Posts tagged training
No More No. 2
Feb 14th
Back and forth. Up and down. Back and forth. Up and down. Back and forth goes the salesperson negotiating with the customer. Up to the sales manager’s desk the salesperson walks and then back down to their desk they go with another price. Another attempt. This volley with the customer has become archaic and antiquated. It is disliked and disgusting. The days of penciling deals over and over must end.
No more No. 2. No more pencils. That strategy is done. It’s finished. Someone tell your sales managers. Break into their desks and steal the pencils and multi-colored Sharpie markers. The consumer has moved beyond this tired strategy and is ready for new days of selling! Stop the negotiating with customers and start the educating.
It is time your sales managers and sales people end the rigmarole they’ve used for years and do away with how they’ve penciled deals. Instead, your managers and salespeople must learn how to overcome objections and negotiate through education. The consumers are coming in with very specific expectations and very detailed research. Why put them through the constant back and forth? Instead, you must utilize the online resources and data at your (and the customer’s) disposal to validate the price you charge.
Dedicate yourself to understanding what all is available to your consumers online and begin using the third-party data as evidence to defend the price you are charging. I’m not advocating a one-price solution here. Negotiation is still allowed and going for gross is still acceptable, but be prepared to answer the “WHY?” question when it arises with real data.
We have now entered the era of Validation Selling. (Yes, I’m coining a new term here). We must prove the reason we price our vehicles by utilizing the data they already have. Moreover, we must eliminate the tactic of writing down our offer on a half-blank sheet of paper with markers and pens and begin presenting our figures on a fully-printed out pricing proposal. All figures must be entered into the CRM and printed out as if it were an official contract. This must happen from the very first offer. Having it printed and available in a clean format lends credence to the numbers your sales team present. Certainly more validity than a four-square with $24,995 scribbled across it in thick blue ink.
Get on board with Validation Selling. Throw out any previously-held beliefs that the customer still enjoys the ‘back and forth, up and down, crossed-off price here and slightly lower price penciled there’ strategies that you’ve grown accustomed to. Educate yourself and then educate the customer with online, third-party data – or be prepared to overcome it. You will sell more vehicles and build a quality customer sales experience at the same time.
Education Over Negotiation
This is how to sell vehicles in 2012 and beyond. Education over Negotiation. DealerKnows are the Validation Selling Specialists. Let us explain it to you.
Pivot your way to success.
Jan 31st
A couple weeks ago, I was brought in to consult with a dealer group on the East Coast. As with most people, I passed the time by reading a book. On this particular trip, I read the Lean Startup by Eric Ries. One of the concepts that is used throughout the book, is the Pivot, and the practice of pivoting. In essence, pivoting is understanding your original vision is flawed, gathering all the information gleaned while discovering the flaws, and moving in another direction to maintain a growth trajectory. In layperson’s terms, it’s setting off in one direction, realizing you are lost, and remembering the land marks you passed to get back in the right direction. Without realizing it, we pivot continuously throughout our daily lives, however we rarely apply that concept to our businesses.
On the flight home, I realized that many dealerships have never pivoted since they created their Internet operations. The management took (what they understood at the time to be) best practices, and utilized what resources they had available to build an Internet program. For some, it was round-robining the leads to the traditional sales staff. For others, it was creating an Internet Department. Yet others, thought a BDC would work best for them. From an outsider looking in, it looks like many dealerships ordered the Processus du Jour and are still suffering the from the indigestion.
Let’s eat something a little more digestible. We were all taught from a young age that plants need sun, soil, water, and air to grow. If that were really the case, we could take that free fruit basket that your lead provider sent you for Christmas, dump it out behind the employee parking lot, and grow a lush orchards of biblical proportions. If you’ve utterly failed at gardening like me, you understand that soil 
composition, species, climate, shade, moisture, insects, ground cover, nurturing, and many other elements play a critical role in the success or failure of a garden (luckily my wife loves to garden!). Simply taking seeds, and planting them in the soil is not enough. Sometimes a transplant will suffice, while other times, you have to till everything under, and wait for next year. Gardeners make hundreds of pivots every growing season to maximize the fruit of their labor (shameless pun), just like car dealers should be making hundred of pivots to maximize human resources, tools, customer service, and Internet market growth.
Operating a car business online is not a decision: It’s a commitment. You can’t just align your staff, create a department, throw the seeds in the backyard, and expect immediate success. You need to make mistakes to learn. You need to pivot when know you’re heading in the wrong direction. Just because it works for someone in your 20 Group, doesn’t mean an orange tree is going to grow in Wyoming. Make a commitment, fail fast, learn from your mistakes, and make the necessary decisions before it becomes too expensive, or worse, becomes too late.
Now go make your garden grow!
The Chrysler Southwest Internet Manager Workshop with Joe Webb and Shaun Raines
Apr 30th
If you are a Chrysler Dodge Jeep dealer in the Southwest region, have you registered to attend Chrysler’s One-Day Internet Manager Workshop with Joe Webb and Shaun Raines?
Brand building: Taking the mystery out of conference jargon
Dec 3rd
Like many of you, I have sat through multiple presentations and webinars regarding social media. While some may touch on it, and others may focus on it, the term “brand building” comes up quite frequently. While on the phone with a dealer recently, it occurred to me that a good portion of our peers may not quite understand brand building, and hence, have a hard time applying it in the real world. For social media, this is a classic case of putting the cart before the horse.
Simply put, a brand is the identity of a business, product, or service. What comes to mind when you think of Coca-Cola? How about Nike? Now maybe Apple? I’ll bet somewhere in your mental imagery, classic white script across a red background came up, along with a swoosh, and a glowing white apple with bite taken out of it. These companies have done an extraordinary job of marketing a consistent brand image, and have created a culture surrounding their businesses. If you need more examples, just walk into your showrooms. You will see brand imagery everywhere.
What comes to mind when you think of your own dealership? (Note: this works best when you think of the positives.) Is it a dedicated, veteran sales staff? Is it consistent OEM recognition? Is it community involvement? What makes your store different from the one down the road? Hopefully, multiple things come to mind. Take those thoughts and jot them down.
Now think about how you want your customers to perceive your dealership. When they think about your store, what images do you want them to conjure up? How are they perceiving your identity on your website’s homepage? If you are drawing a blank, then it’s time to start working on that. Ultimately, it’s up to your business to craft that identity.
I think we are all well aware that Coke, Nike, and Apple have millions of dollars to commit to advertising agencies, not to mention the top-notch marketing talent they have available to them in-house. They are global brands competing on a global scale. Should you aspire to have their type of brand awareness? Absolutely! Do you need their millions of dollars to reach your market of 30,000 people? Absolutely not!
You have the advantage over national advertisers. You understand your own market better than they do. You understand how your closest consumers talk, think, and dress. If you are using your CRM properly, you may even have notes on where people go to church, where their kids attend school, and how much their fifth-wheel weighs. This information is available to you for free!
Speaking of free, those commercials you normally fast forward through are full of free inspiration. Try actually watching some commercials. What messages are you taking away? What tag lines are you hearing? Tune-in the next time you see commercials from mega-brands like IBM, Microsoft, GE, Red Bull, Starbucks, and UPS. Pay extra attention to what your OEMs are advertising and the images they are reinforcing. Take note of the fact they are not advertising “the largest inventory,” “rock-bottom prices,” or “(region’s) number one (whatever)…”
When you are ready to start coming up with brand ideas, talk to others. Bounce ideas off your spouse. Ask your friends. The wider the variety of people, the better. Then, sit down with your coworkers over some pizza and start brainstorming. Try to come up with one sentence that best describes your dealership (or department).
When you feel good about what your network has to say, have the same conversations with your most loyal customers. In fact, take a walk down to the service department and have that conversation with customers while they are having their maintenance performed. Find out if your brand identity is in line with a perceived value (be prepared for the worst). Compare notes. If the messages are the same, fire up the marketing machine. If they are not, you need to dedicate yourself and your teammates to bringing the ideas closer together. This is when you employ brand-building efforts (like social media, video marketing, and dare I say, a TV ad) to distill your message down for consumption by the masses.
Sounds like hard work, right? It can be, but it’s well worth it. Your customers will know what separates you from the competition. You will attract customers who are looking for an alternative to their local dealer. You will create a value proposition beyond price. Best of all, you and your teammates always have a guiding principle to fall back on in times of question. Trust me, you’ll forget about the hard work when you immediately start reaping the benefits. It’s “time to change everything,” “have a Coke and a smile,” and “just do it.”
Post Script
There have been several great books that have been published about brand building or indirectly touch on the subject of branding. One that immediately comes to mind is the Starbucks Experience: 5 Principles for turning Ordinary into Extraordinary, by Joseph Michelli. While it wasn’t written specifically about branding, it caused me to evaluate my business practices and offered some great perspective. It’s a short and compelling study so you should have no trouble finding the time read it. (I read it in one plane trip). If you have some books that have been inspirational to you, please share. Now that the gift-giving holidays have begun, we can add some books to our wish lists.
Vendor Scorecards
Nov 22nd
On our DealerKnows’ Virtual Dealer Training program, we help dealerships maximize the technology, solutions, and opportunities already in place. With this comes a considerable amount of negotiating with vendors to improve their products on behalf of our dealer clients. No system is perfect, despite what vendors say, and often it takes a fresh set of eyes to show a dealership what they are missing with that provider. Product enhancement requests flow when we take on a new client and our Virtual Training platform can help evolve your use of a system/site and can help the vendors get better as well. And there lies the rub.
With advancements changing in the online marketplace daily, vendors must realize their products must change as well…just as quickly. Dealers won’t wait around forever as their vendor clients continue to sit on their hands. So here is my challenge to every vendor:
I want a Vendor Scorecard. I believe vendors should create a scoring system that allows all of their dealers to see, review, and vote on what advancements their teams should put into action. Not support issues (though a Vendor Scorecard could be beneficial for this as well), but an idea exchange where people on the ground can tell the people in the high rises what their system NEEDS to be able to do. It could be a small password-protected community within your software that allows ALL dealers to post their product enhancement requests so that ALL other dealer clients can see. Make it available to your own loyal public. Each product enhancement request should be time-dated and stamped so we know just how long it takes the vendor to react. Not respond… react. Fix. Change. Develop.
Then, take it to the next step, and allow every dealer client to VOTE on which product enhancements they most desire to see active sooner rather than later. You will create your own weighted scale as to which improvements to focus on completing. If you so desire, consider giving those few dealers that utilize your system to its fullest, are your oldest clients, or represent you in the online communities a heavier VOTE than others.
The automotive resource site, DrivingSales, has taken one step by bringing Vendor Ratings into the forefront and asking the automotive retail professionals that peruse this site to vote on who and why they recommend the companies they’ve chosen. This has been a good way to help vendors gain exposure and allow dealer personnel to give feedback to their peers. When a vendor’s reputation is questioned on these sites, it is amazing how quickly they respond. They either scurry to cover up the negativity or do their due diligence to correct it before it damages their business.
The end goal here is to let your own community of clients that USE your product to IMPROVE your product. I think there is a progressive way to do this without risking a vendor’s reputation.
If you are a vendor reading this, please don’t hate me for saying it, but your product/solution/sites CAN improve. Not “will”, but “can”. You can enhance your offerings to dealers if you just listen closely to your current clients. Above and beyond negotiating with vendors on behalf of our clients and suggesting new technological opportunities, we help them get the most out of their current solutions and websites. When we look to improve a vendor’s offerings for our dealership clients, though, we see far too many no-brainer enhancements that still are not being implemented. When I request a change from a vendor or give them (free) advice on how to better their offerings, I hear the same responses constantly. “We are working on it.” “I’ll pass it along.” “That is scheduled to be in our next release of enhancements 6 months from now.” What else do I hear? “I don’t understand.” THAT is the problem. You aren’t using the product the same way an Internet Sales Manager or Sales Manager uses it so you have your blinders up to the real needs of your software.
Dealers are asking themselves daily: “Where the heck do all of my product requests go?” “How many times do I have to suggest an improvement for it to go overlooked?” “When will this feature become available or active?” “Is anyone listening to what I want?”
I see no better way to get a vendor’s attention than making product enhancement requests a centerpiece to their customer service initiatives. Customers will finally be able to track their relationship with the vendors and hold them accountable if need be. Make them time-stamped suggestions with enough of your constituents voting for it and there will be no way a dealer can have a deaf ear. It is time more vendors listen to their clients first instead of listening to their own random ideas.
As I said, this is a CHALLENGE. The first vendor who decides to make the direction of their technology a democracy by creating a similar Vendor Scorecard available for all of their dealers wins my approval and another blog post dedicated to their innovative ways. Fair enough?
