Good morning to you, it must be 5 a.
m in the morning, because it’s time for hardison’s tips and i’m your host brandon hardison president of champion strategies for a thursday august, the 27th in the year of 2020.
, glad to be with you whether you are in key Account major account up and down the street in home sales, retail or automotive.
We have some tips for you as you’re, getting dressed to go out to do your thing, so, let’s get right to it today.
I just want to reflect a little bit because my question is: can you expect survival during this pandemic if your sales consultants are stuck with the mindset of the past and here’s what i mean uh last week, one of the dealerships in my hometown of trenton new Jersey closed its doors and went out of business now, keep in mind.
This was an 80 year old third generation dealership.
At one time they were very well respected.
Employed over 200 people had about 30 sales consultants and were the leaders in the market today.
Their building is empty, their employees are no longer there and the owner is staring at the walls of an abandoned point or dealership.
Now, i’m not privy to all of the variables that came together to bring this demise, but i expect that one of the major contributing factors was the mindset of the sales consultants too many sales consultants hindered by too much mental baggage, not knowing what to change or How to change it, you see if sales consultants are hindered by their mindset, they’re not nearly as effective as they could or should be.
The cost of your dealership from these type of individuals inevitably will put you into a tailspin and 80 years.
From now.
Your business may fail i’m talking about the cost that sales people really don’t pay attention to, but dealers do opportunities that are not captured, customers that are not created a value that is not communicated margins that are not gained because of lack of turn.
All of this impacts, the sales person and the sales consultant gets burdened in their mind and start thinking about things and they’re not ready to play the game.
What is the game working with the customers? So, in a recent sales seminar, we identified one such effective mindset and the idea of that sales consultant is a mobile customer service representative and we role-played it and pretty much.
It went something like this says.
The two were interacting: how are you, how was the weekend how’s the family want to buy a car? Here’s the price, see you when you come back from shopping, my competition.
Well, that may have worked 20 years ago 30 years ago.
I’m not saying it can’t work.
Today, somewhere uh, but we have to make sure that our value as professionals customers will see and have that price justified in their head.
So how come this is not happening.
Well, one there’s! No attempt to identify customers needs wants desires, there’s no formal presentation of anything going on.
We don’t do a good job of telling our story about our dealership, our values, our mission statement, there’s no, depending on the relationship where you do extensive continuation of follow-up.
By giving your customer knowledge knowledge about the vehicle they purchase want to purchase upcoming things, we don’t do decent follow-ups now i can go on and hopefully you can start to see what i mean by too much baggage in the sales person’s head sure the pandemic is Here i said that at the beginning, but we still need to do our jobs effectively.
In other words, presentations need to be made.
Relationships need to be stronger, we need to get prospects in and if we can’t sell them, we need to follow up with them.
Let’s face it, numbers numbers numbers: that’s all sales is so if you want to be around for the next 80 years or longer concentrate on the numbers and the key points of where your team members need to be with that guest.
So if you’re a manager, if you’re an owner, what do i do? I have spent the past three decades of my life in part, training, sales, consultants, managers, coaching gm’s and the economy has shifted a few times over these years.
Yes, we’ve made some critical observations.
We tweaked some things on the way, but one thing i can say it is the mindset of the salesperson.
So if you’re a manager, that’s out there and you’re not doing one-on-ones, how do you know what that baggage is? In your sales person’s mind, remember this is team solution selling you’re the team leader? If you want to continue to hit objective and goals, i need the sales people to make sure the processes stay intact, and we need to make sure that we are practicing on a daily basis parts of those processes.
This is the only way we can transform ourselves and get ready for this new normal, as they say, but one last thought if you feel that sales has changed so much this new way of being normal has changed so much and you don’t think that you’re ready For it do yourself a favor! Why don’t you get out now because you’re hurting yourself, you’re hurting the organization that you’re working for and, most importantly, the potential customer they’re not getting the experience that they were hoping for spending those type of dollars on a new vehicle? Once again, brandon hardison president of champion strategies with hardison’s tip.
We will see you next time and as always in parting, make .
