#21 - Justin Osburn - Improving The Retail Sales Process

Hello and welcome to this episode of the Independent Dealer Podcast. Today we have a real treat, a real treat, Mr. Justin Osborne of Niada. He is the retail trainer, Sales, marketing. Advertising just does it all over there. Expert at what he does, right, Luke?

Justin is great. I've had one meeting with Justin at 20 group years ago and he just blew me away. Young guy, knows his stuff. Today he's going to really concentrate on a couple of great things. Number one, wow them on the phone. Make sure your staff knows what they're doing. The phone up is still a major up. They've already carved themselves down. They're ready to go. So make sure you tune into that and don't just have your customer there. Have a value statement. Make sure that your customers know why to buy from you and embrace the customers. Make sure that if they're there ready to buy, don't run them off, sell them a car.

Sounds good. A lot of good information. I'm excited for this one. Here we go.

Welcome to the Independent Dealer podcast, the podcast for auto dealers to learn and grow together. Here are your hosts, Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson.

All right, Justin, so I've been on the streets lately and everybody says, hey, you know, we always get all this education on compliance and advertising and getting your car ready. But you know, the one thing that, that we really need in our industry is someone to talk about the sales process. And I know that you're one of the experts in the industry on that, Justin, Kind of walk through what the basic sales process looks like today.

Well, that's, you know, interesting because if you lined 100 retail dealers up on the wall, you know, there'd probably be, you know, 100 different processes or ways to do it. One of the common, the biggest differences right now in the retail space is the F and I piece. So where you have salespeople that, you know, you've still got some dealers on a retail pay plan that's on commissionable gross profit and then you've got about 50% now that have moved to a volume based flat fee or flat volume based per unit flat. The benchmark right now is around 350 per salesperson no matter how you're paying them. So you probably want to be a little under that no matter what you're doing. So 300, 325, 350 is kind of the sweet spot all in. Whether you're doing a draw or hourly or a combination of some type of fee or incentive and then the other. So you've got that piece with what the sales people are doing. And then the biggest variance right now is having a full time, more traditional model, like a full time finance manager that's taking the customer once they've agreed on the car and then showing them payment options and lending options and terms and trying to sell product. But we're also seeing a model that's becoming more and more popular where the sales professionals are actually working that deal all the way from the beginning to the end with desk managers. So you've got. That's the biggest variance that we see right now. And one of the biggest Achilles heels for most dealers that I work with every day is really in the prep. I mean, the planning, where the team understands what each person's role is and there's some continuity there. And there's just. There's so many places we could unpack that could enhance or improve a dealership sales processes. But the first thing you gotta do is figure out, okay, how am I.

Gonna pay these people?

How am I going to structure it? How's the flow going to work? And then which one of these models is a best fit for anyone's specific dealership?

That's interesting. Lex and I were going over this exact thing today about we're going to try to change our pay plan a little bit. And I'm glad you came up with that 350 number because we're under that and want to stay under that. And you know, every time it seems like something happens within your department, whether you got more or less salespeople, somebody's. Your pay plan may not work the same. And so I think it's good to revisit every once in a while. How often do you think, you know, your pay structure should, should be revisited?

Well, when you're looking at your pay plan, you know, that's one thing you want to be really careful about. You know, Jimmy, jacking around. Because if you make a pay plan change, then your current team members that you're the ones you're happy with and maybe the ones you're not happy with. Well, no matter even if you're giving them a raise in the car business, they feel like they're getting a pay cut just because there's been a change. So psychologically, you got to be careful with that. And one of the best ways that I've seen dealers make a maneuver on pay plans is by first getting out a clean, you know, trying to get a cup of coffee and close the doors for 10 minutes, which is hard in itself, and, and putting some focus. If you have a Pay plan idea. Take your last 90 days of sales history with your current team and write out and draw out or diagram what this new pay plan that you're thinking about instituting, what that would have resulted in in your current structure. That will give you some real data on what this change would look like. I know in 20 groups, for example, a lot of if you got 20 dealers and 20 different sales pay plans, and it can be easy to say, well, they're doing well, you know, their volume is higher than mine, I'm just going to move to that, but without really seeing how it would affect in your particular or your specific situation. So the first thing I recommend is just diagramming out, using 90 days of history, what would this pay plan? What would it have looked like? What would they have been paid? And then also look at it in terms of like incremental growth. What if we grow by 20%? What if we grow by 30%? What would this pay plan look like at that point as we grow? And would I, as an owner or an operator or a general manager, would I be okay with paying that if.

We were to grow?

Yeah, that's very, very useful information there. And we were looking at it at more of a year scenario and breaking it down for the sales staff that way. But I think 90 days is probably a good place to start for sure. What's the biggest mistakes you're seeing in a dealer's sales funnel? Where are dealers messing up when it comes from the customer entering the sales funnel as a web up until we get them into the office and close, where's the issues lying?

So converting leads to traffic is an area where there can be a tremendous amount of growth for very little investment. So dealers spend a ton of money. It's usually the top two or three. In the retail world, variable expense next to maybe inventory, floor plan fees and expenses or interest personnel or sales commission is another big one. Advertising is a huge one. So when you've already spent the money and now you're trying to figure out, okay, we're generating these leads, how do we get them to show up? You know, one of the, what I found is one of the biggest areas of improvement is actually the phones. Because on the phone, you know, when we receive inbound calls or we receive leads, I think most dealers are really surprised when we say, hey, let's do a quick mystery shop. And I know we do this a lot in 20 groups or when I do, you know, work with dealers, you know, I know it's a basic, a basic thing. It's like, no, I think we're pretty good on the phone. But then when we secret shop the store, most dealerships or dealers are very surprised at what they hear. And you know, I don't know that, I'm not a big script guy, but there's some non negotiables on the phone. And the goal of the phone call is still, even though we're in 2019 and tech is evolving a lot of the sales process, the goal of the phone call is still to get people in to the dealership. Because we can't sell cars on the phone, we can't sell the cars on an Internet lead. We still need to get them in. Of course, everyone's trying to maneuver that way. But what does the call sound like? And I usually talk about three main non negotiables. One is you've got to sound great on the phone. You have to wow the customer. You can't sound like one, you can't turn them off. But customers can't just be satisfied anymore. So I'm sure everybody watching this, this podcast has had an experience with, you know, perhaps your cell phone provider or an airline where you've got on the phone with customer support. And it just wasn't a great experience. So we got to sound good, we got to sound energetic. And if you can't do that, then you may need to take a pause on the phone. And I'm not talking about Dale Carnegie, you know, super hyped up, exaggerated personality. I just pay attention to them, you know, simple things that we don't think about in the dealership. Like at your dealership, if your sales professional is working with a customer and the phone rings, what do they do? Do they answer the phone? Or is there another process that you institute to make sure that 100% of the attention to that phone call can be paid to the person on the phone without, you know, giving the customer in front of you a bad experience. I mean, you know, when I ask that question in a lot of workshops, I'm amazed at how many puzzled faces there are. It's like, well, what do we do? You know, well, we go ahead and answer the phone. So you gotta sound great. You've got to get their contact info. That's number two. That's a non negotiable and that's their name and their phone number. And if you're a rock star dealership, their email address. And then last, we've got to schedule an appointment. And to schedule an appointment, we have to ask for an appointment. And it doesn't have to be. You know, the olden days of beating prospects down with big sticks. It's know just aggressively push being pushy. We can ask for an appointment using either or soft softball questions like, you know, we'd love to show you this vehicle. Would this morning work or would this afternoon be better? I understand you got to talk to your wife. That's no problem. How about we do this, you talk to your wife and I'll check, check your pulse tomorrow. At least we're leaving our foot in the door. You know, let's go ahead and schedule a time for you to come in tomorrow. And if you need to reschedule then give me a buzz and we can reschedule. I mean these are three examples of very easy ways that we can ask for an appointment. I will tell you that I've done some case studies on 20 group members on their ability to take a lead and ask for an appointment. And you might be surprised that even with 20 group members, the last case study I did, 52 secret shops, 52 secret shops and less than 11 of the 52 ask for an appointment.

And that is not uncommon.

So it doesn't cost us any more money. The phone's already ringing. The Internet leads already there. Are we calling them back? Do we know what to say and do we have some non negotiables? Do we know to get the appointment? So that would be a, that would be a low cost thing that we could do to increase and it's still about a 50%. If they call in and you set an appointment, you're expecting about 50% to 60% to show. And then of those that show, 50 to 60% to close.

Yeah, and that's, that's so important and I every week when we train it's, you know, number one is appointment set. That's all it's about. You know, contact information. Information is a non negotiable for sure. But set the appointment, set the appointment, Set the appointment and then verify the appointment. So I'm with you there. One thing you said that, that this is where we need to to that everybody needs to be better at as phones. And I agree with that. So in your experience are there any true phone ups anymore? Like is that how many times does the customer only contact you or their first form of contact is by the phone, does that happen?

Well, I think that's what's more interesting about the phone call ringing today than the frequency is how hot the phone call lead is. If you think about it, for any of Those dealers or GMs or sales professionals watching podcast. If you're a car dog, if you've been in the car business for, like me for over 15 years. Well, if you think about it, back in the day when people had phone books and we're looking up car dealerships and loading up the van on a Saturday to spend all day going from dealership to dealership to dealership to dealership, the phone calls were logistical. So they would call in the dealership and they would sound something like, hey, you know, where are you guys located? Or what's your address? Or what time do you guys close? Or where exactly are you? What are you next to? What landmark? How do we get there? That's kind of what the phone call sounded. Or we saw your ad in the newspaper. Is that car still there? Well, today. And there's a lot of things that we could talk about that's happened. But the bottom line is in today's dealership, customers are going from dealership to dealership to dealership to dealership online. They're still researching. They're on Cargurus, they're on Facebook. They've seen your Facebook ads now. 95. That's not a real stat. That's a Justin stat. 95% of the calls that come into the dealership and you think about this sound something like this. The phone rings and they say, yeah, I was on your website and I was looking at this car. And then they'll ask something like, what's your bottom dollar?

What's.

Is that the best price? Is there a warranty? Is it still available? But most calls today in the dealership start with, hey, I was on your website. Now think about this. When people ask me, hey, has tech changed the sales process? Has it really made a difference? Well, sure, because the old road to the sale, you know, the standard 10 steps to the sale, meet and greet, establish common ground, car them down. Well, the customer, just by doing that dealership to dealership, doing their research, clicking click to call. Calling your dealership and asking about a specific car has now skipped the first three steps of the sales process. They've carved themselves down. And so this is how tech is evolving that process. How hot is a phone call that comes in where they already have? They've passed five or six other websites, found a vehicle on your lot that they're interested in enough to take the call to action to call your dealership and inquire about it. I don't think it gets any hotter than that.

That's interesting. I've not thought about the, how they've led their self down the process and if they call you, they are hot. The other thing on the same process, if we say that there's, let's say 5% or so of actual phone ups, you haven't looked on your website, which is probably rare. How about true walk in ups? Are they a thing of the past or no?

That's a good question. You know what I see is there's basically two types of walk in or drive in UPS these days. One of them kind of looks and feels like the phone call where they did their research on the car. And you'll see these customers come in and they slowly creep around your lot and then they stop right next to a specific car and they get out. And you can almost tell if you watch them, they came looking for that car on your lot. And I think what we need to understand on the sales process is we don't want to talk customers out when they're already carved down on a car, barring qualifications. So if I've got a 2015 GT Mustang and a carload of 18 year old young guys jump out of the car, I might want to do a little probing before I put them on a test drive and move forward in the sales process. But if I feel like I've got a good customer for the car that they're looking at, then there may be absolutely no reason to follow the normal process of getting them inside, setting them down, caring them down, making sure you're on the right car. Because why talk yourself out of a sale? The other thing that we see is the more traditional customer that drives on the lot. Especially if you're in a dealership on a miracle mile, or you have four or five competitors sitting right next to you, you're gonna see a lot more drive in traffic as they hop from dealership to dealership to dealership. And I'll tell you the old meet and greet. Establish common ground. Where we trained exhaustively to teach salespeople what to say, to establish common ground and build a friend and establish trust. We have to figure out ways as margins are shrinking on the front and the Internet is creating a knowledge base for educated buyers to differentiate ourselves from the dealer down the road. And one of the things that we can do, just one, and there's again, we could unpack this for a long.

Time too, but when we meet, when.

We have that first encounter with that true drive in up, one of the things that I think is critical to implement into that process that's different from the past Story. What is your story? What is your value statement? Why? If you're watching this podcast, let me.

Ask you a question.

I really want you to think about this. Why should I buy a car from you? What makes buying a car from you any different than the dealer down the road? And that is your story, and that's where it begins. You know, we're a family owned business. We've been owned and operated since 1974. You know, the dealership burned down and we started again. You know, we started with retail and we provided such a good service, we moved into sales. You know, whatever your story is, we're tied into the community in this way or in that way. We call it an elevator pitch. You can tell anybody in 30 seconds on an elevator, on an elevator ride who you are, what you do, and why I should remember you. And when we're meeting and greeting these customers on the lot that are true, true drive ups. I think that the thing that dealers aren't doing that could really make an impact is just giving them a 60, 90 second story, a value statement instead of getting right into an interrogation. You know, are you trading that car in that you drove in here? How long have you had it? What do you like about it? What do you not like about it?

What's your payment?

What's your interest rate? Where's its finance? Instead of going down that, let's shift it up. You know, we're glad you're here. Is this your first time or have you been here before? That's awesome. Well, let me just tell you just a little bit about our dealership and why we're different and why I work here. And I think implementing that story to the brand new customer could really set a different tone than what they're used to in the past.

I really think that does matter. And, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of people out there today that just tell you, price matters. Price matters. Price may get them to the door, but not make them buy. Right. So having that idea of who we are and why we're here and what we're gonna do for you really sets you apart from another person, right?

Absolutely.

So we talked about the, we talked about the customer getting here and doing this. How long has that customer, in your opinion, been in that sales process? How many days were they sitting at home going through cars before they decided to get into the market?

The recent stats that I've looked at is they're spending about 7 to 13 hours online researching now. I don't know if that's sitting on their iPhone at home in their boxers, or if that's got a laptop out or if they're. I don't know exactly what that means. I don't know that anybody can define that. We know that the research is going online. I can tell you that dealers are already conforming to that, because when you ask a room full of 100 retail dealers to raise their hand if they're spending over 80% of their advertising budget on digital, the entire room will raise their hand, and many are going to 100%. And I don't think that happens if they're still in the traditional research phase. So they're definitely online. They're definitely lots of different areas online. Researching how much they're researching online. I don't know. It might also depend on how good the marketing is.

It's getting in front of them.

That could be based on population and city and size and all that jazz. But we do know that they're coming in more frequently or calling in, landed on a car or car down. We should embrace that. One of the things that we can do with that is, is I tell dealers all the time, we don't get in dealers. Don't get into a Facebook closed group or on this podcast or in a 20 group and lock the door and come up with ways to change the sales process intentionally. The reason the sales process has changed is because buyers now are leveraging technology to change it themselves. And it's kind of forcing us to change the process. Well, because they're doing all this online shopping, we can really embrace that and bring down the time that it takes to get somebody through the process. It used to take hours to get somebody from a drive up, up all the way through the sales process. A handshake, hours. But when they come in car down, and they're actually. They've done some research and they kind of know. And many times, and I think everybody will agree to this, many times, that the prospect today knows more about the vehicle they come in looking at than the sales team does. We just need to leverage those things. We need to be assertive and understand they're happening and use that to speed up the process. So let's not force the customer to go through the old process. Let's embrace it. Let's move forward the winds to our back and get them through and lock down right away.

That's interesting. You know, we spend pretty much 100% of our money now on digital as well. And you can really see the difference in the leads that come to your Website. And the one thing I worry about is that let's say your marketing is too good. And we hit the customer on the front end of their shopping and then, you know, they start the first hour, they land on your page and then they search for 13 hours and they get tired. Where should you be in that process? You know, is it, is it worth spending all the money on the front end or should you be able to somehow focus it on the, on the backside of that process, do you think? Or do you think it matters?

Are you talking about the way you're pricing your cars or the way you're marketing?

No, I guess, I guess what I guess is what I'm thinking about. I think it's better in my opinion to try to hit the customer later in the, in their research process than the beginning of their research process. Is there a way around that? Or you just have to have a good message that you stick out as soon as they find you.

Well, we're car dealers.

In the past, when you think about traditional marketing with billboards, newspapers, we've always been very creative and very good, if nothing else, are getting our heads above the crowd. Pay attention to me. We've been great at creative throughout the last few generations to stand out. We do know right now that our Prospects will visit 1.2 dealerships before executing a purchase. And that's down dramatically from 5, 6 dealerships 10 years ago or 15 years ago. As far as marketing them, this may be a little bit outside my space on the marketing digital wise. I don't know of any ways that I've heard of and I'm pretty in tune with this of being able to grab a customer throughout that process at a certain time. I can tell you that we're seeing. That creativity that dealers have always had is really starting to catch now on the digital side. So when we're, you know, you think about the third party digital marketers operate, you know, companies like CarGurus, Cars.com, the AutoTrader versus the more look at me website, click funnels, lead generators, Facebook, YouTube, those are two different types of marketing online. And dealers are starting, from what I'm seeing, they're starting to understand that the trains left the station when it comes to digital marketing. And they're beginning to get really creative and how they're telling their story online. So I think there becomes this balance of doing some branding, if you will, and not so much branding, but more so entertaining and educational content. And I'll give you a couple of quick examples if you're going to run Facebook ads. You can certainly post inventory every day and you can do that organically and not pay it. You can do paid ads and push it based on lots of different factors on creating very good audience, custom audiences or you can tell stories, you can personalize and humanize those people that are at the dealership. And I could just tell you endless creative ways that dealers are doing that. But I do think that there's a couple of multiple prongs approach there on the advertising to stay in front of the customer because ultimately if the only thing you're doing is throwing up your cars on Facebook, for example, when you throw up that Mustang GT that we talked about, the only one that's really going to key on that is somebody that's in the market for a sports car. And that's if that base of customers sees it. So that's why we use things like paid ads. So we get in front of people that have indicated that they're into sports cars in the past. Maybe they were prospects in our store, maybe they were at a different dealership down the road and were using some Geo fencing technology. Maybe they were in the service lane and they had a sports car before. So all these things are evolving and it's really cool that I'm starting to see anyway dealers put on that creative hat again that we used to be great at when it came to radio, TV and bleed it into social.

Yeah, I think that the retargeting aspect of everything is just has made advertising cheaper to the, to the lead that actually is ready to buy. And Jeff is big on Facebook. Advertising knows a lot more than I do. Alexa knows a lot more than I do about that. But it is, it's amazing how you can, you can take your branding message that you, you've always had and you maybe have spent a lot on TV or radio and you can use the same branding message to retarget to the same people who shot you before. So yeah, I mean it's amazing. The digital technology is amazing. Hey Jeff, you got some questions for Justin?

Yeah, I don't know what you guys covered. I appreciate you guys letting me in late here, not kicking me out but I mean so much of what you say, Justin is a completely along the lines of my philosophy and what I tried to do in my dealership. Three, four years ago I started, we hired a full time social media person who is just here to create content, you know, pictures, videos. You know, I realized that it was so important to have a presence to educate, to entertain and then to sell on social media. Because like you said, if I'm just throwing out, you know, cars all day long every day, which is the typical used car philosophy, that's what they think social media is. That's what they think it is to advertise. You know, I'm like, that just turns people off because like you said, what, once every seven years or something, or three years or I don't know what the turnover is on a car. I think seven years is a house. What's a car? You know, every couple years. But to time that just right is very hard. But what you can do is you can educate and entertain continually. And the beauty. I mean, I think as car dealers, I mean, we have a lot of. We have a lot of creative license.

We.

We have a lot of long. A lot of latitude in our advertising because we're talking about transportation, we're talking about freedom, we're talking about anything. And so what I tell my social media girl, I say, we can discuss anything. We can talk about the best place to drive. We can talk about the best weekend hangout. We can talk about what's happening in town this weekend. We can talk about the high school activities. We can talk about how to take care of your car. We can talk about, I mean, really, anything we can tie back to our dealership brand. Right? And that's where I talk about the education and entertain. And then once we have their attention, we can sell them.

Absolutely.

Justin, go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm gonna get back to something in a second.

I was just gonna say, I really. I think that you nailed it on the head when you talk about educating and entertaining. You know, the educating piece sounds something like, you know, five things to keep in your trunk in the case you get stuck in a snowstorm because it's December. I mean, that makes sense. On the calendar. It's relevant to your local community and that time in your space, wherever you're located, versus entertaining, which could be more like community involvement calendars. And I think this is the space that dealers are really trying to figure out right now who's gonna be the personality, who's gonna be on these videos? Did they feel comfortable with it? And if you don't, then you really need to identify somebody on the team that wants to embrace this, like a sales professional or sales manager. And you really can use the local community and the calendar. Whether it's Christmas or Halloween or if your dealership is in a city that has a town square and there's an event going on this weekend, And I mean, you can just talk about anything. And what it really does is it helps combat this stereotype that our prospects have of the dealer that's just this old seedy, greasy, I'm going to screw you over kind of person. And they start to get to know your team and they know who Angela is and who Joe is, and they see them on these videos talking about local community events and charity things that your operation is doing. And that just goes a long way.

That's 100% agree. It's all about our image. And the more we can make our image better in the community, the more cars. It's pretty simple there. How often do we need to train our sales staff? You know, I don't know, some people may not even have a sales training manual. They may just hire a guy and stick him out there, which we know doesn't work. It's not. Well, it's not even. It's not good for the customer. It's not good for the employee you just hired. What should we be doing? How should we hire and train and how often should we be training after they're hired and selling cars?

That's a good question.

I'll tell you that.

One of the things that I see a lot of is that, you know, independent dealers, you know, kind of the wild, wild west, you're independent because you.

Want to play by your own rules.

You want to be. You're the entrepreneur. And one of the challenges to that is you don't always have some proven playbooks that, for example, that the franchises may have or used or developed.

And so you have to kind of.

Come up with a whole lot of things and wear so many hats all at the same time. And what I find is a lot.

Of independent dealers, they don't have, they don't even know really what their process is.

You know, they're hiring that first guy, that second gal, that third person. And they really haven't define or design.

A process, so they end up getting.

One kind of by default. So I would say the number one thing that a dealer can do to really influence training is to begin to create a picture or a written process. And it can be, I mean, very sketchy at the best. But, you know, for example, I train on things like how we're setting goals.

With our sales pros and what that.

Looks like, the three non negotiables of the phone call, the three steps to a meet and greet, you know, the three steps of what we do from the time that we close on the car handshake. The customer and eventually get them into finance. And that lag time we have there. What are we doing with the customer? Are we just coming up with small talk or do we have things to do to keep them off their phones, to keep them engaged without making it awkward?

You know.

So do you have those three things or four things? So I think the first thing is it's all in the prep. Like most successful car dealerships, most of it's in the preparation. What do you want your team to do? And then you need to define that and then we've got to communicate those processes with them. And I'll tell you two more things in training I think would really help.

Number one is the people that you hire. So in a nutshell, and we all.

Know this, there's basically four types of personalities. Two of them are extrovertive, two of them are introverted. Don't hire the introverts to sell. And I know, oh we can change this guy or he goes to church with me and he's a great guy. You're going to waste a lot of time and money and you're going to slow his career path down. Whatever it is. Don't hire the introverts. Number two, you're down to two extroverts. The driver, the a personality. Run through walls to hit a goal, great potential manager.

And then you're down to the social butterfly.

And today especially in these volume based pay plans where we're not paying salespeople commissionable gross because they can't control it anyway. Then you don't have, you know, we don't have to get together every morning at 8:30 and spend 30 minutes teaching people, you know, Dale Carnegie, silver tongue tricks on how to get somebody to like us. You know, these, these techniques, you know, you hire a social butterfly, it's in their DNA. These are people that you all have met. You go to dinner, you meet them for the first time and you like them. They're just the, their smiles, they have stories and you just enjoy being around these people. They make great sales professionals because it's in their DNA to connect with people. You don't have to teach them that. Now I can take that person with the right attitude, the right personality and I can teach them how to do a delivery checklist and I can teach them how to, how they fit into the penciling process. But I can't take somebody that's got all those skills, put the wrong personality that can't connect to people. I can't teach them how to connect. And it's just a waste of time. So that would be, that would be something I would really think about too. Who are we hiring?

What does that person look like?

How do they fit on the team? And then last is how do we train the right people? And there's many different ways to do this, but there's no better way than.

Whoever your sales manager is or if.

It'S you, then to spend quality time.

With that new hire.

Because what happens, and I get it, you go, you got the person there for the first day, you're excited. You know, you have one 15 minute interview and you said, when you can, you start. How about this afternoon they start and you got your cup of coffee and.

You have good intentions.

And then you say, well, hey, fill up this new hire paperwork. It'll probably take you 20 minutes, 30.

Minutes and I'll be back.

And you come back three months later and you wonder why they're not. They're only selling eight cars. Well, we have to invest in people.

And I know we don't have time.

But when you invest, when you take the time and you invest and pour into them, you're gonna really take some things off your plate down the road, long term. And by cultivating and nurturing a salesperson that connects. And what I recommend is whatever your process is from front to back, the meet and greet all the way to the final close and delivery, you teach the sales professional the very beginning until they're competent and then you take over. Have somebody else take over. If you have somebody else take over.

Pay them, you know, don't ask them.

To volunteer to train your people. Another sales pro.

But, you know, start them out with.

The meet and greet, start them out with the common ground, start them out with the car and down, move them into the demo. And as they become competent and confident.

And doing your process, then let them.

Do it, you know, watch them and then just kind of bleed it out over time until, you know, you're three or four weeks into the deal, you've invested a lot of time in them.

And they can run the sale from front to back.

And I know that was a little lengthy, but those are two or three things I think are critical when it comes to training.

I totally agree. And also, just for me to add one more thing, I think what's also key is that a pay plan represents what you want that person to do. And maybe it's not just selling cars. We've talked about it before, but it's, you know, if it's a certain piece of paperwork and Things that you need done. Make sure that everything that you want your sales staff to do is incorporate into their pay plan, not just selling cars.

One thing that jumped out to me, Justin, when you said that was, I heard something the other day where they talked about make sure the guy that's training your new guy is not indoctrinating your new guy with his jaded view of the car lot. You know, you got to be real careful who you pick to be their mentor or their trainer. Because, yeah, within the first couple hours, this new guy has picked up all the bad habits of, oh, well, we don't really do this and we don't really fill that out. And that's not really what he's going to do, you know, gotta be real careful about who poisons the well real quick.

Oh, for sure. You got. If you got. If you're replacing the salesperson and you let them train them. Oh, goodness.

Hey, Justin, Real quick. Sorry. Tell me. Give us a couple of practical tips for us to know. When is the time to cut someone loose? You know, you say that extrovert, social butterfly. I can teach anyone with those qualities how to sell a car. When we have someone that we feel is just not performing, not toeing the line, maybe they are a bad apple, you know, but we tolerate them because their sales are up, well, they're getting the job done, or, well, they're selling their cars, they're meeting their goals. When do we know how to just pull the band aid off?

You know, that's a great question. And, you know, we really have to look at our, you know, the dealers, operators, GMs, GSM, sales managers, F and I managers. Really need to take a hard look at yourself because a lot of times we'll lose some people just because our process has been so poor on training them. And they would have been the right person if in the right environment. The best litmus test I can tell you as far as when it's time to exit somebody, is if you think about a particular sales professional and knowing what you know today, knowing what you know about them right now, if they came in and interviewed for the sales professional job, would you hire them? If you could say, yes, I would hire them. I think they have potential. Then keep them. If you say, there's no way I would hire this person again, then you probably need to go ahead and pull the trigger, assuming that you have the process of training in play.

That's so, so right. I think that was in Good to Great. The book Good to Great. And that's what it's all about is if, if the person on the bus isn't the right person, you get them off the bus.

Right?

Yeah, absolutely. It's really hard to do.

It is, it is.

You think, oh my goodness, now I'm going to be short a guy and now I got to retrain and now I got to this that the other we get so complacent and we let them pull poison the culture of your office because maybe they're just a negative person.

Well, and another thing to that too is, you know, I'm constantly find dealers.

That get caught in that pickle.

Hey, I need to probably make a change or two on the sales floor, but I don't have the coverage. If there was anything I would invest in, it would be keeping a sales professional job ad running all the time. And that way the dealer is constantly looking at and getting new applications. And if you're happy with your team, if you got a great team, that means you're probably going to grow. So if you don't have a great team, then you're probably going to be looking to add better people to the team. And by running constant ads and never turning them off, maybe changing them up.

But I think that's one small investment.

A dealer could make to continue to see new faces and potentially find some rock stars that they never would have instead of waiting until, you know, you've got a decision to make.

Yeah. And probably speaks to also staying a little bit overstaffed in that area, you know, better than understaffed. Because then if you do have to cut someone back, you're okay. You can absorb losing a guy for a couple of days if that's what it gets to. But if you're already strapped in that position, then you're never gonna, you're never even gonna entertain it.

All right. Justin. Hey, this has been great. So I want you to plug a little bit of what you do. Where can we find you? I know you've got a bunch of training stuff out there and you're gon to be at the convention soon. So kind of go over that if you will.

Sure.

Well, I'm going to be at the.

Convention in Las Vegas. It's going to be the largest used car independent used car convention in history. It's going to be exciting. We'd love to see you there. I'm going to be at the NIADA lounge, which is right in the middle, smack dab in the middle of the exhibit hall. So if you're coming to convention, I want to highly encourage you to come to the exhibit hall, find the NIDA lounge, and shake my hand. Love to meet you. I'm also the Nieda Retail 20 group moderator. So if you'd like more information about a 20 group and what it is and how I might be able to help you and your team, you know, certainly feel free to reach out to me.

Hey, Justin, also, are there any training modules up on the NIADA website yet that you're doing? I know that y' all are talking about it.

We're really excited about this, Luke. I'm glad you brought that up.

We're in the middle of constructing the.

Final building blocks to a very comprehensive sales training platform. And actually not only sales, but really a comprehensive platform. We're starting with sales. So within the next 30 to 45 days, if you go to the niedaeducation.com.

Website, you're going to see, I mean.

Hours and hours of sales content that you can plug into.

And we try not to show sales content.

Just like everything we spoke about today, there's not really the way it's a way or we show several models or several different ways that we're seeing. Dealers are operating this business so that they can figure out what works best for them and their dealership.

That's wonderful. And also CMD class, which I'm a cmd. Jeff, I'm not sure if you're a CMD yet, but Justin, you're teaching those classes too, right?

Yep. The CMD program, Certified Master Dealer program was hot, hot, hot. We just sold out our last class, which was in Atlanta a few weeks ago. We've got another one coming up in August in Chicago. We limit that to 20 dealers per CMD class. And again, you can find more information about CMD@NIADACMD.com awesome, man.

Thank you, Justin.

Thanks, Justin. Appreciate it.

Appreciate you guys and what you do.

Sam.