Sales tactics fail in service drives when dealers skip customer fundamentals for fancy tools. Hire for genuine hospitality, not sales skills. Trust beats objection-handling, and systems that remove friction for customers drive long-term revenue.
The next one is retain customers and making the customer experience easy. And I think that you have to fundamentally be a fan of customers. You have to like customers and have that bug. I remember one time I was interviewing this girl that had been a general manager in some restaurants, and I was kind of asking her, About how she built her team and what she would look for. And she just said this thing that to her made so much sense, but to the outside is kind of like, feels a little different. Is she said like, oh, you can tell right away they either have the bug or they don't. And I'm like, what's the bug? And she's like, the hospitality bug. You either want to serve people, or you, you don't. You're either a good— like, you're a good host all the time, or you're not. Like, that's one of the things that I love about our team is when people come here, everybody we have working here is a great host. They, they want to make sure that people have a great experience. And that, you know, it's, it's very intentional and offensive. It's not— they're not waiting for permission in a way. to, you know, to the degree that Alex is making cookies and, you know, it's just a— it's a whole thing. But I think that you, you either have the bug to understand fundamentally that customers drive everything. The customer experience is the key. So many times we have this conversation and it, it's like the, um, I mean, there's so many conversations we have like this that it's like people live in one world and the real Results are in another world, right? Like people want to talk about video inspections and it's like, okay, but if you can't, you know, video inspections add a layer of complication. Now all of a sudden it's social media in a way and your texts have to be presentable. They have to know, like there's just way more to do than just doing an inspection with a piece of paper. And if you can't do with a piece of paper, you're certainly not going to do it now with software. Like, but people get caught up in this thing like, oh, well, you guys are saying that you don't like video inspections. And that's not what we're saying. We're saying we got to get good at the basics before we add on layers, because it gets worse, not better, if you're not good at the basics, right? And so in, in that same sort of thing is people are like, hey, we want advisor training. And it's like, you don't want advisor training. Like, what you want is a system that takes away decision-making for customers, makes them feel comfortable, builds trust. they will buy. I know that most dealers came up on the front end and they think sales training is the answer because it is in the front, but in the back, people aren't buying because they don't trust and like us, not because we overcame 5 objections. You can't overcome objections in service. You got one chance at it. If you're asking them 3 or 4 times to buy, they're never coming back. That's badgering. And, you know, and so There's like, you have to fundamentally understand that what's important is the customer experience, and that's what drives revenue long-term. You need people to come back. They're gonna spend more money if they like and they trust us. And I mean, it's, you know, all the studies too that, that are out there just go to show you that the younger generation now that, that are the car buyers are even more put off by the experiences that they have in car dealerships. And the retention from car dealerships to independent has gone down. Even you didn't think it could go down anymore, and it keeps going down because they just don't have patience for the shenanigans of the way we do it. And so, you know, you just, you just see the managers that care about customers and kind of build everything around the customer experience, calling people back, when we say we're going to. And they're just fanatical about the basics in taking care of customers and making it easy for customers. That's the key. That's what it's all about, making friends.
Yeah, it really is that simple. But we miss that piece of it a lot. And I think it comes from bad recruiting processes. I think A great service manager also knows you're always recruiting. You're never done recruiting. And if you're not operating from that standpoint, chances are you let somebody on the team that you did not want to. And it's funny how many people have the story of— and when I'm visiting the store, I've learned it's always the last person they introduced me to. So we'll make our way around the dealership. They'll introduce me to the different people, and I can always kind of tell if they have this person on the team on the drive, which most people do, because it's the last person they introduce me to. And it'll be like, oh, there's Mr. Advisor. He has pretty good sales. Um, he struggles with CSI because he doesn't really like people.
Yeah, he doesn't really like people.
Fascinating how many people have the story of that person on their drive. And you got to understand that the crux of this You truly have to. There's zero customer service training you'll ever take that doesn't say you have to have a burning passion for your customers. It's that old Emerson quote. Emerson says, who you are is so loud, I can't hear what you're saying. Advisors need to understand that at its core. We need to understand that with who we're allowing to interface with customers. If not, the independents are going to keep having record months. And they're doing pretty good.
Yeah.
And I remember a store, the only way they would recruit is like through some of the hospitality places like Chick-fil-A. You know, if they had a really good experience, like I'd even say our waitress last night was so good. I think we all looked at each other and just, we had a little bit of banter, but just the engagement, we're like, you think she could be a service writer? She was awesome. It's just those people that you make those simple connections that make it just, uh, uh, pull off the anxieties and that decision fatigue for sure.
