#131 - Motivating Sales with Marshall Zoerner

Hey, welcome to this episode of the Independent Dealer Podcast. Today we have the great honor of having Mr. Marshall Zahner here with us all the way from the left coast.

Hey, how'd you get here so fast?

What are we talking about, buddy?

So it's training with Marshall, it's always training. And if y' all don't know who Marshall is, go back, listen to episode 31, and we talk about a lot of training there. Marshall and I do some training stuff together, and we talk about clarity and consistency. And I think, Marshall, that's what it's all about during the time of uncertainty, is getting your staff motivated through clarity and also through consistency. Is that right? Yeah.

All right, here we go.

Oh, God.

You are listening to the Independent Dealer Podcast with hosts Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson. Thank you so much for tuning in. Let's do this.

Marshall, thank you so much for joining us. Fun fact here, guys. Marshall was on episode 31. Guess what episode this is?

131.

131.

I was gonna say every hundred episodes.

We're gonna have you back, buddy.

Okay. All right. Wow.

For those of us. Any listeners out there that haven't listened to episode 31 yet, they're gonna. But give us a quick introductory intro to you. Where are you at? What do you do? And where'd the hairdo come from? It looks real good.

Yeah, well, yeah, it's a special product that we use here in Oregon. Not familiar with it. Maybe in some parts of the country.

Egg yolk. Egg white. Yep.

Special, special vegan egg white, you know, so I'm a car dealer in Portland and. Well, actually, we have two locations in Oregon. We have one in Salem and the other one's about an hour away in Portland. And I'm sure everybody knows Portland because it's been on national news lately. So we have those two locations. We sell a lot of European cars at our Portland location, and in our Salem location, we sell kind of a mixture of European and some domestic. And then we also have a sister company that we purchased about a year and a half ago, and that one is primarily Japanese. So we kind of have a gamut of different vehicles.

And.

And we sell about 170 to 190 cars a month. And we carry about, between all the stores, about 230 cars.

And it's all retail, by the way.

All retail. No buy here, pay here. Yeah, we have a lot of partnerships with banks and credit unions, and then we have a full service department as well at both locations. And it's a pretty Robust service department. We do everything from allay wheel repair to painting your car to repairing minor and major things like transmissions, engines, or they're European.

So all repairs are major.

All repairs are easier to get sold to a customer. I'll say that.

Yeah, they got cash. Marshall, what's your primary responsibility? What do you do 9 to 5, 9 to 2? What do you do for the group?

You know, that's a great question. I mean, I'm a partner in the business, and my title is recently vice president, formerly general manager, but as of right now with COVID And during COVID times, I would say my role is pretty much anywhere and everywhere. I mean, I'm filling in for sales managers, I'm filling in for finance managers, service managers, because it's kind of all hands on deck right now. And I do have those positions still. It's just, you know, we've limited our hours, which I'm sure maybe a lot of our other dealerships have. We've limited a lot of our staff. So I'm just kind of filling in different spots. And especially right now, that part of the country, or at least part of our state has opened up a little bit. You had five or six months of people taking vacation or not being able to take vacation. Now all that's pent up and people going, hey, I want to take a vacation. So guess who gets to cover everyone's.

Cashing in their pto, huh?

So listen, just real quick, let's hit the COVID thing. Before. Before COVID how many employees did Y' all have?

90.

Okay. At this point where you sit, 60, and you see any difference in productivity?

Well, that's a great question. I know we've talked about that a little bit, you and I personally, and there. There is a diff. Not a difference in the last couple months, you know, we've sold quite a few cars in the last few months. And as far as production, you know, we haven't been able to keep up with some of our recon, that's for sure.

Okay.

And our staff has been over overloaded leads and work. So everybody's just working. I don't know if they're working more. They're working harder and working as they should. Maybe that'd be an interesting thing.

Can that. Can that last? You know, like they talk about, right. Sizing and maybe cutting the fat. But like you said, does that just mean that you're working three jobs right now and you're not able to focus on the big picture and the things you should be doing? Because you're filling in in all these spots, and then your other guys are all overloaded, and they're going to either burn out or stuff's going to fall through the cracks or, you know.

I saw Marshall taking pictures, so I know that it's not going to last long.

Sometimes it's just quicker. You know, I think in this. In. You know, I try to tell everybody, if you don't come out of this ahead, then you did something wrong during this time. This is a time to learn and to make yourself better. And we went from. I think the Exact number was 88. We had roughly 90 employees, and we went all the way down to about 30. And we didn't really know what was going to happen with this pandemic. So we kind of took the best precautions necessary. And March was a little bit rough, and so was May. And then June started to come back. Well, came back with a vengeance. Really well. Right. And then so did July. And so we hired people back. But we wanted to. To be very cautious on the point that we got to, because I think, you know, 90 was probably a little heavy, and 30 is obviously really light. So we wanted to make sure when we built it back that we're building it the way that we want it and we don't want to live too fat. And, yes, I can't do everything, but we're in the middle of redeveloping some processes and procedures to make us a better company. So, yeah, I don't. Long term, no, I'm not the picture taker, and I've already kind of filled that position and in one of our other locations. And, yes, I do fill in here and there with it. But I feel like right now you're right, Jeff. You can't overwork your people. But right now, it's the time to reimagine your company.

Yeah, that's what I said. What I think is so awesome is you've got that opportunity where you're filling these different roles by necessity, but what you're also doing is you're learning where the process is broken. So if you're stepping into F and I or sales or taking the pictures, you're like, what in the world? Have we really been doing it this way the whole time? Like, whoever taught you this? Like, I'll step back into detail. And I'm like, why are we using this chemical? Like, why are we doing it this way? Where did this happen? They're like, well, it's just always been that way. You mean this thing's been broken? For six months and you guys have been duct taping it every single day. Like, how is this so broken? Have you found that being able to step into those different roles, like, man, we have been inefficient.

I apologize for that. That is rude. Yeah, it was early here. Like, who on earth would be calling me at this time? Yeah, we. Well, sorry, Jeff. That was super rude. Yeah, I think Luke, he's so surprised that, like, why am I jumping into a picture taking role? But we noticed the process that we did, it involved quite a few. It involved like, you know, we had a picture taker and we had an editor because we wanted to make sure our pictures were, you know, really nice. And I. We pride ourselves in being, you know, the best of the best with the best quality. And I think part of the problem. Well, I don't know if part of the problem. One of the things I discovered with doing it was, you know, the picture quality went down. But I needed to get these cars online because we just needed to advertise them. Well, one thing that one of the metrics that we took was, hey, no matter what the quality of our pictures were, didn't seem to matter how much our sales went up or down. Like we. Our picture quality honestly went down and we're working on getting it back up, but it didn't affect sales. So you go, okay, is that a metric that I need to spend a lot of time on or do I need to invest a lot of money in that? Probably not. I'd probably need to, you know, make it really good for our company, but I don't need to put in an order amount effort into it.

That's interesting that that picture quality doesn't make a difference. I remember sitting with you at 20 group years ago and one of our little, I guess exercises was to look at each other's website and kind of go through it. And the one thing I noticed on yalls website was, and I know the type of car y' all sell and how nice it is that I didn't think the pictures were. Were as good as they should be. And, And y' all agreed actually when I, when I brought that up and. But you know, did it really matter all that time that, you know. So I don't know. And I've been, I've been with you on that, Marshall. I've been getting cars to the website faster and we're selling them a faster. So I guess, I guess pix quality doesn't really matter that much in the whole grand scheme of things, except for our appearance as a company, I guess.

Yeah. And I had another dealer friend of mine tell me they spent $15,000 on a photo booth. And, and he goes, and I tracked it for a year. It never made it. I never got busier because of it. And so he goes, you know, it was, it made us look better, but I'm not sure the investment was worth it.

Yeah. And that's what's so interesting, I think when you say he tracked it for a year, you know, it's so hard. You make an instant decision to do these things out of necessity. And it might just be the market, hey, it hasn't affected things last month, this month and the month before. But let's track these things over a time period because you are looking for that slight advantage and people buy things like spin car and these other crazy plug in services because they think they're getting a competitive advantage over the guy down the street. So I think you do need to track these over a long term time.

Absolutely. And you can't take what happened in June and July and go, that's what I'm going to build my model after. Right now when I say reinvent your business, I'm going, yeah, reinvent it for, you know, next year and the future. But you can't build it off of, oh, we had a bubble for the last two months and it doesn't matter. You couldn't do, you couldn't do anything wrong. You would. People are just buying cars from you. And I'd like to think that we were doing something really right. But when you talk to a lot of dealers, they're having record months and so don't think that, hey, you're, you know, hey, we crushed it this month and it's all because of us. No, that's the market right now. So what are you going to do when it gets a little bit tougher? And I know you wanted to talk a little bit about motivating sales staff, but what are you going to do when it gets really tough out there and all of a sudden you know that this pandemic gets really real and it's an election season and people get really tight with their money and then all of a sudden they are a little bit more conscious about their purchasing decisions. You're going to have to make sure those cars are marketed correctly and maybe pictures do matter a little bit more than what we're doing right now. And maybe the way that your ads are written matter more and maybe the way that your sales staff handles people is going to matter a lot more.

I think sales staff has a lot to do with this, because if you have the right car, maybe if it doesn't look exactly right, Marshall, I think a good salesperson can sell that car to me or to you or to Jeff. So what should we be doing to make sure our sales staff's motivated and ready to do what they're supposed to do?

Yeah, I love that question, because it's really hard in this time, especially if you're a dealership that scaled back your staff, because we've talked about this before and probably in episode 31, some best practices on training your sales staff. And one of my biggest things that I say is to keep motivating is train them. I mean, people love training. It's definitely motivating. I mean, I think that's probably why people listen to this podcast, because it's motivating. They hear different things and they. It gives them an avenue to go and something to put into place. And, you know, and when we do training, it's very interactive, and so it can be very motivating. But the first thing to drop off when we get busy is training. When. When we don't have time and we're filling in for different positions, training drops off. Right. And one of the biggest things that I'm an advoc of is keep it consistent. Well, I don't know how I could keep it consistent. When I got down to 30 people, it was like, at two different stores going, how do I possibly train on what the heck is going on when we don't know what's going on?

Right.

So I admittedly dropped off a little bit in training for about 30 days there. And then we immediately realized that is a terrible decision and need to get back to it pretty quickly. And a problem is it's just what we train on. The process that, you know, whatever it is that you guys have that you're training on, the greeting, the walk around, the investigative stage, the going on a test drive, it might be totally different now. I mean, in our state, we have to wear masks with people, and we can't be within six feet, which I'm pretty sure is most places. Well, that's pretty hard to do a test drive, right? So now all of a sudden, our guys can't go on test drives. And even if we wanted to, people don't feel comfortable with it. Well, that's a huge part of our selling process. A test drive. And so all our guys go, I don't know what to do. And instead of, you know, the more time you spend with somebody, the higher the chance of closing them. And when you can only spend 10 to 15 minutes with a customer now, instead of 45 minutes, because you were doing this job of investigating and building rapport, and then you go on a test drive and investigate even more and build more rapport. And then you'd kind of close them on the test drive and when you got back, you would, you know, go through some more closing statements and get them to the desk. Now all that's kind of gone out the window because you only have 10 to 15 minutes. So we as managers and we as owners have to go, okay, what's the new process? And come out with it pretty quick. And don't throw out all the other training say, how do we adapt? What is everything that you know right now? How do we turn that into a ten minute little window? Or how do we create more time? That's the biggest thing that I've been training my staff is how do you create more time? And my guys are just, you know, selling cars right and left and thinking, this is easy. And so when a customer comes in, says, I want to drive it, they're going, great. I don't even have to go with them. So I'll just, you know, throw them the keys where you go, no, you have a, you know, a test drive for them. How can we slow that customer down? And what kind of questions can we ask to make sure that we're, you know, landing them on the right car and, and building some rapport? Because, you know, people buy because they like you. Right? I mean, that's most of the reason why us as dealers are so successful. We're likable for the most part.

That's interesting. You know, I had the privilege of sitting in on Marshall's training a couple Fridays ago, I guess about a month ago. And it's just, it's powerful to listen to what his people know how to say to customers. A couple key points Marshall brought up during that training that I thought maybe you could go over. Marshall was getting the customer to sign different things. You know, how many times does it take for a customer to sign before they feel like they're committed? That was number one. And the other one you use, I mean, just a great way to transform a customer. And it's a quick statement of, other than this, what's holding you back? So could you go over those two things, Marshall?

Sure. So I think what, what we did is we, what we do is we clarify negotiating versus versus closing is what you're talking about on that other than statement. And I'll get into that here in just a second. The other portion, the other portion of that, sorry. That first question you asked me was signing.

Signing how many times?

So three signatures is kind of what we call tmo. Total mental ownership. It's not anything that I invented, but total mental ownership is when somebody just, you know, they're, they're starting to own this thing on them themselves. It's getting them to give you feedback on statements. That's why we use a lot of leading questions and try to trigger responses from people. Like when we say it's a really nice car, you know, you don't just. It's not a statement that it's a really nice car. It's really nice car, isn't it, Luke? Yeah, See, Luke has to get that response which. So I've got to trigger that. I got to wait for that response. As salespeople, we just like to talk and not wait for a response. So then the second part of that is when you're getting committed, I mean, they're already signing at our dealership a test drive form. That's, that's one step in a commitment. Then when they come back, you kind of go over a carfax with some, with them. Well, there's a signature line on the carfax. Get that signature as well. And then we in our state have a privacy statement that's another signature. If you run their credit, you can do a credit disclosure, risk based pricing. That's another signature. And I think the key metric is three signatures gives them, you know, a commitment in their mind that they're committing to buying this car. And you'll start to see some hesitancy. But it's really not a bad thing because really in sales we're trying to flush out all objections, right? So objections are welcomed and you can't be scared of them. You can never be scared of objections. And when people go, well, what, what if they say they don't want to do that? Well, awesome. I mean that anytime somebody doesn't want to do something or a customer is hesitant, that that means we're doing our job. We're doing the right job of trying to sell them on something. Right? And I think one of the biggest things that salespeople like to do is go, well, what if they realize I'm selling them something?

Awesome, salesperson, it's on your name.

Yeah, but sometimes we as owners and managers don't even, we like to beat around that too and be like, well, we could gingerly talk about this rather than just going, yeah, your job is to sell, so it's okay to be salesy. Some salesy.

Yeah. And so interesting, the difference between an objection and a complaint, you know, that's something I try to teach my guys, too, is there's a difference between an objection and a complaint. You know, and complaints don't necessarily need to be addressed. They can be kind of sidestep because it's like, yeah, there's a scratch on the wheel. You're right. There's a scratch on the wheel, you know.

Yeah. And that. That's what I'll get into. I'll go into with a second part of this question is, you know, or what we covered is just fleshing out, you know, closing versus negotiating. What a lot of us like to do is they'll see a scratch or they'll see some sort of objection, and then they'll start negotiating on that and go, well, you know, I mean, if we discount the car, what if we were to. What if we were able to fix that? Or, you know, I mean, fixing that is already cost. Right. So rather than committing to any of that, you know, if your objection was, you know, there's a scratch on the car or the tires aren't the tread depth that you want, you say, okay, well, then other than, you know, the scratch on the cars or anything holding you up, buying this car today, and the key statement to that is figuring out what is your real objection, Jeff. Because your real objection is not really a scratch on that car. I mean, it's usually going to come down to money or talking to your significant other. Right. That's what I'm trying to navigate through. Are you able to make this decision today, or do you got to go talk to somebody about it, or is it really. Or what's the dollar amount that you're trying to get to? And if you say, well, you know, I just really can't get over that scratch, I totally understand. But, you know, other than that scratch, is there any other reason you want to get this? Well, you know, I wouldn't want to do that unless it's fixed. Okay, great. Sounds like you're trying to make a good decision or get a good deal on this car. Other than getting a good deal, is there any other reason you want to wrap this up? No, if I can. And then they're gonna come back to you. If I can get the right price, I'll get it. Great. Follow me down to my desk. Now, I know that there is no other reason they don't want to get that car other than that, that price. But what they could do, and the problem is that a lot of our salespeople do is they get them, they kind of, unfortunately some of them commit to fixing that. Well, that's not, that's a hard, that's an easy fix. And in their mind the customer's like, well they're going to fix that. Then they get them down to the desk and then they start negotiating with them and then they go, okay, well I'm just going to go think about it or I'm going to go talk to my wife about it or I just got to call my mechanic to get it inspected. And all these other objections come up that you didn't flesh out and you're going, oh, I just negotiated over. Now I have to negotiate this twice.

Now again, I love that. Negotiated over the Internet. Well, would you take 500? You know this. And you're like, come on man, you.

Know that's a, that's a hard thing.

Yeah, I mean right now, again we have a lot of leads coming in. So right now we can, we're gonna probably land a lot of those customers by mishandling leads because we just have a sheer, the sheer amount of them that are coming in. But when it gets tougher, we've got to know how to handle those leads. And if we're just throwing out information, oh hey, I have a five grand offer. Well, you as a salesperson did not do your job if you're just coming to me with a five grand off offer.

Yeah, that's my biggest argument, Marshall. The hardest thing I have with sales team in general and I know my sales manager is going to listen to this so I'll be delicate, but it's a handful of, sometimes it's just order taking, man. And when I see the guys running keys all over the lot like just a madman, I'm like, what, what is going on man? If I just needed someone to take signatures and run keys all over the place, I'd hire a bunch of 18 year old kids and pay a minimum wage and have them just. I'd leave all the keys in the doors with contracts on the frickin dashboard. Like where's the professionalism and where's the motivation to be a salesman, you know?

Well, 100%. But there's two things that they're in the 1, 100% blame goes to you, Jeff, and then the second part will go to your manager. And what my managers a lot of times like to tell me Is, oh my gosh, I wish my sales guys would do this. I wish my sales guys do that. Well, if they did all that, then they would be managers and I wouldn't have any salespeople because everybody be promoted. So there's a reason you're a manager and there's a reason you're in. You're an owner and you have to deal with that and you have to like accept it. Just like you're going to accept that everybody has objections. You got to understand that your salespeople are going to mess up. And literally we do training every week. And every week I try to recap what we talked the week about the week before. And they always forget, you know, and it's not because they're dumb, it's just natural, right? That's just what. And you go, so I have to keep covering it because they're also dealing with a lot in the day. And so you went through the training, they tried to implement it that day. And then by day two, with the third customer that handled something totally different that they feel like is a one off now, all that training went out the window, right? It's your job to keep reigning that back in. And then there's another thing that I like to. Now, this is a different metric for every dealership, but I like to say it takes about two days for every employee to implement any one process, right? And it can go from one to probably three days, depending on how big your dealership is. And what that means is I have 60 employees. So if I take two times 60, you know, that's 120. If I have to implement a new process, it's going to take 120 days before that process is fully implemented. Meaning if I try to put something in place and next week I'm like, why is that process not being followed? It's because everybody got lackadaisical about it, didn't care, and then reverted back to whatever they thought was easier. So I've got to stay back on top of. I gotta get my managers stay on top of it. I've got to do this for about 120 days before it becomes a habit and consistent. Well, then what? How long have we been in Covid? Five or six months. So how many of us have already taught a different behavior to our people? And if you're a dealership of, you know, five people, you know, I mean, maybe you're. Maybe it's one, five days per person on that one and you've got, you know, 50 days or maybe it's only two days, and you've got 10 days to implement that process. The smaller the dealership, the shorter the term. I mean, if you have three people in your dealership, you should have something implemented. You know, it should only take you about a week, right, to get something implemented because you're not communicating to a bunch of different people. But the problem is we've had five or six months of wild, wild west where we've all allowed our people a little bit of latitude to do different things because we're like, just get car sales. This is awesome. We're doing, you know, we're doing great. It's hard. And then we're complaining about the things that we've. Nothing new to us, right? Oh, it's really hard to find cars. Well, that was a problem for us, you know, two years ago. It was hard for us to buy car. I mean, it's a cyclical thing for us to buy cars. This is nothing new to the pandemic. And then, oh, shipping is a problem. Oh, my gosh, I can't figure out shipping. Okay, well, that's also been a problem. I mean, none of these are new issues because of the pandemic. We just like to, you know, complain about the new issues, thinking that that's what we should put our focus on rather than going, uh, oh, what do I need to worry about two months from now? Or, well, I should say three months from now after the election come January. What do I need to worry about? It's making sure my house is in order and I'm consistent with the message that I'm sending my sales team. And if you want to motivate them, you know, motivate them by one staying consistent. We are the number one motivators, making sure that they're informed. We cannot, we cannot commit to them to say that we, we know what's about to happen. Right there's there. This. These are totally uncertain times. So we can't. I know a lot of them are going, can you please just make sure that my job is safe? I know that's something that I get asked a lot. Well, listen, I can't commit to that, but what I can do with you is I can keep an open line of communication. An open line of communication means we keep our consistent one on ones. We keep our weekly housekeeping meetings and we keep our weekly trainings. And if we do that, I think our sales team is going to stay, feel pretty connected and pretty motivated to us. I hate my life with this people calling at 8 o' clock in the morning.

Hey, just to interrupt the podcast real quick, Luke, our friends over at Dealer Re, we're, I mean, I think we're doing some good for them here at the podcast. Dealers are jumping on board. They see the importance of having their own reinsurance company.

If you don't have your reinsurance company, I cannot say this enough. Do it. Stop today. Call Taylor Byrd, get him on the phone. Call Tim. I'm not sure if Tim's in the office every day, but you call them, get them on the phone and get started creating wealth and not just getting behind the car business.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Tax deferred monies you're going to put in your left pocket. You're going to save it for a rainy day. It really makes me think that it's, you know, all dealers have got to put it in. They've got to put it in their business. You've got to start now.

If you're giving somebody else warranty money, you're losing money. If you're not doing this, you're losing money. I mean, it's that simple.

And we're gonna get the guys on soon to talk more in depth. I really want some more training on my CPI product. I'm not getting the penetration I need to. We'll get into some more depth on that soon. So stay tuned. You guys don't get running around there till like 12 o'.

Clock.

I know how that west coast stuff works for you guys.

Oh, yeah, right. Well, yeah.

What's so funny to me is I had this conversation yesterday with a buddy of mine that owns a law firm and really comes back to the old thing of a lot of us are entrepreneurs. We're so used to working in our business and not on our business. Right. And like right now, even from our first of our conversation, Marshall, you have been thrown back into working in your business. You're there fielding calls, doing sales, doing desking, whatever it is. And you have to mentally then reprogram yourself to be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait, I need to go back to working on my business, meeting with employees, managing processes, people, you know, and staying focused on those things because I get, I get too far stuck down in the weeds. And like you said, it's a wild, wild west. There's inconsistency. They can't trust us. They don't see us because we're running around like a chicken with our head cut off.

Yeah. And I think it's important to do that every once in a while anyway. I mean, I love It. When people take vacation, you have to fill in. Sometimes we do it begrudgingly, and sometimes, you know, we do it willingly. And we are no different than our salespeople. We can get set in a pattern going, oh, we have everybody else to do the work for us, or we only like to do this segment of our job. And, gosh, why aren't you doing your job? And so it gets to be a complaining session with us, and then this is kind of a kick in the pants going, wow, no, actually, I need to get back into it, realize what they're dealing with, realize what they're doing. And. And how can I improve it and make it better? Because that's my job is to improve it and make it better, not just go in there and do it. I mean, yeah, because all of us can do it. And hopefully we can do it better because that's how we got to where we're at. But how can we improve it and how can we help them? I mean, our job is to help them. Right.

And helping them is training them, and helping them is being consistent. Right, Marshall? I mean, that's really what it's about, right?

Yeah. I mean, again, I think training is really motivating. Uh, but it's clarity, really, in anything. And so training is just an outlet and an avenue for you to give clarity to them. So if you're. If you're not doing training once a week, then you're not really giving them clarity on their job, and you're going to complain about something they did and realize, oh, I never even showed them how to do that.

So if we. We're talking to dealers out there today, probably that's never trained any of their staff or. Or they're the one guy, they are doing it. Or maybe they have one salesperson. How would you recommend someone starting a training process in their dealership?

Yeah, And I think we covered this a little bit in episode 31. But one of the things that. If we can remember way back that long. By the way, congratulations, guys, on so many episodes. Awesome.

Thank you.

No one's listening to him. It's okay.

I know that's not true. So I think one of the things, the biggest thing you say or advice I can give is just do it. Right? Just start it. If you haven't started it, just start it. And I know it's like, it's just. It's cliche and it's a little bit. It's like, yeah, no, duh. But, Marshall, how do you do that? Well, you have a process Just write it down. And I don't care if it's one page. Just take. Literally any of us could do this. Take 10 minutes out of your day and write down what your process is. A customer comes in, there's a greeting. What's the greeting, Luke?

At my dealership.

Yeah, what's the greeting at your dealership?

Okay. Are you out looking. You are out looking at shopping day, aren't you?

Boom. There's your greeting now. Now somebody else's might be. Welcome to, you know, ABC Motors now. Welcome. You and I have talked about this before. That that's not my favorite greeting. But it doesn't matter right now. Just write out your greeting, and we can talk about later on some other time what the fundamentals of some of these steps should be. But you write it out. Welcome to this. My name is. You are right. Super simple. But you put it on there. The next step is. What will be the next step of your dealership, Jeff?

Well, I go about a little different, but it's. Is this your first time here? You've been here before?

Okay. And you start with. You start with a credit app. Is that where you start?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, eventually that's the third step. But the first one is get a couple yeses. Have you been here before? Identify what they're looking for.

Great.

Come on in. Let's get an application started.

Yeah. You guys. You guys are way ahead of the game because I feel like you guys have listened to some of these parts.

No, no, no, no, no. But here's the problem. It comes back to what you said 10 minutes ago. It's in my brain, but it's not in everyone else's brain.

You haven't put it on paper yet?

Oh, no, it is. I just haven't shown them the paper. Or if I have, I've shown them once. You know what I'm saying? And I think that because I told you once, it's just gonna happen. Marshall said earlier was so hit home that we forget that it takes a long time to develop a habit. And I've told them what to say and how to say it, but we haven't done it over and over and over and over and over and over. And we have to. And that's what we talked about. I think in our Monday minute. Luke was role play. Role play is such a dirty word. You know, everyone thinks it's this dirty thing, like role play. No, I know it's super awkward, but you're going to deliver this to me, and every single week I'm Going to be the customer, you're going to be the salesman, and we're going to flip it back and forth until it just becomes ingrained, Right?

Yeah. And you know what's motivating when your guys get that when they know it. And then you get somebody else in that's either a new person or maybe somebody else in the office that comes and participates in training. It's an opportunity for them to show off their skills and realize how good they are. I loved it when Luke came out because he sat in one of our trainings and you could tell everybody was like, kind of proud to show off how good they were and go, all right, I'm gonna put on my best behavior. And they, I mean, but it was, it was exciting to them. And we've had new customer, new employees come in, and then the salespeople take part in training because they're going, this is fun. This is. We get to show you how good we are. And then you realize how good they are. When you have a new person, you're going, oh, my gosh, I got a lot to train. And when you start that piece of paper, Jeff, when you write it down and you have that one piece of paper, a month from now, that piece of paper will turn into two pieces of paper. And before you know it, a year from now, you'll have a 30 page manual on everything that you want trained on.

Yeah. And then Covid will hit and you'll throw it all out the window and start over.

Well, adjust it. I don't think you want to throw it all out the window. I think you want to put an addendum to it.

Just change a couple paragraphs.

Yeah, yeah.

That's the hardest thing I have, is that it is continually changing. We just changed our CRM type system. You know, we're running through more of a text based CRM with the whole remote, you know, retailing situation, digital retailing, whatever you want to call it, trying to work more instead of the old school of set the appointment and get them in, Set the appointment and get them in. It's kind of like, no, let's chat with them a little bit by text message. Let's get an application and then let's get them in. So we've kind of changed a little bit with this Covid Y type world.

But I think we're going to use Covid as a crutch or a fallback. But really, Covid is a catalyst for us going, hey, we should have been doing this a long time ago. When people Say, oh yeah, in the new times. Well, this, this has been here. Text messages have been here. We've been communicating via text and chat and, and email long ago. Just some of us have a little late to the game. They're like, oh, now I got to get on board with this Internet thing. Right? So it's, it's really something that we just have to be adapting all the time. And we're looking at Covid going, oh, well, it's really hard to put a process and we spend all this time and then all of a sudden it gets blown up. No, it just gets adjusted. And guess what? Next year you're going to adjust it again. And the next year you're going to adjust it again. And you might have to like during this time instead of saying, hey, we're going to come out with a new, what we call playbook. New playbook once a year. I'm not going to come up with a new playbook every six months. Or maybe now it's every three months, you know, because that's how quickly it's adjusting.

Hey, Marshall, just real quick on that subject, have you all been using any FaceTime or virtual type appointments with Zoom or Google Meet or anything like that? Have you incorporated that into your process?

Yeah, mostly FaceTime. I mean, we're pretty biased with our users. If they don't have an iPhone, we're not interested in selling them a car. I mean, yes, we have done a lot of, we do a lot of virtual tours where, you know, figure out how long you can send a video. We know that you can text message a 45 second video of a car. Gets any longer than that, then you got to upload it to YouTube and then it becomes like a customer lost interest already. So do a couple of 45 second videos. And we, our guys do that all the time, but they've been doing that all the time. And then also we, we mess around, messed around with at home deliveries. Showing a customer a car at home or just right now, they're not so much interested in that anymore. More just, I've seen the car, now can you deliver it to my house? Seems to be the hot button for most customers.

Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it's kind of frustrating. It's like y' all used to come to me and now I've got to go to y' all to deliver the car. It just, it, I think this the world we're living in, but it's, it's definitely making it harder for us.

And again, it's not just Covid I mean, Carvana is doing that, right? I mean, you have, you have a couple other joyride and there's a couple other places out there that do this. So it's not Covid. It's, it's. The times are changing and expectations are changing. I mean, Amazon stuff. How many of you guys are getting irritated when Amazon takes more than two days?

Yeah, everybody.

Like, should I even order it? I mean, what the heck happened to Prime? I want this tomorrow or the next day. I don't want to wait, you know, till Wednesday. What the heck's going on here? So, I mean, that's the, that's the world we're getting trained in.

Great.

Yeah.

I could go on forever, Marshall, but I know we gotta let you go. Really appreciate your time. I mean, geez Louise, we'll see you again. Another hundred episodes, but so much, so much good stuff. Which just builds on my conversation from yesterday that I've got a really. I've spent so much time kind of like plugging the holes in the dam through this whole Covid thing that now's the time to get back and say, alright, focus on the business. Now that I've been in it for a couple months and kind of seeing where the processes might have a little bit of a breakdown, let me take a step back and retool my playbook and really. Train, train, train, train, train, train.

Yeah. Gosh, it was like you come out of this and you're the same thing. Wrong.

Yeah. All right, Marshall. Thanks so much, Luke.

Thanks, Marshall.

Hey, thanks guys.

Thank you for joining us today. Hope this episode inspired you to take positive action. Remember to subscribe so you get each episode the day it comes out and we would love your help spreading the word. Leave us a review and share this podcast with your dealer friends. Dealers helping dealers learn and grow together.