#352 - Sales Training

This is the Independent Dealer Podcast, Education by Dealers for Dealers. Now, here are your hosts, Luke Godwin and Jeff Watson.

Hello, and welcome to this special edition of the Independent Dealer Podcast. Luke, we're going to share with everybody a recording from the Buy Here, Pay Here Summit. Summit.

Get confused on what they're called?

Yeah, but we had a great time. We just got back from Louisiana.

It was great.

It was great. Jeff Martin and his staff really did a great job, and it was great seeing so many dealers there that listened to us. And, you know, it was funny is we had about 40 people in our session that we're about to. To put out there. And I asked a couple people who listen to the podcast. I'm like, why didn't you come see us? He said, oh, I figured y' all were gonna release it on the podcast. So lucky for those folks who didn't come while we were there get to hear it today. And it's really good. Jeff, you did a great job. And, you know, I did. I did what I just.

Basically, I'm adding the clicker, but it is different if you're not there. Like, you don't get the same energy. You don't get asked questions. You don't get to interact. But. So this episode was. This breakout session was called Consistency Plus Accountability Equals a Successful Sales Team. So we talk a handful about having your sales team. Right, having the processes right, the training. So it's. It was a good time, man. It reminded me of a lot of things I need to do better.

Yeah, that's what these conferences do, Jeff. They remind you of things you need to do better, and they also bring you new knowledge that you didn't already have. Actually, today I already implemented one that. That I thought we already knew about, but apparently we didn't. So I implemented that today, and my. My insurance lady was pretty happy about that. But can we. I got a question, Jeff. Are we able to send out the. The PowerPoint presentation somehow to anybody that wants it?

Yeah, definitely. If you can't see the PowerPoint presentation in the video, which I think is going to be really hard to see, you can email us over at Info the independent dealer.com or reach out to Luke or I vi our emails or Facebook and. And we will send you over the PowerPoint presentation with some of the notes in it if you want that. So it's a bit of a long one. Hope you guys stick with it. Here it goes.

Good morning. All right, ready to go? Let's roll. Yeah.

Thanks for being here, guys. If you don't know who we are. My name is Jeff Watson. This is Luke Godwin. I think we got roped into this just because we were willing to do the session. But we also host a small podcast called the Independent Dealer Podcast. So if you haven't checked that out, definitely check it out.

Yeah.

And today we're going to talk to you about consistency and accountability and a successful sales process. Sales team. Process.

Sales team. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So in here, just a quick survey of hands. And we also Want to thank AutoZone for, for our attire here. So it's all about making money, right? So straight cash on me. Everybody likes that. And his hat is my favorite four letter word. Yeah. And I thought it was cash, but it's sold.

Yeah.

So. So we're going to talk about getting things sold today and I guess we'll just jump right in where you want to start. Yeah. Okay, let's do it. So I don't have a clicker, so I'll have to work this manual. And when we talk about building. What is the name of the.

What is the name anyway?

Accountability. Sales team. Accountability. And when we talk about building a sales team, we really just talk about building a sales process. And in the sales process, you got to have training and you see the circle kind of goes however where you want it to. But you can't start at sale. A lot of us started marketing, but great marketing would never lead to sales without training. Okay? So the very first part of your, your sales process needs to be trained. If you don't have a good training process, you're not gonna sell any cars. You may sell a few, but it's not gonna. Not gonna be worth what you're doing. So the takeaway today, Jeff, what are they?

So one of the things we want to make sure you guys take in your notes today and we're gonna go over this in a lot of depth is training your sales team, having a sales process and sticking with it and tracking what you are marketing. So those are going to be the three marriers. We're going to dive into each one of those. Now, all of us have been at it a while, right? We, we're not new to this. Very, very many of us. What happens is these things start to morph and they start to take a life of their own. And we think they're on track and we think it's something that's just on autopilot, but it starts just creeping off incrementally. Right. You have a sales manager that starts introducing his own stuff. You have A salesman who thinks he knows better than you and knows the sales process better and has decided to short circuit yours. So all these things just take constant, constant attention and little tweaks along the way.

And I'm stay right there for one second because I want to. To take a poll of the room and get y' all engaged. The only way we're gonna. We're gonna learn a lot from this session is for y' all to be engaged. So who in here has a weekly training session with their sales team?

Only weekly. At least weekly.

At least weekly. So three? Is that it? Four. Okay, how many people in here. Maybe I should back up. How many people in here have more than one salesperson? Okay, so. So most of the room. Okay, how many people in here have a sales process? A road to the sale? Okay. Okay. And how many in here track everything they do. Ups, test drives, applications, approved apps, things like this kind of a. So, so, okay, so you're going to benefit a lot. This is what matters is we're going to build some sales process, you're going to go home, you're going to implement that sales process, you go train on that sales process, you're going to track your marketing, and you're going to sell more cars. Okay? All right, so if you listen to our podcast, or if you don't, everybody in here, as I can see, because you are here in New Orleans and you're in this class, you want to invest in your people. And investing in your people starts with investing in yourself. Who in here are employees? Who in here are actually owners, raise your hand. Sorry, that's both owners. First. Owners, raise your hand. Okay, employees, it's about 50.

50.

So the employees sit in here. Your owners care enough to invest in you, so you can invest in his or her employees. Okay, so we're going to invest in our people, we're going to educate, we're going to train, we're going to empower, and then we're going to reward with salaries and tenure and job. Yeah.

We always joke around about, you know, what if I train them and they leave me? What if I get a killer rock star and then they go sell for a new car store? And what's the answer?

It happens. That's right.

What if I don't trade them and they stay?

That's even worse.

You know, that's even worse. How many of you guys think you have a mediocre, mediocre, mediocre salesman that is just there and you can't. You can't do anything about it you.

Feel like I have that.

I. I think I have that in probably two or three departments. I have an employee that's just. I. I'm held hostage of great by good.

He's good enough.

He's a good guy. He shows up on time. He's not, you know, doing meth in the bathroom. So we're going to keep him.

Not today anyway, you know, like.

But is he a rock star? And could he be or could you attract someone? He or she. Could you attract that person that could be a rock star?

That's what matters. Because we want rock stars. We don't want mediocre sales staff. Years ago in the new car store, it was. It was said if you. If you don't hit 12 cars a month, you gotta go, okay, and 12 is easy, y'. All. 12's easy. Now I hear the number one. If you don't hit eight, you gotta go. So we're just. It's a race to the bottom. Next thing you know, it's five, right? These people are making 500amonth. What are we doing here? So we got training. We got to get that. All right, benefits, training. Before you go to the next slide, what are some benefits of training? Kyle, What are benefits of training? Well, from the owners. Owners going to grow your business. Mark, what's some benefits to training? Better reputation, better outcomes.

Right.

Okay, that's two people. I know. Anybody else? I don't Gross. Holding, gross, that's always good thing. Momentum. I like it. Consistency. Okay, let's see what we got up there. What do we have on the board? Number one, survey says trained employees ask fewer questions. Trained employees ask better questions and more interesting questions. Trained employees learn more efficiently. And next, training. Employees are more productive, which leads to better gross. More car sales. Trained employees are happier, more confident. Being happy in your job goes a long way for retention, a long way to sell more cars. People are happy to come to work. They're going to be more productive and protect you from liabilities. This is huge, as we know. Hopefully we're kind of out of the scarce to death four years that we had this, this past four years with red flags. And what's the new cars rule? The cars rule. Hopefully all that's gone away, but it might not be. You never know. So technically from liabilities, and that comes from selling cars that are salvaged title or selling cars that are major damage history. All these things that if you train your. Your employees and your sales staff well, they can protect you from these things in the collections department as well. So we're talking about sales here, but this is a big deal. Yeah.

And Mark pointed it out, and that really hits home to me is how many of you guys think right now, today you have a salesman selling a car that's probably going to say something wrong.

Everybody should raise their hand.

I guarantee it. You know, when I'm on the sales floor and I hear a salesman for he's been with me six months, and I heard him say something the other day about one of our warranty items, like, what in the world? Where did that come from? Where did that phrase come from? Like, I don't know how that got worked into your sales process and how long you've been doing it, but that's a real issue. So, you know, we had to. I had to stop and correct him. But scary enough, some of that's going on every single day. So it's my fault for not trading.

And some of your best sales staff are the ones that say the most crazy things. And the reason is, is they over promise at the time of sale, then they under deliver to that customer, and your service department under delivers to that customer. The next thing you know, you got major problems. So this is a big deal. Yeah. They need to know what to say.

Who records their closings, their sales process, their document closings. You guys record it. Audio, video. I know there's some services that can do that, but man, that's huge. To be able to review those. Right. Just like you do your sales calls. Go over them. Okay.

When you go. When you start, when you set out to build a training program, you got to know what you're doing. Because the worst thing you can do is start a training program and then let it fizzle out. And it's happened to all of us. It's happened to me. I know it's probably happened to Jeff, and it's happened to everybody in this room. So if we have nothing to train on, how are we training? And this is where developing a good sales process comes in. Because we have a good sales process, whether that be five to eight steps in that sales process, we know we can consistently pick something and train on. If we don't have a sales process, we're just kind of, okay, guys, what are we going to talk about today? And nobody wants to come to a meeting where that is the outline.

Okay.

Yeah.

One thing I want to point out is we use the word train and training, and unfortunately, it's got a T and an A in it. That sounds a lot like talking. And sales talking is not Training. This training word, I think needs to be replaced with the word role play. Everyone hates that word. It's so awkward. The salesman hate it. New guys really hate it. Right. It's so weird for me to sit down and have a role play with someone. That's what it's got to be. And if you have a sales training schedule, which we'll get into and it's 30 minutes long, 28 of those minutes better be role playing, in my opinion.

Yeah. The first thing you should do is outline what you're going to work on today and demonstrate it. And Jeff and I would demonstrate how we're going to train on our opening. Right. And then at that point, then we just role play the rest of the time to make sure we got that and to come up with anything that we have. And if we're not training, our salesforce is not going to get better. We're going to sell less cars. We're going to hire more people, try to sell the same amount of cars. It cost us a lot of money. And if we don't get better, if they don't get better, our sales staff, how are they? They're going to succeed. Everybody in here has hired a person that came in. They were great. We didn't train them. They didn't get better. And we were like, man, we really thought we had a good employee. You probably did have a good employee and you made them bad. I think blaming yourself, look at yourself. Is a good way to get better. If they aren't succeeding, why would they stay? That's a big deal. If I'm not succeeding at my job, I'm not going to continue to do it. I'm going to go do something else. And people who aren't trained and have a path to make more money or to develop themselves, they're not going to stay with you. They're good. Typically, the ones that do stay that you don't want them anyway. So make sure that we know that we're trying to get our sales staff to succeed.

Hey, guys, real quick to break in. Of course, make sure you guys know about tax max tis the season to get signed up and start filing those fourth quarter tax refund checks.

Yeah, that's a great way to get some of that. That tax money early. I mean, you don't get it right now, but. But you get those cars sold before cars go way up in price. So you can go ahead, replace the cars that you kind of sold now and be ready for tax season. It's like a double whammy. If you do it properly.

Yeah, it's. It's pulling that tax season forward quite a bit. So make sure you, you give the guys a call at tax max. You know, it is part of your sales process. So it does change your sales process. You do need to train your salesman on it. If you don't put it in the process and specifically have it at a certain step in your sales process, it won't get implemented. So that's the biggest issue. Train on it, teach it, and then hold everyone accountability. If you, when you call in or when you sign up, make sure you use the code podcast. 2024, I believe.

Yeah.

And you get 40% off the VIP package. Something like that. And maybe a ham that Bill will send you. I'm not sure.

I bet he'll send you some Celsius. He's pretty big on that. Yeah.

All right, back to the episode schedule.

Trainings be consistent. And I asked the question to start with, who is training weekly? Weekly is a minimum. I would recommend twice a week. Some people who have bigger stores can train a lot of. And that'd be two times a week, which I would recommend for people who have five or more sales staff. That's where you need to be. People who have sales managers, you need to train them to be your trainer or, you know, like me, I like to train. So as an owner, I would continue training, but I would let my sales. My sales manager and I would develop the program. Okay. You have to believe in it. Practice from the top down. Who out here as an owner still every once in a while has to talk to a customer. I mean, most of us. Right. So if that is the case, I want you to use your opening every time you talk to that customer. Our opening is pretty simple. You're out looking and shopping today, aren't you? Yes, you are, because you are looking and shopping. And so that's our opening. Then we do an introduction. So I know that if I do it and I salesperson that I just hired, here's me doing it, they're going to be more likely to do it. What I don't want to do is walk up to that customer and say, hey, how's it going? I'm just looking because that's the response I'm going to get. Right. So that's the reason we have that.

Yeah. What are you doing today? What are you here for? What can I help you with?

Right. Hey, that's the worst. What's going on today?

Yeah. So to stick specifically on this, on the scheduled and the training side of it, is anyone doing anything unique or different with their. With their sketch, with their sales training? How many of you guys have multiple locations? How are you handling your training in that situation? Mark, do you guys have a weekly training? Okay.

And what were you doing?

You're having individual trainings in each location.

Or bringing everybody to one. Is anybody doing back here? Okay. Zoom can be very helpful when you have multiple locations around. And it's not the same as being in staff together, but it's valuable. So if you do have people spread out, I would encourage you to use teams or Zoom or anything like that to get better because the technology is so good now that you can do that. Yeah.

Great.

Aside from there, do you make them be dressed and ready for work? Yeah. Super important. Okay. I think that's important to show up to meetings like that ready to go. If you're doing it virtually, make them be ready. Don't let them sit there with no pants on. Yeah.

We do hold our Zoom training every Tuesdays and Thursdays via Zoom. And what's nice thing about that is when you get it in the Zoom, it's just scheduled. It's Tuesday and Thursdays at 10 o' clock from now till the end of the world. Right. So it happens every single time. When you put it in Zoom and schedule it, it syncs to my calendar, syncs to everyone's calendar. And what I found is to the point of having the camera on and being attentive, we had some salespeople that didn't come in until later in the day. So they would be on the Zoom, but they weren't tuned in. And we'd constantly remind them, guess what? Those are sales people that didn't stick around very long. Right. You could tell they weren't invested just by asking that little extra, you know, hey, I know you don't come in till noon, but every Tuesday and Thursday at 10 o', clock, you need to be logged in and attentive. And that was like too much of an ass. Right. And of course, it played itself out.

Yeah. And that's. That's just gonna happen. So don't chase time, don't go overtime. That's a big deal. Especially with salespeople. Salespeople, they're there to make money. And if you're asking 30 minutes, you need to be 30 minutes. Do not go 45 minutes. Do not go 40 minutes because they ready to get to the floor. They're ready to call those ups they've had. They're ready to call those leads they got to sell cars, make money. So don't go over their time, never cancel, which is a big deal. I'm. I'm. I'm one that cancels, and I should never do that. But it happens every once in a while.

Do you have a backup for when you do cancel? Is there someone that can step in and do the training without you?

No.

So that's an issue. So for us, if I'm not there to do the training, then my sales manager does the training, right?

Yeah.

So there's always. The sales team knows that there is no canceling. One of us will be there. It will happen regardless. And to that point, it comes down again to this is a training. You know, like Luke said, I will typically demonstrate how I want it done, and then we'll just go around the circle in the zoom videos, and everyone will have a chance. And one little tip we do in our training that I would recommend is at the end of their opportunity to take us through that process. I asked the simple question, what did they do do good? What could they do better? Right. What did she do good there? What could she do better? And it's. Everyone gets that question. Even I get that question after I demonstrate. Hey, what did I do good there? What could I do better? And then that causes the sales team to think through, hey, okay, great. I really liked how Jeff said it this way. Or how he handled this objection or. Or how he turned this complaint around. Oh, but he kind of missed the why by portion of that. You know, he didn't really talk about our program or he didn't really address that concern. And then they can voice that back to us.

Right.

And we can have that dialogue of, hey, this is. You're right. This should have been in my presentation or in my conversation that time. Or, hey, no, this is why I didn't go down that road. You might have think that it was a missed opportunity, but let me explain to you why I don't want you to talk about, you know, the car or the issue or something. So it gives that opportunity for the feedback loop in the training.

Yeah. And make sure you're training specifically on. On certain portions more than. Than one time. That's a big deal. People think, well, I trained on it. Yeah. My employees should know it.

Right.

But they don't. It takes repetition. And a lot of times we spend six weeks on one particular aspect of our sales process, and then we add it all together. Because if you do it that way, it's just that repetition just really, really gets them to Know the material. Okay. Okay, big one. So what is a sales process? And what does yours look like? So everybody raise your hand. Who said they had a sales process? Okay, so I'm going to start with you. How many steps in your sales process? Six. Six. Okay, who's next on this row? Who had the sales process? Next. Next. Anybody raise your hand. Who else has the sales process? Mark got seven. Okay. Sevens here, a lot of sevens here. A lot of fives here, a lot of eights. A lot of times. Okay? It doesn't matter how many you have. It's just as long as you. You have it. So for those of you who have a sales process, is it written down? Yes. Okay. All right. Does your sales process look like this? It's funny, right? For those of you who do not have a sales process written down, that's what your sales process looks like. You know why? Because they just. They make it up as they go.

Okay?

Have you ever heard of brooming a customer? Everybody should shake their head yes, and then the value pay your business. You can't broom because you're selling to people with bad credit. Okay? And you don't know if those people with bad credit hit the lottery yesterday. You don't know if they had a. If all of a sudden they got a huge bonus from their job. Yes, sir. Okay. Brooming is this. A customer walks on the lot, and before you even enter the sales process, your sales staff determines that there's no way you're going to sell them a car. Okay? So it. You know, you hear the stories from farm farm guys, right? A lot of times that they walk into the new Ford store looking at a new F350, and they're in overalls and they're chewing tobacco. And the salesperson, first. First thing they think, man, that guy couldn't buy nothing. And next thing you know, somebody's selling him a $50,000 F350, 10 of them, because he's got, you know, whatever. And it's the. It's. It's looking at someone and determining they can't buy before you go through your process. That's a broom. Quick broom. And that's.

That's salesmen who think they know better. Short circuiting your system, right? They're going straight from the meet and greet. Hey, my name is Jeff Watson. Welcome to Four Seasons. This your first time You've been here before?

Well, for the first time.

Great. How much down payment do you have?

Boy, I got. I got a hundred dollars.

All right, man. Thanks for stopping by. Stop by some other time.

You know, that's a boring day.

I didn't tell you I had a trade in that I own free and.

Clear, you know, like so.

So I'm trying to just. I'm trying to get to the sale.

Too early or that this new salesman didn't know. They have bought from you 10 times. They've never missed a car payment. And you will take a hundred dollars down from them because you've done it in the past you and they've never missed car payment. Right. These are all the things that can happen in a broom. And if you don't go down that process. One of the steps in our process would be after I introduced you and I looked at you and I said, well, what brings you to Gallup Motors? Have you bought from us before or were you recommended by someone?

Right.

I bought from you before. Really? That's great. When was the last time you bought? Two years ago. Awesome. Are you still paying your car or is it paid for? Well, we pay for them pretty quickly. We pay for all our cars in a year. And when I'm a salesperson, I know that our notes usually 48 months and this guy's paying for it in a year. What does that tell me? I'm gonna sell this guy a car Even if he only has 100 now, probably if he has zero down, I'm gonna still sell him car. Okay, but this right here is what your sales process looks like if you're not training on is not written down, and if your salespeople just are going willy nilly because they're making it up as they go.

Yeah. And what I want to point out from a practical standpoint is Luke made this on, I don't know, Google Slides or something or.

Yeah.

Super easy, guys. So we're going to rearrange this in a second to match Luke's process. But you can do this, right? This is very easy. You can. It's all in your head.

Most of us, we've got this process.

In our head and we teach it to ourselves and then over and over, but we don't write it down. And then give them to us so they can visually see it. And then of course, within this, Luke has built out, well, what does step number one actually mean? And then let me give you some more tracks right, so you don't have.

To make this for one, I'm. I'm an idiot when it comes to technology. So just write it down, rehearse it straight on it. And then this is what your sales.

Process.

It should be clean. Okay, so the difference is jumbles, including this. And once we have this, I know that we have seven different training things we can do. And so if there's 52 weeks in a year, I know I have seven. And I know that I can divide 52 into seven and I can get a number that's 7.2 or something like that, and I can train seven times with each one throughout the year, or I can change seven times each and then I can put them all together. I can train five times each and then put them all together. I can start over. I know where to go. This helps me determine how we're going to sell cars. It helps me determine how we're going to train. Hey, guys, just want to remind you about Buckeye dealership consulting. I tell you, those guys are everywhere, Jeff. They were at the convention this week and they really take care of their customers. That's the one thing that you see with vendors that are at everything. Buckeye's always there. And reinsurance is huge. This talking to all these dealers about whether they had it or whether they didn't. And some they're talking about cpi and some people make more money in CPI than they do anything else. But it builds wealth and it helps with that tax burden. It's November 14th. You probably still got time to get it done. You can reach out to, to Jason, you can reach out to Brett, you can reach out to Bill. I'm sure he'll just fly down and hold your hand and walk you through it. So get it done. It's time.

Yep, absolutely. Give the guys over at Buckeye a call.

Take a little bit of time. Look at this. Who has questions on anything I have up here when it comes to my process.

What did he do good? What could he do better?

Back in the back. Yeah, let's stop there. So who has only Salespeople who have BDC? Two hands or one hand? Okay, who has a BDC? Might be the easiest way to say, okay, three. So BDCs are really popular and then they're kind of gone out. And so now who else who all uses cradle to grave with their salespeople? A lot of people do now.

Okay.

So yes, that is training. And we would have. So here we had the seven step process. And when it comes to lead handling, we have a whole different process. But so what's, what's interesting about that? Handling a lead is truly the same way as handling a. No. Okay. And the reason is, is because you have to have a meet and greet virtually Would everybody agree with that? Okay, so what we'll do in the meet and greet, we'll train a couple days on the lot up. We'll train a couple days on the phone up, and we'll train a couple days on the Internet up. It's all the same. It truly is all the same. We're just doing it differently. And most people in here will say 90% of our, our leads now are Internet leads, not ups. You know, 15 years ago it was an up, but it's still, it's still handled the same. How many people in here would say their phone ups are more than their, their Internet ups? Nobody would, but they probably are. But if you're not tracking, you don't know. Yeah, same thing.

And a lot of people have different preferences too, right? So that as a manager and owner of the dealership, you're going to decide, okay, is my meet and greet time on the phone or on the text message or the Internet? Is that my time to set the appointment so that I can finish the rest of these things? Because I don't want to do that over the phone or you decide, yes, over the phone. I'm going to get all the way over here to qualify the applicant. You know, I'm going to do all this over the phone or via text message before I even bring them in for a test drive.

And I'm going to go and I'm going to follow my, my sales process first meet and greet on a, on the Internet lead to application immediately before we even think about getting them into the office. Because I don't want to waste their time or my time. Okay, you have a lot, a large lead volume. This is what it should look like. You have a smaller lead volume, you can bring people in. But if you're dealing with 50, 80, 100 leads a day and you only have four people working them, you got to do it a little differently. Everybody's is going to be different.

I'd argue that it's just based on preference. You know, the old school situation of get them on the phone and get them in the lot and then we'll talk about stuff. You know, I think that's, you know, during COVID it was all get them pre qualified before they come in. I feel like it's swinging back the other way where I want them here. You know, I want to be able to get them to see me, who we are, our why buy, meet the salesman, fall in love with us and then the rest of this is really easy. You know, that's my Opinion. But, yeah, everyone runs differently.

Anybody have some more opinions on this? Because we can talk about this all day. What's the. The. Whenever it comes to training your sales staff. $2,500 down payment. Yes. How do you train them to overcome. Oh, I don't even have. Start.

I don't know.

It kind of does.

It doesn't.

But it's 500.

Go to the store today.

Maybe I should come back. That's one.

That's.

That's one rejection, right? Okay. All right.

Tyler, your mom think they need a little bit of money.

Because you don't get this money to get back and forth to work, you're.

Not going to have a job, right? Yeah, I guess I could.

I guess I could go. We got him up once, now got to do again. Your baby mama, you've been paying her a lot.

Right?

Child, you've been paying her on time. You think she's been holding some of that money back to me? Yeah. She knows. She knows if you don't get to work, you're not gonna pay all the time, right? Would you give her a policy? Give you a little bit of money? So I got one no and three. Yeah. One no and two yeses. Okay. You got to keep digging. You cannot stop on the first time. You're gonna always get a rejection. But if you started at a thousand dollars down, how much money is the max you're gonna get? Right. That's why we start. And our down payments show that we average $2,000 now.

Okay.

Because we dig deep and we try to get it. You got a question back here. I think you're right. And I think you're right that. That during COVID we switched so quickly during COVID to nobody's coming to our store. We locked the door for nine months, and probably a lot of people in here did. And we didn't lock the doors, and we closed. We locked the front door so nobody could come in unless we invited them into our office. So we switched, and we wanted everybody approved up front. And it worked fine up until probably midway of this year. And what we have seen is appointment setting is back, and it's big. And so I would definitely recommend that if you are doing a meet and greet on the phone or up, there's nothing wrong with getting the application, but also set an appointment at the same time because it's super important. Face to face is still. Still the real deal.

Anyone else have a question that they'd like Luke to get in their face and beat them up over? But a good Sport.

But see, the reason the entire. And what I wanted to show is I've rehearsed that so many times. My sales staff has rehearsed that so many times. And actually we use 3, 500 now, not 2500. How close to $3500 can you get? And the first response is usually a number. And what does. What does the number mean? It tells me right then that the customer's got something. And the second one is, well, if you had to go ask your mama, your daddy, your brother, your sibling, what they do, that's number two. And then the third one is typically something outlandish. I mean, seriously stupid, like could you go ask your baby mama? Or could you go dig up the. The money you plan in the backyard?

What can you pawn?

What can you pawn? Have you flipped your couch cushions over to see if there's any more money in there? That's. I mean, it's outlandish, but endears you to them. It endears you to that customer because they start laughing. Once they start laughing, you got. It's a yes.

Yeah. And Luke actually does crawl up on the table and yell at from on top of the table, I think. How many of you guys follow a similar process of the NEO application? And I know the process isn't the focus of this discussion today, but this is interesting to me. The NEO application and the down payment investigation happened way before the test drive. Is that pretty standard for everybody here? Since we're all by here, painter dealers? How many of you guys are salesmen? Go from this to this. See how close those are to each other. Man, that's tempting, isn't it?

I'll tell you what, I've locked the.

Key box before on a salesman. When he went out on the line.

He greeted someone, and then he comes.

Back in, he's like a little squirrel in the box. And he just stuff in his pocket.

With keys because he's going to go.

Out and show this guy every single.

Car on the lot.

He came back in and that key box was locked. You come to me, you need a key, you come to me from now on. And that was.

He never did it again after that.

But that's the biggest temptation when we're selling, buy here, pay here, as opposed to retail. Right? Because that's how a retail dealer works. Hey, let me greet you. Oh, great. Let's show you some cars.

Once you fall in love with the.

Car, they don't get you approved. And the bank will send me the money. Right. It's the biggest temptation for Our salesman to, to short circuit is to jump from this meet and greet straight over to the car.

And that brings up an interesting point because it's more and more people, it seems, are trying to do a dual model. And a dual model would be buy here, pay here, lease here, pay here, and some retail.

Right.

And so if you really want to do that, and I'm going to say really want to do that. I do you really want to do that, then you have to have a very, very well trained sales staff for one to cover your butt when there's some pricing problems. And I'm just going to leave it at that. But also to not, not get people's hopes up and then not be able to get it done. So you need to make sure that, that if you are trying to do that model, your meet and greet puts you into two separate tracks. And what I mean by that is, after your meet and greet, what I would ask Jeff as a customer, I'd say, well, Jeff, you have your own financing set up or are you looking to take a part of our in house program?

Exactly what my guy said.

Yeah, okay, you gotta make that distinction, right. Then when that customer says, oh, I have my own financing set up, the next question there is, that's great. Well, are you paying cash or what bank are you using? Okay. Then it splits again. But if they say they want to use your in house financing program, we follow this step. That is a super, super important question and it needs to be addressed every time. It needs to be trained on like crazy because what happens if you don't do it and your customer goes, oh, I want to drive. I came here to look at the $40,000 Navigator you have sitting out there and the next thing you know, after you they're falling in love with that and you realize they can afford the eight thousand dollar navigate, then we got a problem. Yeah, They put zero into that down payment because at that point they have an app. So the way our application is set up, and I don't know if everybody in here is, but most people's application are set up to ask that question. Okay. I let them put in, the customer put in whatever they they're going to do and what we do with applications and I encourage, encourage that with anybody that's have QRS in your dealership that they can scan and do the application on their phone or you send them a text with that application in that text. This makes it easier. You're allowing the customer to put it in even though they're in store.

I Don't care.

They'll put it in and we'll still ask. Now, if the customer puts in $35, we can, we can bypass the down payment investigation. But they've already told us and we're comfortable with where they are. But we may have to come back when we realize that they need more money now. Yeah, yeah.

And what's different? So like my sales process, loops number two, three and four for my sales process are all the same step. Right. For that, that's all step number three for me, which is get the application in neo, get it approved. But I don't, I don't separate my down payment investigation as its own step, which I, I could or should do. And it's why he has larger down payment than your typical buyer. Pay your dealer.

Right.

Because he emphasizes that it is its own thing. It is a step in the process. It's not just a line item. Oh, well, how much down do you have today? Click, click, click, click, click. Right. That's what my guys do. Well, how much down do you have? What are you thinking about putting down? Yeah, the minimum.

I don't know.

What can I get away with?

And it gives me something else to train on, which is great. And if anybody has more questions on the step three, I did a session at Niada maybe two or three years ago. It's. You can get it somewhere probably on podcast fee. That is nothing but about. It's a whole session on down payments. Why they matter so much.

Hey, everybody, promise this is the last interruption in the sales process. Make sure you're including your auto pay information information. And of course Blitzpay is the one to go to, to do that. I converted over to them a year and something ago and I, I enjoy it. I love it. It's great. It makes things so much easier. My customers are happy. They've got their own wallet, their own portal. We just opened up the Cash network, so now my cash customers can go and pay at their local dollar store and Walgreens and Walmart. Like it's really, really making the process easier to get my cash back to me.

Yeah. And that's what it's about is getting the money in the pocket. Let's pay is the way to go. They were at, they were at the convention too. It was great to see tj and they're always there, they're always helping out. So thank you all. Thanks to all the vendors we talked about today. Thanks for everybody that was there. And here you go. So now we're going to switch into the Marketing and marketing and sales go really tight together. And your sales staff, okay? So we have to identify a problem. If we're. If our sales are suffering, we have to identify a problem. The problem is either your marketing, your sales process, or your sales people. Okay? And I say, do you have a lead problem? Do you have an inventory problem, or do you have a sales problem? Yeah. And before you. Before you hit the button one more.

Time, come back to that.

Okay. What is the goal of your online leads? Yell them out. Engagement. Next appointment. Love it. Next. Like, steps. That's quick. Okay, next. Sell a car. Right? Get an application, get approved, app, whatever. Okay. How do you know if your marketing is working.

Any cars?

Sell cars. Okay. Or you can look at the membership track.

Right. Next. Yeah.

What are you tracking? So this is super important and we're going to kind of just reads through this.

Next.

These are things you should be tracking. Ups, test drives, write ups, bone ups, point sets, format shows leads, credit apps, and approvals. So you should. You should be like, well, why am I tracking test drives? Why should we track test drives? Jeff, can you. I don't know.

I don't track tax. I don't track them.

Okay, anybody got an idea what you should try? You should track test drives. And I didn't figure you would know. I mean, I didn't think anybody would know. Anybody got any ideas?

I think you might have an inventory problem.

Might have an inventory. Right. There we go. May have a recon problem. So we have to do this. Or you may have a salesperson that's riding with a customer and they're making them feel uncomfortable, or they stink. And you may go, they think they may actually have body odor and you're getting in the car and your customer doesn't like it. I mean, these are things I've heard that happen before. So don't be surprised if you have a test drive problem with a certain. You may have a salesperson that is amazing to getting the customer in there and then can't close. Well, maybe he sucks at closing or he may stink or he may not know how to test drive. Okay. Tracking, pull ups. You know the difference between phone ups and leads and what is working better for you. Gives you something to train on. Credit apps. If you're getting a ton of credit apps in and you're only approving a certain amount of them, you could have serious problems there and you gotta fix it. And this just gives you a way to learn what you need to fix and learn what you need to train on. That's the biggest, biggest reason to track and also to see if your marketing's right.

Yeah. What I like is when you talk about this, you, you, we track this, you know, obviously by salesmen. And that's one of the biggest factors, right? As you say, okay, well maybe my leads convert at this rate because I have this huge net and I'm getting a ton of useless Facebook leads. But then when you track salesmen, you see, well, this one's converting those leads, no problem. This one is not. Right. And now you're able to narrow down on the problem. Oh, all these leads are crap. Oh, they're all junk. None of these people have down payment. You're like, well, Susan doesn't have a problem converting them, so there's no difference here. I also really like in the tracking process to know if my, my process is broken is to track my leads, basically Internet leads to my. What we track as user added leads, right. So I look at the leads that my dealerships generating and put into the CRM. And then I look at the deal, the leads that my salesmen are generating on their own and putting into the CRM. Right. So I know, are you prospecting? Are you working? Are you asking for referrals? Are you calling past due low balances, you know, repeat referrals? Or are you just waiting for the bus to show up digitally or physically?

And just a side note on that, you should have one person, one salesperson. Your best. It may not be your best salesperson, maybe your best own voice, best person that knows how to working phone, working all your low balance queues. It should be a permanent job that should be worked every day, all day, again and again and again and again. That's where your best leads are in there. And funny is we noticed that we were working low balance queues starting at 4,000 and under, I think was our low balance, the one we were really paying a lot of attention to. And you know what happens when you start working those accounts? You might want to guess what would you think would happen? They have the most equity they can trade, right? What do you think really happened? They knew that they were, they could see the light at the end of the tunnel. And so what did they not want to do? Trade. Right. So we figured out that we had better success working four to $8,000 load balances, which puts them on the cusp of, of equity. Now what does equity really mean? May not mean anything about your pay here business, but what it does mean is those people probably have paid us for 25 to 30 months and they're really good customers and we have a relationship with them and we can spend it really quickly. So make sure that you're targeting the right thing. When it comes to low balance. It took us months to figure this out. Why in the world are we not selling these Low balance and then we pick it up.

There a question on these. I mean, we talk about KPIs a lot. Right. Key performance indicators and your dashboards and what you need to be looking at daily, weekly, monthly. Does anyone have input on these or anything they're doing different or better for the group?

Yes, ma'. Am. Yeah. So she's using her CRM to make sure what the divide is on how the leads are coming in, which is super, super important because then you know how to better allocate your resources. When it comes to marketing.

You're talking about the percentage of sales that are made up by source.

Yeah.

So your salesmen are creating 5% of the sales on their own. That seems it's low.

But her BDC is so good.

So I mean that to me is interesting because I just go back to like you. You eat what you kill. Those salesmen, man. What a great job. What a great job that would be.

So. So what?

Just take it back to signing documents, is it.

That's, that's what they're doing. Right. I mean it's, it's super interesting and, and we could debate BDC and cradle to grade until the cows come home, but your BDC is your sales staff is what that tells me. And the sales people should only be paid as, as signers. That's it. Because they're not your compensation plan. Yeah. They're just signing documents. You could get, you could get docusign or not docusign to the other to do it for you. And secure clothes to do it for you. You never need them is what that tells me. It's only 5%.

What's the hardest step in this process, do you think? As from a sales. From an employee standpoint? Close. I would argue it's not. I would argue that's the easiest step in my process. I'm buy here, pay here. I got you approved. Do you want the blue one or the red one?

Yeah, yeah, you're right.

Step two, three, four, those are the hardest.

Right.

Your BDC is doing the heavy, heavy lifting. They show up with a pre qualification. The salesman's like, hey, you want the blue one or the red one? The clothes.

The clothes gets harder the nicer your car is. I can tell you that the higher Your ACV goes. The close gets to be harder and harder because they have. They can go to Drive time and look at almost the same car. Right. They can go to Carvana, look at the same car. They go to Carmax, look at the same car. So the close gets key. We, we've really not been as good as we should on the close and that's tracked here.

Right. Credit apps to approvals, approvals to deliveries.

Yep.

Right. So you can see if you have a problem there. Hey, I'm getting the credit apps, we're getting these people approved or conditioned, but I'm not getting the deliveries. What's going on?

Your approvals, your sold should be 50% of your approvals and ours is running about 20%. So where's my problem close? Yes. It's about 12%. 12% of total leads.

Yeah. So if we go all the way back to here, right. Whether we got a meet and greet digitally or online or in person, 12% of those people are going to make it figure. Right.

So you can essentially say 12 of every hundred leads are going to get.

You a sole car all the way down that process.

12 and a half percent if you're good. If you're good, it's 12.

They open the door on us, which I think we're done.

Sorry, I wish we had more time and more questions to answer. Yeah. Thank you. Yes, sir. What's that? Well, go back. Go back. So before you leave, how much marketing really cost, you've got to track per lead, per application, per app, per car sold. Per car sold. Benchmark is around 180. In our industry approved app. What do we say was something. Yeah, was about $20 something dollars per approved app and per application. I'm sorry, it was 20 per application, 40 per approved app and about 180 per car sold. Yes, thereabouts it could be anywhere from 150 to 300. If you're getting close to that 3 to 400 range, it's too much.

Thank you guys.

Thank you for listening. Please leave us a review. We'll catch you in the next episode. Sa.