In the first installment of this series on high- vs. low-trust culture within a dealership, we discussed how, while progressive employee benefits are certainly welcomed and appreciated by most employees, all the vacation time in the world can’t save a dealership that operates on a low-trust culture.

In this second installment, we’ll talk more about how a low-trust culture can prevent a dealership with incredible potential from thriving in the marketplace. We’ll then go over some examples of how to identify a low-trust vs. high-trust company culture. 

Let’s start with biology. Did you know that the human brain perceives distrust as a social threat? And that it responds to a social threat much the same way it responds to a physical threat? When we operate in a low-trust environment, our brains lock down, and our thought-processing abilities become limited to basic survival instincts. In other words, “When we are experiencing a threat response, our brains simply aren’t capable of the same level of cognitive analysis, problem-solving, or collaboration that is often desired by organizations.”

So, right off the bat, we can see that taking the time and energy to build a high-trust culture is in the best interest of your management, your employees, and your dealership as a whole.

It doesn’t end there, though. A low-trust organizational culture can be pricey, to say the least. Consider the following:

• A study conducted by the global consulting firm Watson Wyatt found that high-trust companies outperformed their low-trust counterparts in total return to shareholders by 286%.

• The businesses that made Forbes Magazine’s list of “100 Best Companies to Work For” (where at least 60% of the criteria is comprised of trust factors) earned more than quadruple the return of the broader market over the preceding seven years.

Now that we have at least a small glimpse of the negative effects a low-trust environment can have on any organization, you might be thinking that you need to make some drastic changes at your dealership. And in Part 3 next week, we’ll learn how to build and manage a high-trust culture. But before we can really do that, we need to understand what each type of trust culture looks like, and how to identify a low-trust culture versus a high-trust culture.

The level of trust on which a business operates can affect numerous different aspects of the company’s operations and ultimate failure or success, but it always impacts at least two measurable outcomes: speed and cost. A low-trust dealership will function at a lower speed, and will do so with higher costs. Conversely, a high-trust dealership will operate at a higher speed but will have lower costs.

These two measurables, of course, arise from the existence and perpetuation of a number of less tangible outcomes; indeed, there are arguably too many of these intangible signs and symptoms to reasonably cover in this article. But in his book First Things First, the legendary Stephen R. Covey provides an excellent starting point for understanding what each type of culture looks like. I’ve compiled Covey’s descriptions into a single chart here, for quick and easy reference:

Now that we have a better picture of the differences between a high-trust versus low-trust dealership culture, it’s time for the hard part: Over the next couple of days, take a clear, honest look in the mirror. Pay attention to your employees’ overall energy levels, how they behave, and how engaged or disengaged they seem to be. Then, be honest: Are you running a dealership with a high-trust or low-trust culture?

Whatever the result, be on the lookout next week for the final installment in this series, where we’ll learn what it takes to build a low-trust culture into a high-trust culture, as well as how to foster and manage an already high-trust culture.

You put a foosball table in your dealership’s break room. You stocked the kitchen to the hilt with free food for your employees and bestowed upon them more paid vacation than they could ever possibly use. You probably think you’re nailing the whole “company culture” thing.

So, why can’t you seem to hold onto any good service techs? Why do your salespeople arrive exactly on time -- never a minute earlier than they have to -- and cut out the moment their scheduled shift ends?

The answer: they don’t trust you. Or their supervisors. Or their co-workers. It may sting to hear this, but the reality is that if you’re struggling with engagement, retention, and performance issues, your employees likely aren’t operating in a culture of trust, no matter how many “progressive” perks you’ve thrown at them.

Paul J. Zak, author of Trust Factor: The Science of Creating High-Performing Companies, refers to these types of benefits as “golden handcuffs,” and he’s here to burst your bubble: Without a high-trust culture, such perks may create some sporadic short-term happiness, but they won’t improve performance or increase retention in the long run.

Through years of extensive research on the neuroscience of human connection, trust, and teamwork, Zak has found that:

This may sound like a fluffy chunk of common sense, but the numbers don’t lie -- and they’re eye-opening, to say the least:

 

Stay tuned for the next two installments in this series:

• What High-Trust vs. Low-Trust Cultures Look Like

• How to Create and Manage a Culture of Trust

Ian Coburn is the author of The Customer is Never Right: Sell More Trucks, Cars, Buses, Parts… Anything in One Month. He is a former training manager at Navistar and president of the soft skills talent development and training company GPA Training, Inc., but he started his career in a rather unorthodox position: as a stand-up comedian.

“It was my job, touring across North America, for ten years,” Coburn said. “No one realizes the value of a dependable vehicle and thus a great mechanic and knowledgeable source on vehicles [more] than a comedian. I was once on the road for 106 straight weeks. Literally, the only relationship in my life as a comedian was my car.”

Uncommon, to be sure, but touring as a comedian served to build up a useful repertoire of skills. When Coburn got tired of the comedian lifestyle, it made “perfect sense” to get into sales and customer service; after all, he’d developed the ability to speak in front of people and, most importantly, how to listen to people.

“It was a huge advantage because unlike when we are dealing with a customer, I didn’t have any numbers, deadlines, quotas, etc., to hit,” he said. “I could just listen, which got me interested, which led to me asking questions to learn more and really dig into the details. I learned to do it, effectively, and quickly.”

His first job after being a stand-up comedian was selling office supplies, where he was “immensely successful,” breaking sales records. His first day on the phone, he made 39 calls. Of those, he scheduled nine appointments and sold a man twelve computers – a 26% close rate. Two weeks later, his employers created the training manager position and promoted him.

And so it went. Coburn would start a sales job, get great results, and be put in charge of the team or training after a few months. Eventually he became a sales consultant, setting up, training, and/or “revamping” sales and customer service teams. In 2016, Coburn joined Navistar as a training manager, quickly becoming a frequently-requested speaker at conferences.

So why did Coburn decide on the automotive industry? Simple: he wanted to help.

“Auto and truck have been ignored by L&D, which is too bad, because you won’t find a better group of people who deserve to achieve maximum results,” he said. “They make everything happen,” from selling and servicing vehicles that take children to their soccer games to spending long hours on their feet dealing with disgruntled people, especially in service.

“Other jobs, we hear people sometimes ‘go above and beyond.’ In auto and truck, the job [itself] is going above and beyond, like when techs drove to Mount St. Helens from Chehalis, 100 miles away, to pick me up at 2:30AM because my ball bearings had busted, leaving me dangerously stranded in a curve heading up to the mountain,” Coburn said. “So I jumped at the chance to help truck dealers improve when the opportunity arose, and then to later add auto to the mix.”

What Successful Dealers are Doing Right

One word: listening.

“Top sales and customer service people, whether at dealerships or in other industries, listen and respond. They ask questions and make few statements. Then, once they feel they have all the information they need, they sell you the solution you need,” Coburn said. “That solution is never a vehicle, part, or service; instead, it is the dealership. They also build good relationships with everyone within the organization.”

Coburn talked about an auto rep who sold Coburn’s own mother a car in Lima, Ohio. The rep asked her a few questions: What are the most important features you’re looking for in a vehicle? How will you be using the vehicle? What about passengers or other drivers? And then the rep listened to her responses and asked follow-up questions before providing exceptional service – including a free oil change.

“My mom was so impressed,” said Coburn, “that she now drives one hour to Lima whenever she needs something for her car, even though she used to use the mechanic just down the block from her.”

What Unsuccessful Dealers are Doing Wrong

Conversely, struggling salespeople and customer service employees talk more than they listen.

“They rarely ask questions, causing them to frequently take customers down the wrong path, then must backtrack, somehow blaming the customer. And they aren’t shy about letting the customer know it: ‘I wish you had told me that,’ or ‘You should have said something,’” Coburn said.

And , he added, even if a salesperson does assume everything correctly, failure to ask questions (and listen to the answers) causes, in turn, failure to build rapport with customers. Even worse, sometimes salespeople will bad-mouth other departments in their own dealership, which is unlikely to encourage repeat or referral customers.

What Can Your Dealership Do?

Coburn puts it like this: Stop marketing; start selling.

“There is a muddy area between marketing and selling in the dealership world. When we stand in front of someone and point out all the features of a vehicle to them (‘The seats fold into the floor, I’ll demonstrate.’ ‘You can remove the cupholder to reveal a hidden department.’), we are marketing,” Coburn said. “When we ask questions (‘What are your top three must-haves in a vehicle?’ ‘What qualifies as good mileage to you?’), we are selling. There’s a reason someone coined the phrase, ‘Telling isn’t selling.’”

Coburn also advises that asking questions (and – you guessed it – listening to the responses) can be used to control the conversation. There is talk in the industry about not being “order takers,” but Coburn points out that many dealerships train their staff to be just that.

“We teach them to ask, ‘How may I help you?’ at the onset of the conversation, which tees up the customer to ask the questions and our staff to answer. The problem is, customers aren’t experts, so they don’t know which questions to ask,” he said. “Better to teach your staff to ask, ‘What part/service/vehicle are you interested in today?’ It sets up staff better to continue asking questions.”

Take the time to walk around your sales floor and listen to your staff, and see who ends up asking the questions. Chances are, you’ll find it’s almost always the customers. Once, as an experiment, Coburn walked around 22 different car dealerships in the western suburbs of Chicago, and the salespeople were the ones asking the questions in only four instances.

Another thing you can – and probably should – do is answer questions with more questions. People usually tend to answer questions with statements, but oftentimes, the question being asked is not the “true” question. The goal should be to identify and answer that “true” question. To find out the real question, Coburn recommends following these three steps:

1. Acknowledge the question.
2. Get permission to ask your question.
3. Go straight into asking your question.

Coburn referenced an interaction he witnessed at a dealership, involving a sales rep and a customer. The customer asked the sales rep if a particular vehicle got good gas mileage on the highway, to which the sales rep replied, “Yes, sir, 24 miles.” The customer thanked him, refused the his offer of a brochure, and began to walk away.

At this point, Coburn jumped in, asking the customer what qualified as “good” mileage on the highway to him. The customer said it was 28 miles, so Coburn asked the rep if there were any vehicles that fit that standard. When the customer was asked if he would like to see those vehicles in particular, he said he would, and the rep led him off.

“The ‘true’ question was not, ‘Does this vehicle get good gas mileage,’ but ‘Do you have vehicles that get at least 28 miles per gallon on the highway?’” explained Coburn. “That’s the question the rep needed to identify and answer. Why didn’t the customer ask that question? It goes back to L&D – how the adult brain works.”

“The customer  knows what qualifies as good mileage to him, he knows the car he is looking at, he processes the information, and then asks, ‘Does this get good mileage on the highway?’” Coburn elaborated. “Interestingly, a child would have been more likely to ask directly if the car got 28 miles on the highway, because children’s brains aren’t developed to the point where they do such processing.”

Coburn says your dealership should also practice objection handling. The simplest way to do this is to bring the customer with you, by “repeating the objection, [getting] permission to ask a question, [and asking] your questions instead of making statements.”

When Coburn and his wife went into a Toyota dealership to buy a minivan in 2016, they looked at the Sienna. Coburn told the sales rep he liked the folding seats in the Pacifica, and the sales rep retorted, “Yeah, but it doesn’t have [this feature] and [that feature].”

“None of those features mattered to me,” Coburn said. “He pushed the product, came off slightly confrontational, and turned the atmosphere negative by putting down the product – worse, it was a product I had told him I liked, which some customers could mistakenly take as him putting down their personal tastes or judgment.”

You can circumvent this effect by bringing the customer with you. Instead of putting down certain features, sales reps should ask the customer questions to determine why they like a particular feature.

Coburn’s final piece of advice? Have fun!

“Take it from a former touring comedian: when it comes to communication, delivery is more important than content,” he said. “If you’re having fun, the customer will have a much better experience, because your delivery will be much better. Top sales and customer service reps are always having fun, regardless of their numbers or the challenges they may be facing outside of work.”

Coburn’s book, The Customer is Never Right, is available here. DrivingSales members can receive a discount by using the promo code DRIVINGSALES.

Erik Nachbahr, President of Helion Automotive Technologies, talks about the biggest mistake today's dealers make when it comes to their data security.

Employee retention: the notorious and ever-present affliction of the automotive industry. One of the most important components in the quest to win the battle against employee turnover is proactive employee engagement strategy. But what is employee engagement? I mean, what does it look like? How do we know which tactics are truly effective and which are a waste of time and resources? And how do we apply that information to a variety of employees?

The Brandon Hall Group recently released the results of its 2018 Engagement Survey. The report provides an excellent jumping-off point for figuring out how to effectively drive employee engagement: generational differences. The survey shows that there are "some striking differences in attitudes when it comes to valuing activities for engagement among organizations with a younger age-mix compared to older age-mix organizations. The younger age-mix organizations are more likely to consider team-building activities and recognition programs to be highly valuable for their engagement initiatives. The older age-mix organizations are more likely to consider career development, coaching, work/life balance supports, and wellness/well-being to be highly valuable."

The report provided this visual breakdown:

 Of course, it's important to tailor your employee engagement strategy to your particular dealership, and perhaps the best way to do that is to ask your employees themselves what types of activities they consider highly valuable for increasing their own engagement with the organization.

Do you find this to be an accurate summary based on your own experience? Managers, what engagement activities have you found to be more or less successful for your dealership? Non-managers, what age group do you belong to, and which types of activities do you find most valuable?

You can find the full report here.

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Chris Thomas, owner of Krieger Ford, talks about the growing importance of building flexibility into the processes you use at your dealership every day.

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When Shannon Crane, founder of BDC PowerConsulting, started out as a BDC Manager at a local dealership, she was “as green as it gets.” Not only had she never worked in a dealership, she’d never even financed a car before.

To use her words, she “kind of fell into the automotive industry” – much like many of us did. And, like so many of us, there wasn’t a whole lot of training involved. She was thrown to the wolves. As a result, “when something worked, I’d add it to my repertoire. Basically, when it stuck, it stuck,” she says.

Crane started out with a bare-bones BDC, taking internet leads at a makeshift desk in a corner of the dealership showroom. Eventually, the GM had the receptionist start sending sales calls her way. A little over a year later, and after a small amount of growth in her department, Crane was promoted to the management position.

Crane explains that people who have to figure things out the hard way tend to be very good at training others because they had to carve their own path and make (sometimes embarrassing) mistakes to learn and therefore can pre-empt the major pitfalls and misunderstandings green employees will come across before they have a chance to make common mistakes with customers.

When Crane first took over the BDC role, there wasn’t a lot of structure in place. There was no path already in place to follow because the department was brand new when she started, so she carved her own path. She revamped the word tracks and created the process, the reporting system, the templates, and the variations thereof. Crane strove to set up an “efficient, machine-like system” that was personal at the same time. She also wrote the BDC departmental handbook, administrated various systems, and participated in the morning managerial save-a-deal and sales meetings.

Crane notes she was “very fortunate to work for an incredibly talented, and surprisingly wise GM” She described her former general manager as a genuine person who understood things in a realistic way. “I learned a lot about managing people from observing him, and he always stopped to answer my deeper questions when they came up. When he gave me run of the BDC, he basically just said, ‘It’s your world, I just live in it. Run it.’ It felt good to have that confidence from someone I respected so much.”

After four years at this dealership, Crane decided to branch out and start her own BDC consulting firm. She knew there was a great need for the niche-style of training and coaching designed specifically for BDC’s: when she was managing her own department, 60 percent of her job was spent coaching, and she was always on the lookout for someone to come in with a fresh perspective.  Crane needed someone to come in and refresh her team, but she could not find a professional trainer that specialized in BDC appointment closes.

“When you have a team you’re in the same room with every day, and reinforcing the same wordtracks and strategy multiple times a week, sometimes it stops landing with the agents. It becomes background noise,” she says. She believes that hearing the same call strategy from a second voice reinforces the legitimacy of the process, as the second voice will always have a fresh spin on coaching or teach a new turn of phrase to use on calls or emails that reignites the team’s motivation.

Crane would take time to pick the brains of outside showroom sales coaches who were brought in to that dealership on a semi-regular basis, but found that their processes, although wonderful for floor sales, always fell apart about ¾ of the way through for her team’s needs, since their specialty was on closing showroom sales, not setting appointments for internet and phone customers. This was the experience that informed her decision to go independent.

Crane’s Advice to Dealers: Keep It Simple, and Grow Slowly

BDCs can be expensive to start up, which holds dealers and GMs back from moving forward.

Crane recommends a type of “baby steps” approach for dealers who want to incorporate a BDC but are put off by the overwhelming process of integration:

For Crane, the first step for a new BDC is to answer incoming internet leads only. This allows the team some time to get comfortable and perfect their phone skills with outbound calls they can mentally prepare for first. The next stage of growth is to then integrate incoming sales calls. After that, the BDC can learn the service process and start taking all incoming calls as well as scheduling service appointments. 

These small steps don’t benefit only the BDC, either. “Service departments can be overloaded. The service writers’ inability to be at their desks all day to answer customer calls is something that will give a service department bad reviews online. Bad reviews they don’t deserve,” Crane said. Taking over service appointments and calls can dramatically reduce the load for often-buried service departments.

Crane says that funneling all incoming calls through the BDC ultimately eliminates the need for a receptionist position and keeps the customer from having to wait patiently through multiple transfers to find the right person to talk to about their needs.

“The point is to make those changes, but [to] make them in increments so you’re not overloading your team [and] your expenses,” she said. “Introduce one new step, let the BDC get comfortable and confident in its process, and then add in the next step.”

Crane believes BDCs that also specialize in service appointments are integral to ROI because you can generate sales from people who are calling in for repairs, sometimes major. If trained properly, your BDC can begin to integrate your service customers into dealership sales campaigns.

Crane advises spacing out the stages of growth in increments of four to five months. Start off small, she says, and gradually build up the number of staff only as needed. Some dealerships may start new BDC agents to be focused on service calls and campaigns first, while training in sales with overflow leads when the other agents are weeded. This solution may or may not work for everyone, as dealerships are individualized “just like people.”

Draw on the Arts, Sciences, and Philosophy, for Starters

Crane says she often has to come up with unique takes on sales training and coaching; there’s no “one size fits all.” Crane’s approach draws on the arts and philosophy, for example.

“You have to be able to understand people on a deeper level,” she says. “My approach is sometimes unexpected at first, but when the agent I’m coaching sees results and begins to understand what we’ve been building, they appreciate it.”

Start by engaging in casual conversation to get to know them, learn about them, discover what moves them, and learn how they communicate. It’s important that this is a genuine interaction. From there, you can adjust your approach to each individual.

Crane offers the example of a young woman she coaches. This woman is a very talented musician, so Crane often uses music metaphors to get through to her to explain the philosophy behind the call strategy.

Another example is one of Crane’s clients who is “very linear and left-brained, which is okay because everyone is unique.” Crane coaches this client to write sticky notes of word tracks that were less commonly needed but extremely powerful when used. This is a good coaching strategy for agents that have some structure but are learning how to crush it in tougher calls.”

“The left side of the brain is being used at its fullest capacity when an agent is taking an inbound sales call. For starters, inbound calls are always a surprise. The agent is now shifting gears, listening to the customer, researching vehicle info, running calculations, and making sure they respond to the customer in a way that brings them further down the sales funnel and closer to closing an appointment. So I advise agents to write sticky notes of word tracks that are less commonly needed but extremely powerful when used. The hand-writing of the word track on a sticky allows the agent to quickly find that lesser-used-but-important word track, but not lose focus on the left-brain operations on the call. The right side of the brain recognizes variations of handwriting and spacing on paper, and it will lead your eye straight to the wording note you’re looking for. The subconscious mind does a lot of background work for us, so it’s important to let it do ‘its thing’ for us at work, too.”

“I don’t like to train people to parrot things. Sales is an art like any other. I liken it to playing an instrument. “To elaborate, a person is not playing their own music when they’re still memorizing where to put their hands to create notes and chords, but they are learning the basic process. They are awkward at times and will have to check their sheet music and hand placement often. However, with practice, these things are mastered in time, and the chords are assimilated as muscle memory. This is when the musician can play as themselves and improvise, like jazz. Learning sales strategy is no different. There is a structure you need to follow, as well as certain points an agent needs to hit. Once the fundamentals are learned, their voice is going to come through,” she explains.

I learn a lot by being asked questions while I’m coaching,” she said. “You can plan all you want, but at the end of the day, I’m going to be playing improvisational jazz, too."

Professional Development & Hiring

“The employees I found who tend to be the most driven, dedicated, and willing to learn are those who are intelligent but weren’t born into a privileged position in life, unable to follow what’s considered the traditional path,” Crane says.

Crane cited one young woman who had worked at a chain shoe store for six years – for $8 an hour. Another had twin babies and had been working at an airport sandwich stand when she was still carrying them. And there was a “driven” 19-year-old who had been in AP classes in high school and an effective communicator with a great phone voice, but didn’t have the opportunity to go to college.

“What these three women from my old dealership team have in common is the will to grind in humble positions, often under difficult circumstances, for the long term. They operate under the philosophy of taking care of business no matter what. When you find someone like that and you give them the opportunity for a real career, where they are treated well, and will pay a working adult’s wage, they will be the most loyal and hardworking people on your team, because they’ve been finally given the opportunity been looking for and deserve,” she said. “They tend to be the type of people who have been driven since childhood but simply didn’t have an outlet for it. You give them that outlet, and you have an excellent, high-performing team. When I hire people for BDC, the biggest thing I look for is longevity at places of employment and I don’t really care what [that job] is. If a person is driven enough to grind in a humble position for that long, and is an effective communicator, they’re going to be someone who’s invested and driven to make the most out of the opportunity that they can.”

Jim Roche is the Divisional VP of Marketing & Managed Services at Xtime. We asked him to tell us the biggest mistake he sees dealers making today when it comes to customer retention. Hit play to hear what he told us.

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Jonathan Dawson is the founder and CEO of the sales training company Sellchology. Here, he chats with us about having one-one-ones with your salespeople.