I’m not your prototypical Car Guy

I wasn’t raised in the auto industry. I didn’t have any connections in the auto industry. I didn’t have a family to help set me up for life in the auto industry. So how does someone with no connections, no car knowledge, no sales or automotive background, even get into selling cars, and from there, quite rapidly, go from Sales to Ownership?

I don’t really care to know about the history of classic muscle cars, although I do respect those who have a passion for them. I won’t be the first person to jump out of my chair when a new hellcat comes into the dealership to take it for a test drive. I’m just not a car guy. But, what I’ve come to understand, is that I’m a people person. I genuinely want to help others, and see them either succeed or play a role in helping them get what they want.

Here are 4 proven concepts that anyone can use to succeed in any business. We must find ways to take the complexity out of success and simplify it with systems and processes from real life experience.

Intuition is the highest form of intelligence. Trust it!

On a hot summer July day, about this time of year in 2007, and with similar temperatures, I walked into a Chevy Dealership to get some service work done on my wife’s car. Still dirty from welding 400 barrel tanks in the oilfield, I go into a Salesmen’s office and we talk vehicles because we were thinking of upgrading Steph’s car. I knew I didn’t want to be a welder for the rest of my life, but I didn’t yet have clarity on what I wanted to do. Troy (the Salesman) and I seem to be getting along well, spending more of our time talking hockey than cars, and as that is going on, I noticed that 4 out of the 6 offices had their lights off. To this day, I couldn’t tell you why or where this came from, but that voice inside my head said “you should tell Troy that you could fill one of those offices for him, what’s the worst that could happen?” And so, I trusted my instincts, and blurted out to Troy that I could fill one of those offices for him, and to my surprise, he said “Great, we’re needing someone, I’ll go get my Sales Manager and we’ll do an interview right now!” As I’m sitting there sweating profusely in the comfortable air conditioned office, thinking to myself “What the hell did I just get myself into”, the Sales Manager comes over and starts the interview process. I don’t remember the whole conversation, but I do remember asking him who his best Salesman was, and he said between the two dealerships, that it was Troy. Having no clue how many vehicles would be considered good or not in a month, I asked him how many Troy sold on average, he replied with 15. That seemed astronomical to me. How could someone possibly sell 15 vehicles a month, every month! None the less, this voice came back into my head and said “tell him that if Troy can do it, then there is no reason why I couldn’t either!” And so I once again trusted my instincts, blurted out that if Troy could do it, then there’s no reason why I couldn’t either. I was hired on the spot and started my Sales Career the following Monday.

The harder you grind now, the easier life gets later

Being raised by a workaholic has its pros and cons. Thankfully, a strong work ethic and being used to working long manual labor hours is a pro. Whenever I heard, or still hear today, someone complaining about working a 9 hour day in their office, I have a silent chuckle to myself. Little did I know the time and effort it would take to get to 15 vehicles per month. To become successful and gain respect from your peers and clients, you must be willing to put the time in early on in your career. This speeds up the learning process, and although it may seem like you aren’t getting any monetary gain out of it, you’re going to down the road. In the Automotive Sales Industry, speaking from experience, your third year in is when you really start seeing massive benefits from the time and effort that you had put in years prior. It’s not that complicated, work hard, work smart, put your head down and go, get along with your peers, work on yourself every day, and the results will come. I figured out a bit of a chart for the Sales Consultant to review. When I get into Sales Coaching full time, this is what my goal will be with a New Sales Consultant for example.

Time                   Units         Hours/Week

3 Months            0-8             80 – Craziness
6 Months            8-11            70 – Overloaded
9 Months            11-14           60 – Full Time
12 Months          14-17           50 – Part Time
15 Months          17-20          40 – Free Time
18 Months          20+             Flexible

For anyone in the automotive industry, they may view these numbers as ambitious. But let me tell you from experience, I’ve gone from knowing nothing about Sales or cars to the #1 Sales Consultant in our Company to Sales Manager, to General Manager, to Owner, and was selected by Automotive News as one of North America’s top 40 Automotive Professionals in North America under the age of 40, and there is a system that can be taught to anyone that will lead them to generate these kinds of results. I’m confident in taking a 15 car guy to 20+ cars because I’ve been that guy, I’ve been there and done it myself. And have only gained more knowledge and credibility since then. To find out more, check out https://rethink-selling.teachable.com/

Care

It’s genuinely that simple. Unfortunately, this could be the key contributor to separating yourself from another Sales Consultant. And, it will be the key contributor to repeat/referral clients, which are by far the best kind. It requires genuine attention to your client when they are talking, holding doors for people as they are walking into the dealership at the same time as you, making sure you go over the entire vehicle after your detailing department is done with it to make sure it reaches your standards, say Hi to your peers every morning without exception, listening more than talking with any one, under-promising on something only to end up over-delivering so you can leave the client with that WOW feeling, etc. Caring more will never go out of style and is an intangible quality that follows you around wherever you go, and people love people who genuinely care.

Always be progressing

No matter what your definition of success is, it always comes down to having an obsession with everlasting self-development. If you aren’t progressing, you’re falling behind. You’re falling behind on your potential, you’re falling behind against your peers and other Sales Consultants, and you’re delaying your financial freedom goal. Self-development, like caring, will never go out of style and will always be a determining factor between a client falling in love with you rather than someone else. Often times, we’ve had situations occur where our prices may have been a bit higher, the product may not have been exactly what the client wanted, but yet, they start a relationship with us, and are more than happy to do so, because they fall in love with the experience they had. Once you understand that now more than ever, you’re not selling a tangible product, i.e.; a car, or truck, you’re selling an intangible product, i.e.; the clients’ experience, then at that point, you’ll be able to start separating yourself from other Sales Consultants who are caught up in memorizing scripts and providing every client with the same sales pitch, with the same closing questions, with little to no emotion, and so on. Keep in mind that this isn’t the Sales Consultants fault in most cases, it’s the culture of the dealership that creates that atmosphere and that’s on the Ownership or Management team.

So I encourage you to Trust your Instincts, grind it out, genuinely care, and have an obsession with everlasting self-development. Once you do this, you’ll push the fast-forward button on your success!

Imagine allocating only 15% of your marketing budget to newspaper, print, online, and radio. And not advertising any payments or price on those ads. Not only that, you encourage people to shop your number and give them a “Car Buying Guide” explaining the best way to approach an auto dealership. Now invest the other 85% spent on sponsorships, donations, and gifting. Do you think your traffic would increase or decrease? Do you think the quality of that traffic would be stronger or weaker?

In the fall of 2016, we modeled this approach and are on our way to the strongest retail sales year that we’ve had in the 32-year history of the company. What we’ve done is simply invested 85% of our advertising and marketing budget back into the very people that came here to experience our dealership and purchase our product. We re-invest the money into buying their 4H Steers, sponsoring their curling bonspiels, hockey and baseball tournaments, donating to important causes in the area, and the biggest change was we started sending personalized gifts to our clients after they purchased. We paid close attention to what their hobbies were and based our gift off of that information. We also sent hand written custom thank you notes. Here’s an example of one that we did recently.

A client of ours needed a pre-owned SUV, and we happened to have what he was looking for in stock. You couldn’t help but notice the San Jose Sharks Hoodie, Key Chain and hat he was wearing, clearly a fan. At this time, the Sharks were on their way to the NHL Playoffs. After he picked up his vehicle, I immediately went online and ordered him a new Sharks Hoodie and Hat. The way we customized it for him was we put his nickname on his hat and hoodie, “Casper”. When he received it in the mail, he was beside himself. It was completely unexpected but it made him feel important and valued. No matter how big your budget is on marketing, that feeling can’t be bought. We felt great for doing it, and he felt great for receiving it. A win/win. We don’t have our logo on our gifts anywhere at all. We focus on gifts that the client will value and ideally see every day. We do gifts like custom cutting boards where we get the family name engraved on them and the clients will love them so much, they’ll have them set up in their kitchen on display which leads to a great conversation piece at dinner with friends and family. People are often shocked that a dealership would pay this much attention to detail. In an automated society, now more than ever, it’s important to have a personal touch because people will value the extra little effort you put in.

Running cheesy gimmicks in an attempt to get clients in the door is easy and requires virtually no skill set. Plus, the vast majority of dealers are constantly promoting some sort of gimmick ad to get their floor traffic up, so if you’re doing your advertising this way, how are you separating yourself from the competition? From what I’ve experienced in the past, free hot tubs, big screen TV’s, “free” trips (they usually require the client paying a registration fee that they weren’t informed about), may have got us some people in the door but the quality of the client was low and thus our profits were low as well. The end result being, a lot of work and money for a low R.O.I. and retention rate.

We asked ourselves, what if we approached advertising from a completely different perspective. What if we encouraged clients to shop our numbers and gave them a guideline on how to purchase our product? I’ll give you an example. We ran a full page color ad in a few newspapers and advertised on our local radio stations about a “Car Buying Guide” which gave a guideline for clients on how to purchase a vehicle. The ad included shopping our number with 2 other competitive dealerships, asking the right questions when at the dealership and on the test drive, and helping the client be as prepared as possible before they got to the dealership or even made first contact with their Salesperson. The response to this ad was exceptional. In what should have been our slowest 2 months of the year (January and February), we exceeded expectations and crushed our goals by 68%. Clients are going to shop you anyway, we all know that, but the majority of businesses seem to be naïve and would rather blow a bunch of money and hope that people come in the door with speculative marketing. What we found the result by changing our approach to advertising is higher traffic, higher quality clients, higher retention rate, and the referrals were starting to flood in. Ultimately, the client respected our honest approach and started telling friends and family about our company.

When you see an ad in the newspaper for a vehicle, what do you typically see? Low Payments, Huge Savings, Payments as low as, Prices have been slashed, etc. The information is the same with every dealership but with different colors or pictures, the message is the exact same. We found that by creating an image for our dealership and promoting why we are in business completely separated us from the competition and made people take notice. Although I believe there is certainly a time and place, it’s now extremely rare for us to advertise prices in print or radio. Our focus has shifted to informing the public about why we come to work every day and creating a culture that they would want to be a part of. People don’t buy initially based off price, they buy off emotion, connection with your business, the overall experience, the product and then the price.

By focusing on our core values and advertising them freely, it has undoubtedly been the driving factor behind our company’s success as of late and will continue to be moving forward. Our advertising budget has decreased but our business has increased and we have the numbers to prove it. We’ve increased our new Retail Sales Volume from 134 in 2013 to 216 by the end of our fiscal year in 2016. The client acquisition cost at our dealership is an estimated 75% lower than our direct competitors.

I would encourage you to take a serious look at taking a different approach with your advertising moving forward. You tell your employees about your vision and what type of culture you want within the dealership, so why not tell that to the public rather than simulating what the vast majority of other dealerships are advertising which is “the lowest price”. Price became less of an objection after we stopped advertising it. Weird eh?