rules is, i would always ask myself: is this service or product going to help make the dealership profit, or is it going to actually save us on expenses? Now, today i want to talk about something that you can do in-house that doesn’t cost you a dime that will actually save you money on expenses and also help increase your profitability.
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Okay, let’s go to work.
Welcome back today, i want to talk about the importance of setting up an in dealership, ongoing training sales process and one-on-one coaching now, typically, when i talk to dealers about ongoing training and do they do some type of in-house training, the conversation will go something like this.
So tell me, mr dealer, a little bit about your ongoing continuous training process and they say: oh it’s great.
We use so-and-so’s virtual training platform and i’ve got sales managers that they go ahead and they check to make sure that the sales people are watching those videos and actually taking the tests and passing those tests.
So they check on them once or twice a week to make sure they’re holding them accountable and then, typically again, i’m impressed that they’re even doing this, and it’s great that you have a resource of being to use one of these virtual training platforms, but i’ll typically Follow up with that’s great, so are they actually using the material they’re learning? Are they actually practicing and putting it into play and using it with live, customers and they’ll, say well, yeah yeah sure i i’d say so, and so then my follow-up would be well.
Is there someone holding them accountable or someone practicing them doing, role plays and one-on-ones and again practicing those sales situations and again that’s typically where the conversation starts to trail off and i’ll, hear things like well, when my sales managers have time they will do some role Playing or i’ll hear well, you know we kind of leave that up to the sales people to do on their own.
Well, i’m here to tell you this: the discipline it takes to go ahead and try to learn some of these word tracks concepts and closes to do that on your own.
It takes a lot of work.
I mean it takes a special individual to go ahead and follow the training regimen that we go ahead and propose to memorize word tracks.
You know it’s hard work to practice a word track 10 times throughout the day to go ahead and make an audio tape of yourself to go ahead and make a videotape of yourself and then practice those continually again for the prescribed amount of time that we ask Them to do that and, quite frankly, if someone’s not there, holding them accountable, it just probably doesn’t happen.
It’s one of the same reasons why many people hire a personal fitness trainer when they’re wanting to get in shape, and that is that personal trainer they’ve got the expertise.
They’ve got the experience and they’ve got the knowledge.
However, one of the big things they do or hold the person accountable for working out, i mean i’ve even heard of personal trainers who have people sign contracts that says they can wake them up at any time of the night day or night to go ahead and Do the workouts, if that’s what they choose to do so again, it’s no shame in having somebody help.
You be a little bit more accountable.
Please don’t get me wrong.
I think there’s some fantastic automotive virtual training networks out there, and i also think they’re well worth the money.
If someone at the dealership takes the lead role to make sure they’re holding the sales people accountable to learn the material and the goal should be to use these with live guests someday now someday, it’s never going to come unless we have an assigned person to be That personal fitness trainer that practices with the sales team and helps them get better.
I’d like to give you three reasons why continuous training and one-on-one individual coaching is so important number one you already know and that’s accountability number two though it’s learning styles and learning paces see, there’s three different learning styles, and maybe you know, but we’ll just review and That’s visual learners.
Some people learn by seeing things and taking them in through the eyes, then there’s auditory learners.
We use our ears, we hear things and that helps us learn a little better and then the last one is kinesthetically and that’s touchy-feely or actually hands-on approach.
So again, everybody has different learning styles.
Some people learn maybe better with two of the three.
Some people need all three to be able to have the concept sink in, however, they’re all extremely important – and the third point is retention.
Now, when i say retention, i’m talking about two types of retention – one of course is retaining the information that the sales people have learned during this training.
So, whether it’s a word track role play a particular close.
They have to practice those enough to where they can retain that information and again use them with live guests, but the retention that actually costs dealerships.
A lot of money is employer retention, so in the automotive industry there’s around a 70 plus turnover rate.
That’s huge and statistics out.
There say that a company loses one and a half to two times the annual salary of an employee.
If they’re not able to retain that employee, so that means in the car business if you’ve got a sales person making about fifty thousand dollars a year.
It costs you about seventy five to a hundred thousand dollars.
When you don’t retain that employee and then lastly, there’s strong correlations between high profitable dealerships and a high correlation with retaining employees.
So another reason why you want to retain them and think about it.
If you’re a salesperson and you’ve got an experienced car person, that’s working with you one on one and they’re taking individual time and interest in you as a salesperson, you’re gon na one be much better, but really good about that particular dealership, because you’re gon na know They actually care – and please don’t underestimate the value of having your salespeople know how much you care about their success.
In fact, why take my word for it? Let’s hear what some sales people themselves have to say about one-on-one, individual coaching and just training in general.
If i didn’t know these word tracks, or at least have something to reference, i wouldn’t really have the right words to say to overcome that objection, be a mentor.
Someone to talk to um, give let them know what my issues are and help me work through.
It.
Good, you know time more to focus on me and what maybe skills that he sees that i don’t quite having a cro come across in the word tracks, and then it gives him the ability to be able to coach me doing these one-on-ones has actually given me More confidence in talking to the customer instead of oh, there goes one, let’s just see what they do, really what it comes down to is practice.
You know spaced repetition and it’s something he bred into me and now i’m doing it every day.
I do the same thing when i wake it here in the mornings.
I go walk.
My lot.
Look at my trade-ins.
Look.
If there’s anything new that i didn’t catch, the other night, you know start up a few things put my hands on vehicles.
You know and then repeat my work tracks too many times.
We look at training as an event, instead of as an ongoing process.
Let’s take the military for an example in the military: they don’t train their rifle people by go ahead and having them go to an online class and watching a couple of videos and maybe taking some online tests and then saying: okay, let’s go out there and we’ll See in battle good luck, no, they go ahead and work with those people one-on-one to assure that they have the material down and that they know that they were able to shoot that gun and hit the target every single time and don’t we as dealerships kind of Do this we’ll give them a one week, training course on just an overview of the automotive business, maybe a little product knowledge and then we’ll send them out there and say: hey good luck, let’s see what you can do and we know that.
That’s just that’s! One of the things that’s leading to this high turnover with employees.
So, in conclusion, what i would like to tell you is this: i get it depending on how your dealership’s structured it’s difficult with your managers tasked with so many different things, it’s very very hard for them to be able to find time to do continuous training.
But you have to decide that it’s going to be a priority.
If you decide it’s a priority as tony robbins likes to say we get our must in life and if training becomes a must, then you’ll go ahead and do that every single day.
Now, i’m not telling you you need to hire myself or some type of a personal training coach to help you, however, if you do need something like that, obviously we’re available.
However, if you’d like to reach out to me i’ll, go ahead and leave my contact information in the description and then you can go and reach out to me, and i can talk to you about setting up your own dealership in-house one-on-one coaching program.
So you guys can do it yourself.
Well, there you have it while continuous training and one-on-one individual coaching so important to your store.
I mean on one hand it helps you retain employees, so it saves you on that expense, but number two.
It just helps make a better employee, a better sales person they’re going to handle objections, much better through the work tracks.
They learn the closes and the different skill sets they pick up through that continuous training and that one-on-one coaching and practicing and that’s going to help them, sell more cars, which is going to increase the profit for your store and speaking of word tracks and closes.
If you’d, like some tips on how to memorize these word tracks and closes so they sound natural and they just flow out and you become unconsciously competent, go ahead and click on the video.
That’s going to be coming up right about now: , you .
