#31 - Marshall Zoerner - Why We Train Our Staff

Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Independent Dealer Podcast. Today we have our good friend Marshall with us. Luke, what are we going to quiz Marshall on? We're going to pick this guy's brain. He's a wealth of knowledge. What are we talking about?

It's training 101, Jeff. You know, we have such an issue with it. We've got to get better at it. So Marshall's going to kind of outline what he does in his dealership. They have 80 employees, and they really. They train and train and train, and that's the reason they've grown from, you know, from three or four employees to where they are now. Guys and gals, listen to what he's got to say. We're going to talk about consistency. We're going to talk about the different types of training. This is something that we must do and you must listen to.

All right, 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.

Luke. Yo, Jeff.

Let's talk about some training. Let's get Marshall in here. Let's have him explain to us his training process. This guy has got it figured out. I'm going to throw a bunch of words out there, and he's going to probably deflect them all and say that he doesn't. But I think he probably has this thing going much better than 99% of the dealers. How to train, when to train, the processes, the schedule, making it mandatory. I mean, Marshall, give us kind of a basic, like, how do you guys do? What do you do?

Okay, well, I guess let's start with what we do and how we do it at our dealership without just a 5,000 foot view is we do training every week at our dealership. We do it at every level. So mainly with our sales staff, we train every Friday. It's mandatory. It's about an hour, and it's very interactive, so it's not just stagnant. And then.

Can I jump in, Marshall, and interrupt you a bunch? Because this is something I have so many questions on, because I don't do it right. So help me wrap my brain around. You have sales training every Friday. Do you do that before you open? Do you pull everybody off the floor in the middle of the day? Like, how do you get everyone in the same room at the same time?

So that's a great question that actually I get asked by a lot of dealers, and you kind of got to figure that one out. Depending on, you know, your Workflow and what your schedule is. We have everybody scheduled to work on Friday, so it works that we can do them on Fridays, and that's why we picked Fridays.

Fridays where you open. I'm sorry, you do it before you open.

Before we open. So we open at 10 o'. Clock. We start our training at 9. By like 9:45, if we're really having a lot of fun, it might go right up to 10. Awesome there. It gets a little tricky when you move into the service world. I do have service advisors that are staggered schedules and I cannot do it before we're open, so I have to do it while we're open. And at that point I have, you know, my parts manager, somebody else fill in while I take them up. And I just make that training a lot shorter and more. I don't know if more efficient is the right word, but I like to think so. And, you know, we keep it 20 to 25 minutes.

What is the. So we, we all can kind of gather what a sales training meeting will be. There's a. There's a lot of role play, I assume, and you go over your percentages and things from last week and. And make sure people know where they are and where they should get to right now.

Let's come up with a clear distinction between a sales training and a sales meeting. Okay. Because I think those are two different things. I believe in three different types of meetings. There's what we call a housekeeping meeting, which is a little bit of what you talked about. These are all the things we need to cover. You know, this is how the store is doing. This is our goal for the week. These are some things that you guys aren't doing right. Maybe be it lockup procedure or just, you know, coming to work on time, whatever it is, those are kind of housekeeping things, right? These are some new inventory we've got coming in. And then a training is totally separate and apart from that. So housekeeping meeting can be all together. I don't mind if that's pieced together. You know, if I don't have my whole staff there, I can cover part of it on Wednesday and then cover it with the rest of my staff on Thursday. But I like to distinct. Distinct them, distinguish them between sales training and housekeeping. Because what happens is one goes longer than the other. So you'll do a housekeeping meeting and then all of a sudden you're like, well, we have 10 minutes. Let's rush through this training. And I want my training to be very, you know, direct poignant it's. It's intentional for that purpose. And then there's another thing that I think you kind of mixed in there that we call one on ones. And that's where I go. I go with my sales staff or whomever it is, my manager, whatever those are, where we go over their individual numbers. You know, hey, this is your closing percentage. This is how many people you saw. I'd love it if you got in front of more people or you turn those people into test drives, whatever that is. And that's kind of a one on one. And that's where you would address specific things to that person. And I always believe in the, you know, I'm not sure where I heard it, but you appraise in public, correct. In private type thing. So, you know, those things that are kind of correctional, that aren't necessarily to the benefit of the whole crew, those are what you go over in a one on one. So you got to kind of figure out your schedule. And all those have to be every single week.

Huh?

Okay.

So when you're in those. We all know what happens in housekeeping meetings. That's something that we're probably all really good at, you know, and some process is out of whack or someone's doing something wrong, we're gonna get in and we're gonna fix the. Fix the situation and let them know what's happening.

But sure.

Now what do you go over in the training? Do you have a specific program that you follow? Do you adhere to any of these gurus that sell their. Their manuals and their online classes and their stuff?

Who.

Do you have cheer. Do you have cheerleaders to come in and. Rah, rah, everybody up.

What are you doing here? Yeah, I don't know about that too.

Those are all good things. I mean, we. So we have designated. My sales manager supposed to train. I'm kind of the designated trainer. Dealership. So I come in every Friday and I. We'll get together with the sales manager. We'll come up with a plan for the month.

Right.

And then, you know, I have an outline. It's very generic outline that it should cover. I'm going to recap the last meeting. I'm going to go over the nuts and bolts of this meeting. We're going to have some sort of interaction between each other. So it's not. So it's lively. They always have to have something to write on. So they're writing something down and there's always something, you know, I recap to make sure they're taking something away. It's very. It's same process every single time. Now, the same person every time can be a little detrimental to your point, Luke. Do you bring somebody into rah, rah, rah. I have my own style, and sometimes I'm motivating, and sometimes if I'm doing the same thing all the time, I'm, you know, it becomes monotonous. Monotonous? Yeah, it's a tough word. Yeah, it is. You know, so we'll bring in, you know, maybe you have your F and I manager give a training that week, or you have a different sales manager come in, or you bring somebody from the outside and maybe it doesn't totally line up with all of it, but it's something new and refreshing, or you give it to your sales staff. That said, you know, hey, you know what you're really good at? Closing. We're gonna get into closing. I love it. If you gave, you know, the, the majority of the training this week, and I'm going to jump in where you're, you know, a little bit off, but gives it to other people and changes the pace.

Do you have them do anything outside of that meeting? Are they responsible to do their own training during the week outside of it?

Well, if you want to get better, this is what I always tell them. If you want to get better, do this. If you don't, then don't do it. Right. And nobody in the meeting wants to say, I don't want to get better. So they all say they're going to do it. The reality is you get in your work week and you get busy. I'm a big believer in planning. And that's where the one on ones come in. And so if I'm meeting with you one on one, Jeff, I might go, hey, you know what? This is what you really showed that you're awesome at investigating and building rapport with people. But, you know, you really got to work on, you know, your closing. And so I want to work on that with you this week and kind of your homework this week. You know, Thursday and Wednesday and Thursday I'm going to have you partner up with Luke and you guys are gonna work on some closing stuff. And every morning when you come in, you're just gonna do these five minute drills and get better at that.

Did you, did you, did you come up with these, like five minute drills or your training process? I know that you have a training process that you wrote for sales. Is that, is that something that you come up with or is this something you adopted I like the word adopted.

Yeah, we've done a lot of trainings over the years. I think there's great trainers out there. You know, Paul Webb is a great one. Joe Verde is a great one. You know, we've taken a lot from Joe Lascoda, from Nada, from Niada. There's the guy we just heard at Niada, David Anderson. Amazing. And so you just kind of take pieces of those every, everywhere you go and you kind of add to it and you go, yes, that fits in our dealership. Because the problem with, you know, these guys trainings, they're great sales training, but unless you adopt it and make it fit your own, the sales guys aren't going to buy into it. So they're going to go, yeah, that's great for, you know, the Joe Verde's out there. But they have big dealerships and so that doesn't work for our small dealership. Well, it can if we adopt it. And unfortunately the reason we're managers and they're not is because they can't figure out how to adopt it. So we need to figure out how to adopt it, come up with our training manual. And I think I was talking to you guys about this before. The way you start it is just by starting it, you know, just, just make one and then just keep adding to it.

So there's going to be some dealers out there. When we talk about size, there's going.

To be some dealers listening to this.

Podcast, podcast Jeff, that go, hey, I have one salesperson. Why do I need to train? Well, I'm going to be on your side here, Marshall. I got to train that one salesperson, right? How do we start? How do we go? Let's start training. Where's the jump off?

Sure. I can think of the most uncomfortable training was my first training when we did a live action role play with Eric and myself. And it was weird and awkward and uncomfortable. But training does more for you than it does for your salespeople. It makes you better. You have to be sharper and then you also have to practice what you preach, which is, you know, sometimes not fun for us. We want to tell everybody what to do and we've done it before so.

We don't have to go out and.

Do it the same exact way. But when you're training on it and a live customer comes out and they're watching you, you got to be on your game and you got to do it and practice it. So I think it's probably more a benefit for us than it is for them.

Yeah, that's interesting.

So true. I can think of every single time you try to teach them a process, but the time that I take the up or I meet the customer, I'm gonna, I'm all over the place, man. I don't follow. You know, I think that I know better and I'll take them down whatever road I want and then the next week I'll be harping like, no, you gotta lead them down the right path, like, stop short circuiting the system, you know?

Yeah. I mean, I think examples is we have a specific test drive route, and if I get an up, I'm like, I don't have time for a test drive, so go on your own. But then I have to go, oh, no, wait, that's. I'm skipping so many steps and what I train on that I either have to do it or I have to pass them off early. So it really holds us accountable to do our jobs. Right.

I've, I've experienced that lately. And it's funny, it's like I. You do have to practice what you preach and just. Because I can take the up essentially from, from the walk up to the close really quickly. But if I don't follow the process, what kind of example am I showing? And you gotta, if you write a procedure, you should follow it, right?

Yeah. Yeah. And then, I mean, I think, you know, just going from back to the 5,000 foot view. On training, I'm a big, a big believer in consistency because your salespeople see right through it. And so if you say, hey, we're gonna do training every Friday, but you start it and stop it, they immediately go, yeah, sure you are. And then there's always something that comes up for us. Right. So unless you can outline that for the month. That's why we do a training outline. Okay. Hey, you know, I'm in South Carolina this week, so who's doing training back at the dealership? We have training on Friday and I'm not there. So it doesn't just not happen. Yeah. Because then the salespeople immediately don't believe it. So you not only have to line out what the training is, who's training on it, and so who backs you up, Luke, if you can't, you know, when to your point, it's just me and one other salesperson and there's a Friday that I'm going to be at the auction out of town or out at some conference, who's doing it, and so keep that consistency there. So I say if you can't do it, Once a week. And you can't commit to that. Commit to once a month or the first Friday and last Friday of every month or something that, you know, you can live by.

That's so interesting about the consistency. And I think the only way to have that consistency is have a schedule, and you got to stick to it. And we ask our staff to have a schedule when they come to work, you know, and what they do, we got to hold ourselves accountable to. We also have to hold ourselves accountable when it comes to training, because it's so important to have that consistency. For sure.

Yeah. When you make it important, you prioritize it on your schedule. So I know a lot of times I'll put these things on my schedule, but unfortunately, I'm not bought in enough that it's the first thing to go. And if I have some hiccup in my schedule, it's the meetings or the trainings to get kicked out. And so we've got to treat it like it's as important as we know it is when it comes down to it. One thing I found that really helps for me is I've been tying bonuses, like cash bonuses for my employees to these meetings. And I could see you tying that to your training to say, hey, you know, we do weekly training. It's a X amount of bonus or it's X amount of points towards your whatever, or it has something to do with your payroll. Guaranteed. Those guys are going to corner you. Your salesmen are going to corner you for training every week when you tie their pay to it.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely. It's mandatory and it's tied into their pay plan. Just like being on time or being in dress code is tied into their pay plan. You know, I definitely think that that's important. But it gets to a point where training is fun and it's motivating, and it should be fun and motivating. That's why I believe in the separation of housekeeping versus training. Because you want the sales guys to go, oh, man, I missed that. Like, what did I miss in training? What can I get recapped on? Because they're going to miss. I mean, you're going to have vacations, but they want to know, you know, what. What went on and what did I miss out on? But I think you also. It's a learning curve, too. Not just on our part for being consistent, but the salesperson. I have guys who. They come in at nine now on a Friday, and they go, well, since I'm here at 9, I start telling my customers I'm here and they're booking appointments at nine and so they'll duck out of the training and go, oh, sorry, I have an appointment here. And you know, a sales manager wants to go, well, yeah, definitely help that appointment. But I'm going, no, don't you, what are you thinking? Scheduling an appointment during my training? Then it's 9 to 10 is training and don't deviate from that. And so that'll make me more upset than it does happy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I could see that.

Let's, let's circle back around to something you were talking about and I kind of went down this path and let us off of it. But so we all know what sales training is like now that you've redefined it for me. There's a, there's, there's three different aspects. What does your service training look like? Because that to me, is it different from sales training? Is it, is it, what are we doing here?

That's a great question. So when I talk about service training, I'm talking about advisor training, right. And so I don't look at it as any different as far as the structure and style. Obviously the content is different. You know, when I'm training an advisor, for instance, I believe you need to outline the steps of the process for any position in the company. You have to outline the steps of the process for the sale. You have to outline the steps of the process for your advisors. And that's what you train on every week. And you know, each step has a lot of meat to it. So just for instance, the greeting, the way you do the greeting as a service advisor, there's a lot of, there's a lot of meat to that just in and of itself. So that could be a one week depending on how good of a trainer you are or that could be a three week training where you go, yeah, this is how we do our greeting and you move on or you go into why we do it this way. And so we talk about that, we talk about the, you know, the walk around and how we sell during the walk around. But it's not just selling, it's, it's protecting yourself, it's protecting the customer and it's all, it all should be for the benefit of the customer and the dealership and the salesperson. Everybody has to see the benefit of it or it's not going to be, it's not going to be beneficial. And the other portion to that too, to answer your question, we do role play in that, you know, how do you do the green? Let's practice it. Not just talk about what it is, let's actually practice it. Practice by doing, you know, what is like one thing we're on right now with our service advisors is the active delivery. They do it, but the hardest thing for them to ask is there for a review. Hey, Luke, you know, I really appreciate you servicing with us. If there was any reason you were dissatisfied or wouldn't leave us a positive Google review, I would love to know right now so I can fix it. Yep. And you know, 90% of the people that, that are dissatisfied will just leave your, your dealership and never come back to you. So I want to know, like, one of the things that you've got to get your service advisors ready for is rejection or a comment that's going to be negative. And so the reason they're asked, they're not asking for it because they're ready. They're like, no, that's going to be negative. And I don't, I don't want to deal with that. Well, let's practice that. What are the. Let's get you ready for that and anticipate it. It's going to be negative. So make it fun, man.

Yeah, I hadn't even thought about that. You know, we all think about it in the sales process. Right. And typically in the sales process, everybody's so excited to have a new car.

Right.

So the active delivery is very easy. Hey, can I get that review?

Sure.

But man in service, that person might be leaving. Still pissed off, right?

Yeah, it was more money than I thought it was gonna be. It took longer than I thought. You didn't communicate with me. Right. You know, my car wasn't washed when it was done. It doesn't even look like it was. I mean, there's like countless things that we have to go through and we just address every one of them. We make it so that now the service advisor, I said you should go into that looking for them to come up with something. And when they don't, it's almost like they don't know what to say. No. Yeah, I'm absolutely gonna leave you a five star review. I can't wait to put you on Google. And they're like, thanks for the business.

Jeff, you don't have a service partner, right?

No, I do.

Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

You know one thing, Marshall did train at NIADA and he did a session.

And.

Those of you who weren't in it, you really missed out. But there's. Marshall described their walk around process and how it, number one? Well, number one, it covers you from liability. So you get a car there that has a dent or scratch, you can point that out to the customer. Number two, it helps the customer because the customer may not know that their tires are worn right or they need wiper blades, this, that, and other. And number three, it sells product. And honestly, that's what we're all here for, is to sell product. Right. And take care of our customer. And the thing was, I came home and implemented essentially his walk around. Enter our service department, and we've been training on it. We're probably a weekend, but I have seen my average RO customer pay RO already grow at least 20 or 30 bucks just by doing a simple walk around, and we're not good at it yet. Can you talk about how that training has affected your customer payora?

Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think, you know, starting from the beginning and then keep, you know, the beginning of the sales training and then going all the way through. And then I say that I recap every week. You know, so say we're on the walk around, and I'm going to recap the greeting last week, my sales staff, my service advisors, they always affirm that training is necessary every week, because I go, okay, guys, what did we cover last week? And they're all like, what did we cover? And you're like, oh, my gosh, this is why we train every week. Right? Because you can't even remember what we talked about last week. So that's always a good reminder to me that it's every week when you train on it. And so they might have overcome a hurdle. And I like to draw this circle. This is a little digression here, but I like to draw this small, tiny circle as an example of your comfort zone. Right? And our comfort zone is pretty big because we've said things that our sales staff isn't comfortable saying. But you got to recognize where your sales staff is at, right? So their comfort zone is a very small circle. And if you can just get them to inch out of that comfort zone, their comfort zone, the circle gets a little bit bigger, and then it gets bigger and gets bigger and gets bigger. But what sometimes we try to do is we try to take them from that small circle of comfort to this giant circle, and they're really uncomfortable doing it, and we can't figure out why. So in the training process, a lot of times what I do is I just get to the root of it. You know, we're in there and we're talking about Again, this active delivery. Okay, guys, what percentage of the time would you say you do it? And they say, well, you know, just be real with me. 30%. Okay, why is that? Let's get to the root of why that is. And, you know, after you uncover it, it's uncomfortable with what they might say to me. And then you go, okay, that's what I have to train on and get you better at really getting your sales staff to be honest about it. And I don't work very well with sales staff who's not honest with it because I'm not using any of your numbers or any of your behaviors against you. I'm trying to use it to make you better.

Yeah. What's funny, too, is by training and asking those questions for feedback, you might find out that your process is broken. You might find out that, hey, you know what? Well, why aren't you guys doing this walk around? Well, did you know that this door got blocked? And we actually can't get from the shop to the customer very easily anymore? And so everyone's just given up.

I love that point. Jeff. You nailed that. I'm discovering that every single time we train, like, things that are. Yeah, we have a lot of those roadblocks as to why they're not doing that. And then things that they're going, you know, I mean, we used to have snacks for our customers, and all our employees were eating them. And so from a management perspective, I said, get rid of those. I just always see employees eating them. And then I'm training on advisors, you know, on how to keep your customers happy. And they're like, well, they all complain about the snacks being gone. And I go, really? I thought, really, just our employees ate them. They're like, no, it's for customers. And you learn that through the training, that it was a benefit or whatever the roadblock is, you know, customer parking being full or you not having the right tools to sell them. You know, hey, we ran out of the walk around paper. You know.

Yeah, yeah. Thinking, or the website's broken. How long has it been broken? Well, I don't know. Since I started. You're like, what do you mean?

I told somebody, but not the right person. Right?

Yeah.

You're like, okay, that has happened so many times. Like, why aren't you doing this? Well, the link is bad.

I don't have a login.

Yeah, well, don't you think you should have told somebody?

So what I'm hearing you guys say is if you just did training every week, you would fix problems a Lot quicker.

Oh yeah.

Than the ones a year you filled in for that position.

Yeah.

So you, you have a, and this, we're going to go down this road for a second. You have a piece of paper for the service. Walk around.

Well, so yeah, we, we used to. So they, they check them out on surface pros now and that was an integration we did. But before, you know, if, if somebody else is filling in and you don't have a surface pro on you or you don't have the equipment that you need, everybody should be able to check in a customer. If I, if my advisors are busy, the customer shouldn't have to go, well, I guess I'll just sit here and wait or somebody is falling out of the process. My parts manager needs to know to do it. My service manager needs to know how to do it. My other advisors need to know how to do. They all need to be able to fill in.

So cross training, that would be another section and topic. You know, I mean it's. How important is cross training to make sure that your, you know, your parts guy knows how to do the service rider and your, you know, lot tech knows how to maybe answer phones or something. You know, I mean, that seems essential.

Or in our business, a salesperson knowing how to take a car payment.

Right? Yeah. Yeah. I think going back to Luke's point, there's some of these dealers that are going, hey, I only have one salesperson.

Great.

Who's the fill in that? You're telling me you don't every once in a while have the title clerk go out and help sell cars, put them in the sales training. And the more people in the sales training, the more fun it can be, right?

Sure.

And the more feedback you get. So I like throwing other people into the training that are going to somehow be involved.

So help me, Marshall. So we talked about sales training, we talked about service training and there's obviously a bunch of other responsibilities and jobs at our dealership we need to continue to be training on. What about management and ourselves? When does that come into play? When do we need to be training? When do we need to be training our upper level management, if we have any. And how do you do that?

Well, that's a great question as well. So we have finance training, which is another one, and then we have what we call supervisor training or management training. So we do that once a month and it's about two hours and we actually take them off the premise of the dealership, we get them lunch and it's a two hour focus training With, I give them handouts and everything that they fill in and they, they just, they have a binder they put together that's a. Because I recognize that managers can't be gone once a week. They're, they're either facilitating training or, you know, what have you. So the, once a month and that is in the middle of the workday. That's a, it's usually from 11 to 1. And we, we just put it on the calendar. You know, I don't have a last Friday of the month or every 15th or it's just, we put it on the calendar. That makes sense. And, and then, and you, you facilitate that training. I facilitate that training, yeah.

Okay.

But it's, I mean, and then I guess if you're talking about us in particular, my training is giving training. I love going to NADA and NIDA and you know, attending trainings and. But the biggest training that I get is by teaching. I mean, every time somebody comes up with something, every time I should say I train, they come up with something that I didn't think of before and I go, oh, that's really good. I'm gonna. No, I'll write that down. You know, I think my service advisor, when I was training on, you know, how to notate, you know, just keep records and notate every conversation. I think my advisor says, when in doubt, noted out. I said, that's making it to our sales training manual. Awesome thing, I loved it.

So let me ask a couple questions on that. When you say sales training manual, you created your own manual that has all your processes, procedures. That's what you use when you go to reference. Like, hey guys, here's our 10 step sales process. We're doing step one. I've got it all written out in this, what Google Drive, Stone tablet.

It's printed, it's printed, it's bounded. And they bring it to every sales training. They write all over it, they add to it. We print a new one every year. If you looked at our 78 page training manual, it would seem like a daunting task. My advice to anybody would say write out your process. I don't care if it's five pages, write it out, print it out, give it to everybody and then you'll find that you're adding to it every week. What we put in there, we put a lot of other stuff in there, like how you take a deposit, how you enter somebody into your CRM. We have a lot of how tos. That way when somebody new comes on board, they have the tool to Go, oh, I have a reference book to it and I can write my own login information on there, whatever it is. But you're going to find. If I just start, if I put five pages of it together, stable it together and start training on it, I'm going to. That thing will become 15 pages in one month.

That's so interesting. I hadn't even thought about having your sales staff bring that to class. But it's just like if we were going to class in college or high school, we would have taken our book, right?

Well, yeah. And how organized is your sales staff? They're going to bring their own notebook that you don't know where it's going to end up. So I'm just giving them something to write on.

That's great. That's so funny. I was literally laying in bed last night, couldn't sleep because I was thinking about this topic of, you know, how do you ever free yourself from the dealership or how do you not become the bottleneck in training and educating? How would you ever scale if you don't have these things written down, like manuals that people can refer to and your processes are spelled out, repeatable and teachable? I mean, if they have to come to Marshall to learn how to sell a car every single time, you got no time for that. You know, if it's all inside your brain, it doesn't do anyone any good.

That's. So when we went to 20 group meeting Jeff up in Boston a couple weeks ago, Isaac and I sat down and we took what you had from the, from your walk around and we wrote up our own walk around, you know, and it's. And like you said, it started with one page, but it's growing, you know, it's, it's the process of what we do, how we do it. We need to add some stuff now. You don't just start thinking about that. I can see it being five pages in the next two weeks. My service training, training book. And that's. It's just getting started. It's so hard for so many of us just to open up a Google Doc and start writing down. Is that, is that how it comes about for you? Is that.

Yeah. So eminent. It gets easier once you have it written and then you'll find you have policies somewhere else that go. That applies to this book. And then the more management you get behind it, put it on the onus on some of your managers, hey, why don't you start, why don't you write it down? It could be completely wrong and Terrible. Right. You can get it back and go, that's not what I want. But it's a starting place. Yeah. So much easier to edit something than start something from scratch.

Yeah.

And then I'd like to jump back to your point, Jeff, on training for us. Yeah, Luke touched on here a little bit. I'm a big believer in management going to training with any of your people. So if I'm, if my sales guys are going to a sales training, my manager is going with them. If my management is going to a training that I send them outside, I'm going with them. Whether it be I like, like 20 groups or whether it be niad, I like them to come with me so that when I come back to implement it, it's not me just saying it, they also heard it, or vice versa. If they heard it, want to implement it, but they have a hard time articulating what that person said or what they wanted. You were there with them so you can collaborate a lot easier on it.

That is, that is so true. And this is the first time we've taken a manager with us to a 20 group and he got a lot out of it. And, and also I think it's, it's a good time to get out of the office to, to try to write some of these things or do that with your sales manager. And like you said, how many, how many times have we said, Jeff, when we come back from 20 groups, everybody's scared, I guess. But if you took a manager with you or someone in the staff with you when you come back and start implementing things, it might be a little easier coming from them than from us. Right?

Yeah. More buy in.

So on those lines, not to belabor the point, but is that, should people be looking into those. Is that money well spent to send your manager or yourself and your salesman down to Florida for a day to do a sales training or a collections training or a management training from any of these groups. I mean, is that, I mean, yeah, man. Do we spend that money?

I think that's. There's never wasted money in training in my belief. And I've gone to some pretty bad trainings, but I always take something away. There's always something to be learned. And so you can go to a really bad training and take one thing away and go, that was not that great, but I did take this away. Or you can go to a really good training and still have the only. The ability to take three things away because we can't comprehend all that. We can go, man, there was so much there, but you still can only take back one to three things and implement them.

What's interesting, when he talked about. And you asked the question, how about training us? Sitting in those classes and asking questions. And I've said this already on the podcast. I talk to you a lot. But I was in your. It took me being in the convention in that session that Marshall was teaching to figure something out, you know, so, yeah, we've got to keep training ourselves every day.

Yeah, it's a mindset, too. Yeah, for sure.

It's funny because it makes me think about. We get so much anxiety that, like, well, I can't take a day off of work. Well, I can't. I can't be out of the office for a day to send my salesman down to training or two days. But it just makes. I mean, if you're driving a car down the road and it's got a vibration or a heavy pull, you're not just going to keep on driving until you tear it up and blow out a tire and you're stranded. You're going to stop, fix the problem, and then enjoy the rest of your ride. And I think as salesmen and owners, we have a really hard time being like, all right, I could either just keep pushing this salesman down the wrong path or let him just go down his own path by himself, or I could stop him and say, hey, man, we're going to train. We're going to send you to training. We're going to take an hour out of your day to get this right instead of letting you just continue to do it the wrong way forever.

Sure. And that's, you know, that's a little bit of what goals you want, too. I mean, some dealers just want to work in it all the time, and they have no desire to, you know, to train the people under them. And that's fine. But there's some people that go, yeah, eventually I would like to, you know, be the guy that has all these people, you know, selling the cars for me, and I can go do other stuff. Well, if you want to do that, then you have to invest them and you have to be willing. This is a really tough pill to swallow. You have to be willing for your sales to drop. Because when you're training and investing in somebody, of course I can sell more cars than them. Right? Of course you can sell more cars than them and you can do a better job. You've had eons of training to do it. You just didn't realize you were in training for 20 years and you're the boss.

And sometimes customers like dealing with that.

Yeah. So if I'm going to hand that off to somebody else, they're going to, they're going to drop it a little bit and you have to be okay with that because they have to learn. Right.

And I think sometimes you have to back up a little bit to go forward, right?

Yeah, almost always.

Yeah, I like it. I don't know what else to say. I think that's a lot of great stuff. Most of the people listening to this podcast, I think they know the value of training or they wouldn't be here. They're wanting to get better, they're wanting to improve themselves. Even if they're just a two man operation, they're not, you know, you're not looking to just be content. You know, we're continually learning and growing and moving forward. So if you're not moving forward, you're going backwards.

So let's wrap this up. Marshall, I want to start training. I want to implement something today. I've only got three staff members. What do I do?

Yeah, I think it's important in any training that I give or talk, that I give, that you walk away with something. Right. Because there's always, like you said, Jeff, there's a lot of stuff here and we all believe in training. But if you could walk away here and go, okay, what could I do right now? I think right now if you could take, you know, half a day, two hours out of your day and write down what's in your head, your process, and maybe you're, you're like some of the, sometimes the details hold us up, but if you just can put all that aside and say, you know what our process is, we meet and greet, then, you know, we pre qualify them or we investigate and build rapport and then we test drive and then we, you know, then we close them, then we do a delivery, whatever that is, just write that down. And if you could write that down and then you say, you know what sales staff, we're going to train once a month and it's going to be on the, you know, last Friday of the month or whatever you guys pick. And I always encourage people to start with once a month we all jump off this phone or this podcast and get ambitious. And we're like, we're gonna do once a week or we're gonna do once a day. Don't do that unless you can commit to it. So commit to a monthly once a month training and put something on paper. That would be the advice I would.

Put it on paper. Smart.

Very smart.

Yep.

Thank you, Marshall.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you for your time. Hope you guys have fun out there. I don't know what what you two got planned this weekend. Just a bunch of holding hands and skipping through the forest or what?

Who gave you that itinerary? How did you know?

Hey, just. And for you know, Marshall and I are teaching a session at the Ciada convention Friday in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I know it's a little late notice, but if you're around or want to come check us out. Come on.

Yeah, only if you want to get better. If you don't, then don't come.

Exactly. Or if you want to throw things. All right. Thanks, Marshall.

Thanks.

Sa.