Help Your Salespeople Achieve Success
Here is a portion
of a course I teach to new salespeople. Your sales managers may find it to be a
good reference for a sales meeting, so please pass it along to them or to your
salespeople as appropriate. You can find a thorough discussion of each of the
bullet points by clicking here to
go to my blog.
The Daily Routine
Everyone has heard
the expression, “You are what you eat.” In the auto business, “You are what you
do” applies. An habitual daily routine that includes activities that will make
you money is critical to success.
The Daily Routine
a.
Start with the End in Mind
b. The
Today Sheet
c.
Mental Preparation
d. The
Inventory Walk
e.
Prepare for Appointments
f.
Sales Followup.
g.
Lead Followup
h. “Bird
Dogs” and Industry Referrals
i.
Prospecting
j.
Product Knowledge
k. Contests
and Incentives
l.
Collect People
m. Being
Sociable Without Being Social
n. A
Teammate on an Opposite Crew is a Good Idea
o.
Make a Sale
Start
With the End in Mind
Very few people stumble into
success. Often what appears to be serendipity or instantaneous success is the
culmination of years of hard work and preparation so that salespeople can
recognize opportunities to succeed. History is rife with talented people who
achieved very little because they did not apply their talents. To be a success
at almost anything in life you must become goal oriented. You must establish
short term and long term goals, write these goals down and establish metrics
you will use to quantify your progress towards those goals. To achieve much
better than average success as a salesperson requires this goal orientation. The
best way to start each day is with a particular part of your ultimate goal
firmly in mind. Remember, hope is NOT a plan. Start your day planning to sell a
vehicle as opposed to hoping to sell a vehicle. This results in a huge
difference in attitude and a huge difference in success.
The
Today Sheet
Many dealerships require that
salespeople prepare and submit what I call a “Today Sheet” to a sales manager
at the start of each day. Typically, this sheet contains the salesperson’s
scheduled appointments, follow-up telephone calls and other planned tasks for
the day. It also summarizes the salesperson’s month-to-date progress towards
monthly sales and earnings objectives in terms of numbers of units sold, gross
margin made, commissions and bonuses earned and compares those to a pro rata
portion of their monthly goal. Finally, it contains a specific sales goal for
that day. Going over a Today Sheet with your manager for a few minutes at the
start of each day allows him to give you advice and be ready to give you help
when you need it later in the day. If your dealership does not require a
procedure like this and the completion of a Today Sheet, do yourself a huge
favor and adopt this procedure for yourself. Without external discipline, the
only way to get yourself to do this is simply to make it a habit. Just force
yourself to fill out a Today Sheet for thirty working days in a row. You will
see the difference it makes in your work habits, your personal satisfaction,
your sense of control and your income. You will be hooked on a good thing.
Mental
Preparation
You begin mentally preparing
yourself to sell from the moment you wake up (well at least sometime after that
first sip of coffee). When you dress professionally, or shine your shoes, you
are preparing for success. When you look yourself in the mirror each morning
and say, “I’m going to sell a car today,” you are preparing mentally. And when
you fill out you Today Sheet to plan your work you are preparing mentally. Do
not discount the importance of all these small affirmations. In sum they will
make you realize that you deserve the successes you achieve, and they will make
you ready to see and seize success when less prepared salespeople do not. Some
of the best salespeople I have known make a habit of repeating a personal
affirmation (“I am selling this guy/gal/couple a car!”) on the way to greeting
any prospective customer.
A positive attitude is key to
being an exceptional salesperson. A mechanic can perform the purely physical
function of replacing parts on a vehicle whether or not he is in a good mood. Being
a salesperson means working with others, and being ultra-sensitive to their
spoken and unspoken communication. The rapport you achieve with prospective
customers is critical. Prospective customers don’t want to be around a
salesperson having a “bad day,” and usually will not buy from one.
Every salesperson and manager I
have ever met will tell you that another key to success is the ability to bring
a high level of energy and enthusiasm to work and inject it into every opportunity
to work with a prospect. Many say that a salesperson’s energy and enthusiasm,
more than anything else, is the propellant that gets prospects to move from
step to step of a sale, and eventually results in successful sales. Sales
managers in particular link success or failure in salespeople to their relative
levels of energy and enthusiasm. It can be difficult to be “UP” all the time. At
the very least, however, you must always be “coming from” a place that shows
excitement for the prospect’s opportunity to change their lives for the better
by purchasing a vehicle. So learn to coach yourself, and be prepared to put
yourself into a positive frame of mind, full of energy and excitement, every
day.
The
Inventory Walk
Early each day you should get
in the habit of taking an Inventory Walk. This is simply a walk through the new
and used vehicle lots and the “bull pen” (where fresh trades are kept), and
detail shop, looking for and learning about vehicles. The purpose of this is to
make sure you know where all the new and used vehicle inventory is located, to
refresh your memory about specific used vehicles on the lot, and to learn about
any fresh inventory which has been purchased or traded in and is about to be
placed on the lot. The value in this seems obvious, but you would be surprised
how many salespeople have let prospective customers go without realizing that the
perfect vehicle for them had just been taken in trade or just been delivered
from the factory, but was still back in the Detail Department being prepared
for the lot. That this can and does happen is just one more reason sales
managers insist that salesmen come review their prospect’s needs with them
before letting prospects go.
Selfishly, however, there is an
even more important reason for you to do an inventory walk religiously. You
will be in competition with all the other salespeople in the dealership for the
opportunity to sell the superior pieces of inventory that come through your
dealership. There are exceptional vehicles that possess attributes (so clean,
so low mileage, so rare) that make them truly unique. These sorts of vehicles
inevitably sell very quickly for top dollar and produce the biggest
commissions. Time is critical in this process. The salespeople who can get
ahead of the rest of the sales force, finding homes for these choice vehicles
before anyone else does, simply make a lot more money.
Prepare
for Appointments
When you have an appointment,
don’t wait for the prospect to appear then “wing it.” Be prepared. If time
permits discuss your prospect’s needs with your sales manager and get his
advice on how to prepare. Settle on two or three vehicles you think might be
perfect for your prospect. Get to know those vehicles particularly well,
rehearsing the kinds of features and benefits they possess that might be of
particular significance to your prospect. You might even prepare by pulling a
vehicle offline into a special location where it will be easier to get the
prospect to focus on that one vehicle rather than the sea of vehicles on the
lot. The closing ratio of prospects who come in on appointments is enormously
higher than the average prospect who simply shows up on the lot shopping. In
fact, the closing ratio should be at least 40% or more. Make sure you take full
advantage of this opportunity.
Sales
Followup
A portion of every day should
be devoted to sales followup. These are telephone calls you make to people who
recently purchased from you, and there should be several to each customer. The
first call should occur within 24 hours of the sale. The tone should be energetic and the message
thankful for the business. You should insert a comment into your conversation
that if at any time the customer knows of anyone else who might be in the
market for a vehicle would he please tell you, setting the stage for asking for
referrals on subsequent calls. It is important that you make your initial call within
24 hours because the customer’s glow of fresh ownership is still strong then
and your call will help dispel the natural feeling of ‘buyer’s remorse’ that
arises later. You should also remind the new vehicle customer that he will
receive a survey from the manufacturer (to the best of my knowledge all
manufacturers send these) about you and how his transaction was conducted. Ask
him if there is any reason he cannot reply that he was “completely satisfied”
to any portion of this survey that he tell you so. Manufacturers grade both the
dealership and you by these survey results. Anything less than “completely
satisfied” is an unacceptable result. Unacceptable results can have the effect
of making both you and your dealership ineligible for significant factory
incentives.
Your initial thank you call
should only be the beginning of your contact with your customer. You should
make at least 3 telephone contacts (not voicemail contacts – actual contacts)
with your customer in the first month after a sale: one within 24 hours; one
within one week; and one within one month. After that you should contact every
one of your customers by phone no less than once a quarter. As your customer
base increases, this will amount to a significant number of telephone calls
each day. Regardless of whether or not your dealership places a lot of emphasis
on “relationship marketing” systematic maintenance of a relationship with each
of your customers will be the difference between being an average or below
average salesperson and becoming a superstar, six-figure earner. More on on how
you can accomplish this later.
Lead
Followup
The highest priority portion of
any salesperson’s day, when not actively assisting a prospect, involves calling
back prospects who have not yet bought. Of course, this is impossible if you
were not assertive enough during you first contact to obtain the customer’s
name, address and phone number. Some customers do not want salespeople to
bother them with sales calls and are reluctant to give personal information. Nevertheless,
a skilled salesperson develops techniques that build rapport, break down these
barriers and makes obtaining this critical initial data fairly easy. Most
customers will admit to visiting three or more sales organizations before
deciding to buy. The average closing ration across all dealerships is about
20%, including customers who purchase on a second or subsequent visit. This
means that more than 80% of the time the average salesperson will not make a
sale on a customer’s first visit to the dealership. This statistic emphasizes how critical it is
to be good at Lead Followup. Later we will cover the telephone techniques,
followup and prospecting skills you need to acquire to be expert at this.
“Bird
Dogs” and Industry Referrals
Each day might include a few
calls to “Bird Dogs.” A “Bird Dog” is a person who, often for a small fee upon
a successful sale, will refer customers to you. “Bird Dogs” are the sort of
contacts you should call regularly. A good example of an “Industry Bird Dog”
might be an insurance adjuster or body shop foreman who regularly sees people
whose vehicles are totaled and will refer them to you, or give you their
telephone number and ask you to call them. Some salesmen make a good living
doing nothing but cultivating a string of “Bird Dogs.” Do not ignore the non-industry
“Bird Dog” as well. One salesman I know got an extra sale practically every
month from a grocery clerk who really liked him. Whenever she encountered a
person in her checkout line that was in the market for a vehicle, she would
hand out one of his business cards. He made sure that every time he shopped she
had plenty of his cards. He bought her flowers on her birthday and a present at
Christmas time. She wasn’t even asking for referral fees. She just did what she
did because she liked him.
Prospecting
When you complete higher
priority items on your Today Sheet, you should turn your attention to
prospecting, contacting people whom you have yet to meet. You don’t want to be
so unfocussed in this effort you do the equivalent of opening up the phone book
and calling at random. The best prospects are “orphan owners,” dealership’s
customers whose salesperson is no longer working for the dealership. These
prospects already have a relationship with your product, your dealership, and
probably your service department. They are the lowest hanging fruit in terms of
the amount of effort it takes to develop a sales relationship focused through
you. Adopt them whenever you can. Lists
the manufacturers distribute from time to time contain other good prospects.
These have usually just received marketing targeted directly at them from your
manufacturer. You want to reap the benefits of that marketing by becoming their
point of contact with the dealership.
Your objective when making a
prospecting call should not be to sell a car. It should be to make a positive
impression, and if possible make an appointment to see the prospect in person.
When prospecting it is important to realize that first time calls result in an
appointment less than 5% of the time, even for skilled prospectors. If you
define success solely as making an appointment, nineteen out of twenty calls
will disappoint you. A success rate measured in this fashion is so low for
unskilled prospectors than many salespeople give up on this process altogether.
It is very important to develop good prospecting skills (more later on this). It
is also important to view this process holistically, as more of a commercial
for you and the dealership, a one-on-one very impactful commercial that you
will build upon in subsequent contacts.
Also remember, even if you are only able to
make an appointment in one out of twenty calls, for every twenty calls you will
have one more prospect than you would have had otherwise. Religious making 20
or more calls a day can turn the average salesperson’s opportunity to interact
with fifty prospects a month into an opportunity to interact with 75 prospects.
Assuming a similar 20% closing ratio the salesperson, who religiously does this
extra work, should be able to earn 50% more each month. That “extra” volume
almost always qualifies that salesperson for more bonuses and factory
incentives than the average salesperson earns as well. Salespeople who come to
the auto industry from the brokerage and insurance industries, where agents and
brokers typically make 80 to 100 telephone calls daily, found themselves to be
particularly well suited to build a “book of business” quickly using the
telephone prospecting skills they already possessed.
Product
Knowledge
A portion of every week should
be set aside to expand and refresh your product knowledge. Just as an inventory
walk can be particularly useful in getting a head start selling fresh used
inventory, acquiring product knowledge is important to selling new vehicles. Today’s
customers gather a great deal of information about the vehicles for which they
shop on the web. However, they still expect the professional salesperson to
know more than they know.
What the professional
salesperson does that the typical buyer does not do as he gathers product
information, is to imagine how he will use that product information to vividly
and memorably bring the benefits of a vehicle’s features to life in the mind of
a prospect. For example, it is one thing to simply know and say that a vehicle
has anti-locking brakes. A good
salesperson will imagine how to get a prospect to “see” himself on a
rain-slicked street with the whole family aboard when an emergency stop must
occur. The salesman will get the customer to “see” himself stomping on the brakes,
and “feel” the pulsing under his foot at hundreds of beats per minute,
maintaining traction; then “see” himself continuing to steer under conditions
that would have caused a vehicle without anti-locking brakes to slide
uncontrollably. Finally, he will rehearse one of his patented “trial closing
questions”: “Isn’t that they kind of safety you really want for your
family…?”
Contests
and Incentives
Simply keeping yourself aware
of what money is available to you from contests and incentives, both within the
dealership, and from the factory, will allow you to prioritize your work in
ways that make you more. Salespeople are usually very good at this. However, I
have actually seen a salesperson miss a $500 bonus because his normal day off
fell on the last of the month. Instead of scheduling an appointment and selling
a prospect on his normal day off, he sold that prospect on the first day of the
succeeding month, when that one extra sale in the prior month would have earned
him that $500 bonus.
Collect
People
Having the inquisitiveness and
desire to learn everyone’s “story,” I call “collecting people.” Collecting
people can be one of the most enjoyable parts of being a salesperson. It is a
skill, an attitude and a goal, which makes money. If you really want to know
about a prospect’s life, his family history, how he has grown up, what he has
done, you will discover that there are fascinating people out there. There is
no better way build rapport, and make your customer very memorable to you, or
you to them, than to encourage and listen to their stories. Collect people
wherever you can find them, in the service waiting room for example.
Be
Sociable Without Being Social
Having a good rapport with
other salespeople, especially those on your own crew, can be important and
rewarding. There is nothing wrong with a few minutes of social banter scattered
throughout your working day. “So! The Red Sox are not going back to the World Series
after all….” But beware. Most salespeople are by nature social creatures, and
you probably are too. It will be very easy to allow a significant percentage,
if not a majority, of your day to disappear in the chitchat that any such group
can create. Superstar sales performers do not let social chitchat keep them
from moneymaking tasks for very long.
A
Partner on the Opposite Crew Is a Good Idea
Under certain conditions, when
two salespeople are involved in a single sale the commission is split 50-50. Since
a single salesperson cannot work every hour of the day seven days a week it is
often beneficial to develop a symbiotic relationship with a salesperson on the
opposite crew so you can know that your customers are being handled
professionally when you cannot be present, and your partner can as well.
However, do not rush into such a relationship.
It is very important that you are confident of a partner’s skill and
professionalism or undue friction will result when it is imagined that the
other party blew a “sure sale.”
Make
a Sale
We began with ‘keeping the end
in mind.’ I will end it with that same thought.
Some salespeople get so involved in the organization of each day that in
among all the walking, and learning, Today Sheets,
prospecting and followup, that they lose sight of the very simple goal: make a
sale today! That thought has to be ever-present, guiding your choices and
actions throughout each day.