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Customers don’t buy vehicles, and sales people don’t sell vehicles. Customers buy solutions to problems they can feel emotionally. Sales people are the conduit that helps customers discover those emotional solutions.

People buy from people. Customers generally do business with people they like and trust. Your customers don’t walk out of your dealership telling you that they bought from you because you are a jerk. Customers can get vehicles anywhere. Most of you are not selling a rare commodity. Therefore the decision criteria of a customer are based upon money, me and machine. However, you are the secret ingredient. You have the power to influence the perception of the customer about you, the machine and the money.

A customer will move through three stages of the selling process – Character/Trust, Emotion and Logic. People have to like and trust you, then they allow you to guide them to emotions that eventually combine with logic. Emotion distorts reality. That’s why everyday customers walk out of F&I and tell you that they did not plan to buy a vehicle today.

The number one reason people buy a vehicle is and always will be confidence. Confidence they feel in the money, me and machine that you give them. Therefore the most empowering decision you can ever make as a sales person is accept full responsibility for every sale made or lost.

Once you accept full responsibility for winning and losing and eliminate the easily accepted notion that it’s about price, you become an incredibly powerful, winning sales person. If you allow one excuse for losing into your subconscious it opens the door for a million excuses. Weak sales people raise skinny kids. Eliminate all excuses such as price and watch your sales take off.

If price is the issue, what can you do to influence the price or the decision? Practice apples to oranges selling. If everybody else is showing the customer apples, you show them better apples and show them oranges, as well. Always think HFG – Hope for Gain. What is the customer trying to accomplish and how can I apply to their sense of HFG.

How will the first stage of your engagement with the customer set you apart and influence the customer? Most customers decide to buy from you in 15 seconds to two minutes. The decision is made about you long before they ever make a decision about price. Try this greeting: “Hi folks, are you out beginning to look and shop around?” What are they going to say, “No we are just looking and shopping?” Be proactive. Take the objection away up front and make the customer feel at ease while you do it. Nobody else is greeting the customer this way.

Most sales people operate out of the same gene pool. If you do this you eventually become a homogenized, generic sales person. What follows are bad results, lots of price shoppers, low sales, low incomes and eventually a bad case of excuses. Never forget that everything you do makes a difference.

Before any customer leaves, are you and your manager “walking the wheel”? “Walking the wheel” is a phrase I use to remind us to explore all avenues. Bigger car, smaller car, car to SUV, new to used, used to new, demo, longer term, cash back, delay payment, pay off the remaining lease payments on their trade, trade another vehicle, trade two vehicles, etc. How hard do you fight for every sale? Persistent = consistent.

Winning at sales is simply a choice. You can choose to win or choose to lose. Once you choose, you become the sales person you have decided to be at the given moment.

The managers in your dealership must have a written job description with clearly defined responsibilities and expectations.

Having specific goals for the department is required. Daily action plans for selling, training, appointments, one-on-one coaching, save-a deal meetings, deal structuring, follow-up, etc will increase sales by 20 percent without spending more for advertising.

If you read biographies of successful people or businesses, one common thread always seems to be a strong sense of passion fueled by big goals. When you write specific goals down on paper, you are committing yourself mentally, emotionally and physically to the attainment of those goals. Do your dealership and your employees set the long and short-term goals? As the dealer, have you committed your dreams to paper for the month, six months, a year, five years, 10 years, 20 years? Speed of the boss, speed of the crew, if you make the commitment, your employees will, too.

Once you have set your goals, plan your specific actions to reach them. Write a specific action plan for when to train, what to train on, who will conduct the training, how long the training will last and your expected goal of improvement for that area. Post a training schedule for the month and make it a monthly priority. Training is not a sometimes activity. It’s an everyday requirement.

Set goals for appointments and make action plans to reach those goals as a dealership. This requires goals and action plans for each sales person as to their activities to set daily appointments. Strive for and monitor appointments and watch your sales increase.

Every sales person should be coached daily in a one-on-one session. Set a game plan for who does this, when they do it and the expected results. Items covered in those sessions should be their sales pace in relation to their goals and their percentage of success for total seen contacts, demos, write-ups, closed and deliveries. Those items should be monitored for both yesterday’s traffic and month-to-date totals. Each sales person should have a day planner. The sales people should be required to have a plan for their day that is broken down into an hourly focus. To-do lists and follow-up systems should be reviewed for both sold and unsold customers. Review yesterday’s traffic for each sales person, walk back through what happened and listen for clues that would show breakdowns in their sale process. These activities alone can increase your dealership’s sales 20 percent.

To make more money, each morning the managers hold a save-a-deal meeting in the F&I office to review yesterday’s sold and unsold traffic. All deals in F&I should be reviewed. Review approvals to see if they have been delivered and if not, why? If delivered, have they been booked out and turned to the office? Review finance turndowns for reasons why and any possibilities to approve those deals. Review dealer trades and the status of those deals. Review heat sheets and contracts in transit for deals not funded and deals that have missing items, such as titles, etc.

It takes increased effort and focus to improve your sales 20 percent. Many dealers just increase their advertising in hopes of increasing sales, and in turn, make their sales people traffic junkies. The percentage of gain in bottom line and long-term benefits is what you are seeking, not short-term fixes. The first step is to get rid of the notion, that there are good and bad months. You either have good or bad goals, game plans, actions and reviews of actions. Good or bad months are directly attributed to those items and are not luck.

"Your Attitude Determines Your Altitude." 

Once upon a time a strong wood-cutter asked a timber merchant for a job. The timber merchant was happy to oblige. The pay was good and so were the work-conditions. Therefore, the wood-cutter was determined to do his best.

The timber merchant presented the wood-cutter with an axe and showed him where to work. The first day, the wood-cutter brought eighteen trees.

"Congratulations!" the boss said. "Go on working like that."

Motivated by the boss's words, the wood-cutter tried harder the next day, but he could cut down only fifteen trees. The third day he tried even harder but cut down only ten trees. Day after day, he brought fewer and fewer trees. "I must be losing my strength," the wood-cutter thought. He went to the timber merchant and apologized, saying that he could not understand what was going on. "When was the last time you sharpened your saw?" the timber merchant asked. "Sharpened ? I have had no time to sharpen my saw. I have been busy trying to cut trees," said the wood-cutter.

This story can relate to us in our industry through a number of ways. Are we too busy selling cars that we never have time to personally sharpen our skills in life. If you never take the time to do this, you will find yourself beginning to burn out. If you never take the necessary time to sharpen your skills and yourself you will have nothing in the reserve to give out.

Here are some ways to sharpen your skills:

1. Visit Websites That Will Support & Train You

Find sites that assist you as a dealer to help arm you with training, resources, and relevant practices to apply to your daily life in the dealership. Automotive Digital Training

2. Find Industry Current Sales Professional Trainers

This industry is changing all the time. We should never think we know all there is to this business no matter how long we have or haven't been in it. Search the web and look for reviews regarding the different trainers that are out there. Also contact other friends in the business and see the results that the trainer delivered to the store after they left. Dealer Synergy

3. Go To Conferences & Seminars

Attend conferences and seminars that will help you in the area of time management, processes, sales training and people skills. These are so valuable for your business and life in general. Franklin Covey, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Internet Sales 20 Group

4. Sign Up For Webinars, Newsletters and Industry Emails

Go to different industry websites like AutomotiveInternetSales.Com, KBB.Com, Edmunds.Com, WeWorkForYou.Com, AutoMotiveNews.Com, Dealerelite.com, DealerRefresh.Com and sites like these to stay current on what's happening in the industry.

5. Continually Keep A Good Attitude

Your attitude is your posture, your mindset and your state of being. It can be seen on your face, in your words and how you respond and act towards others. Before talking with a customer make sure you do a check up from the neck up before you take the next up. Stay positive and keep a good attitude. Your attitude will ultimately determine your altitude. In other words, your attitude determines how high you go.

I trust this helped and if you need to contact me please don't hesitate. Be blessed!

I was invited to be a guest lecturer for an entrepreneur class at the University of Cincinnati. In the question-and-answer portion of the program, the professor asked me to sum up what I felt was the most important message I could stress to the class. My reply was one word – ACTION.

At a sales seminar I was giving, I was going over low- to no-cost marketing strategies designed to increase leads for sales people. At the first break after the marketing section, one of the sales people in attendance who had fl own across the country to attend, got on the phone and called a list vendor I had suggested during the class. Before the break was over, he purchased a large list for a small cost, created an outline and had begun to write the letter based upon proven copy writing techniques and marketing strategies. Afterward he was able to express the value of the campaign to the dealership management and they agreed to cover his costs of his campaign.

At the end of the day, I was having a conversation with the promoter of my seminar and I asked him how many people would take action on that one idea. His answer was few, if any, other than the one sales person. He asked me why I thought that was the case, and my answer was simple and scary – I didn’t know.

From my days as a general manager and leader of people in dealerships to my now many years of training, consulting and sharing with people in dealerships all over the world, I have constantly been stumped by the lack of action by the masses. The truth is indisputable that a small minority will move through their fears and excuses and begin to take action on the necessary steps for success.

In the last few years, I have begun to unlock and share some of the secrets to taking action and achieving success. Unfortunately, even when I share these ideas and suggest simple steps that can guarantee massive self-improvement and eventual success, I know that most people are comfortable being comfortable. Even when that means being comfortable with below-average results. Is my statement negative or just recognition of reality?

Successful people create their own reality. Most people who would take the time to read articles like this are part of the minority of action-takers. For your action takers, let me share just a few ideas on action, the reasons for a lack of it and some corrective measures.

1. Write down the first 20 ideas and teachings that you learned about money. Did you hear these typical messages? “What do you think we are, rich?” “Money doesn’t grow on trees.” “We can’t afford that.” “Money is the root of all evil.” You are more influenced by early learning than you might believe. Many ideas and messages you hear from TV, teachers and even parents are negative and rooted in scarcity. The root of the word scarcity is scare. When was the last time you saw a movie or TV program in which the rich guy was the good guy?

2. Are you clear in your goal of what you desire? Have you written it down? Less than 5 percent of people will ever write their goals and begin to focus on their desires and action plans to get there. Clarity of thought creates questions that bring answers.

3. When you write a goal, you are making a conscious choice. Your actions, however, are often directed by your subconscious messages. Often the goals you have chosen with your conscious thought and the actions you take directed by your subconscious are in direct conflict and opposition. This is why at times you can feel such an enormous state of struggle. The only way to get past the struggle and create positive action is to remove the negative and opposing messages and images in your subconscious. When you write your goals, what are the limiting thoughts and feelings that pop up that are implanted in your subconscious? Once you have identified them, rewrite them to erase the limits and negatives. Create a conscious and subconscious that acts in unison.

4. Write down your top five largest fears. Fear can be described as false evidence appearing real. We can escalate fears or goals to reality. Both are simply a choice. What are your most dominant thoughts? Do your thoughts lean toward action, achievement, success and abundance or toward lack, scarcity and fear?

Only through action can you make the necessary mistakes that will lead to success, rewards and happiness. Nobody has ever sat and watched their way to success.

I found this study about how consumers shop for cars from the AutoTrader Dealer Learning Center www.weworkforyou.com. Nearly a quarter of all new- and used-car buyers use multiple devices to shop. Indeed, there's a correlation between everyday device usage and shopping behavior, and it's a trend that's becoming a way of life. In fact, AutoTrader.com expects that 52% of all car shopping will be done on multiple devices within the next 5 years.This study reveals how consumers use their devices, and what you can do to ensure that you're delivering the kind of shopping experience they expect.

Click below to see the Entire Study:

AutoTrader.com Multi-Device Car Shopping Study: How Consumers Shop for Cars

Have you made the commitment that automotive sales is your career choice? Unless you commit, it’s impossible that you will take the necessary steps to create the business you desire. Long-term thinking in addition to short-term goals are keys to continued success.

When you first enter into a sales position, 80 percent of your time is spent acquiring customers and 20 percent of your time is spent maintaining those customers. Eventually, with the right efforts, that model should be reversed. Eighty percent of your time should be spent maintaining your customers and 20 percent to acquire new customers.

You face a paradox of time management in building your business. The paradox is that you must work in the business and also work on the business. When you are face-to-face with customers you are working in the business but no matter how busy you are, you must find time each day to work on the business, as well. Working on the business includes marketing, prospecting, follow-up, networking, delegating, automating etc.

Insurance sales people, real estate sales people and sales people from many industries continually think and act on building their business. However, in the auto industry the majority of sales people seem addicted walk-in traffic. Eliminating this addiction is the key to long-term success.

Lead Generation = Dollar Creation. Begin to build multiple streams of leads by building a marketing web. List every way you presently acquire leads such as walk-ins, phone prospects, be-backs, referrals, repeat customers. Then begin to list new ways you could begin to acquire leads and how you can strengthen or add to your existing methods of generating leads.

Do you presently have a software program for following and managing your leads? Not the dealerships program, your program? Don’t trust anybody or anything to manage your most important resource – your customers.

Secondly, do you have a set follow up strategy? How often will you follow up? How will you follow up. What rewards will you give, and what special offers will you provide to bring them in for service? That creates the Law of Familiarity and Obligation leading to repeats and referrals.

E-mail follow-up and marketing is essential. Automate your follow-up using technology. E-mail, Autoresponder e-mail and Sequential Autoresponder e-mail are all ways to follow-up and add value that can be done while you sleep or on vacation. Video e-mail and personalization are keys to making a connection, removing the impersonal nature of e-mail and adding the wow factor.

All sales people need their own personal Web site. The site should include sign-up forms that collect e-mail addresses. The site should be personalized with your picture, family picture, your own personal story, rewards for visiting the site and helpful information for the customer. Your Web site should include an audio introduction link.

Do your business cards look like 99 percent of others sales people’s business cards? Don’t use a picture of a car, use your picture or caricature. Business cards also need the sales person’s Web site, e-mail address and slogan. Put a call to action on your cards for the customer to come see you, call you or visit your Web site.

Maximize traffic by creating a be-back CD. Create a CD that you give each customer who does not buy and invite them to play it on the way home. The CD should include information about you, your dealership and product that would benefit the customer. Include testimonials and a reward for the customer if they come see you.

Create coupon swaps with businesses around you. Visit a local restaurant and offer to build their business on their worst traffic day of the week for free. You can build their business by creating a coupon with an offer they approve and then pass these coupons out at work from the cashier, receptionist, and all departments to every customer who enters your dealership. In return ask that the restaurant pass out coupons from you approved by the dealership with a special offer to come see you.

Once you start the marketing web it will grow and take on a life of its own. Building a business first requires long-term thinking and a commitment to the industry as a career. When you commit, you have already created a business, only its shape is unfinished.

The first step in advancing the productivity of your staff in using the phones is a better understanding in the importance that the telephone can play and how it affects your business. Often a lack of the right attitude is displayed in the treatment towards the receptionist position. The receptionist is usually hired without any guidelines that would be used to hire for an important position. In your dealership do you have personality profiles, set interview questions and guidelines to hire an exceptional receptionist? Do you have a formalized training process and performance based pay? Often the receptionist is the lowest paid person in the dealership but is often the person who influences the customer first. Why not pay the receptionist a bonus based upon various criteria such as average time to answer a call, average hold time for a customer etc.

The sales people also need training on the understanding of the importance of both inbound and outbound sales calls and how this can affect their incomes. A sales person can sit around all day waiting for someone to come in, but they can take incoming sales calls and treat them like they are not important. The average dealership will spend a fortune on advertising to get people to call and come in but not pay attention to what is happening when the customers call or come in. Call a competitor or call your own dealership and mystery shop a few times and ask yourself if you are impressed with the results.

Let’s talk about a few things to improve the importance of sales performance in utilizing the phone. First of all, the dealership needs a formal call tracking process. Many dealerships know their floor traffic but not their phone traffic. Why? This sends the wrong message. You must quantify to qualify, meaning you must know where you are at to understand where you would like to go. Have the receptionist use a call tracking sheet that they are trained to use. Example: On an incoming sales call, the receptionist should positively remark that they will be happy to get a sales representative for the customer and then acquire the customers name by asking “and your name is?” The receptionist can then list the customers name on the log with the date and time received and page for a sales representative. Now the receptionist can write their name on the tracking sheet as well. The sales representative is responsible for putting remarks of the results on the log after the sale. The above process can be altered according to the technology you have established in your dealership. Managers can now include a review of the phone traffic in their daily one on one coaching sessions.

Sales people must have a formal tracking sheet they use when taking calls to assist them in remembering the right steps and collecting the information necessary. The first step in changing the view of a sales person towards the phone is to show them how easy it is to pick up several units each month just by having better phone skills. The Internet has increased the number of sale calls and the quality of customer calling.

Sales people must be taught new techniques that match the marketplace of today. Sales people have been taught the importance of getting name and number so much so that they are jeopardizing the appointment and scaring customers away. Gone are the days of telling the customer you are out in service and not at your desk so you would like to get their name and number and call them back or that the customer just needs to come on down so you can show them in person. Customers are looking for ways to dismiss you as an option and outdated phone skills will make that happen quickly.

Review the telephone operations in your dealership and take steps to increase the skills of everyone using the phone. Better phone process and skills uncover hidden wealth.

What is hidden wealth? Hidden wealth is an unused, dormant or under utilized part of your business that contains great value. All businesses have at least one hidden wealth. Even the best businesses in the world contain hidden wealth. The key is to determine your hidden wealth and begin to mine the potential gold that lies therein. All businesses are different. Each business should require their leaders to conduct a concerted effort of introspection and egoless honesty to determine what their hidden wealth may be. One way to begin is to ask deeper and better questions about your business than you ever have before. What is the story of your dealership? How is that unique and more importantly, how does that benefit the customer?

Begin a journey to determine what your business does best. What does your business do better than anyone else? Then ask yourself these questions about that one thing, “How”, “Why” and how can I prove it to my customers in a way that benefits and motivates them? Once you determine the one thing that you do better than anyone else, then ask your customers why they think you do it best? See if what you feel and they feel are the same. If your business does something great but your customers don’t know, it won’t matter. If you customers don’t hold the same value in what you think you do great, it won’t matter. Better questions lead to better answers and better businesses. Ask yourself, what do you have that others don’t have? What do you have that is better than what others may have? Is your sales staff better? Is your service better? Is your location better? Is your inventory better? Is your pricing structure better? Is your process quicker? Is your facility better? When you determine what you have that’s better, you must ask yourself, why is that true?

You must also ask yourself, how can I explain what we do and how it’s better in very specific terms that the customer cares about? You can’t say you have a large inventory. It doesn’t mean anything. But you can say you have 500 vehicles worth ten million dollars in inventory and that no one comes close to your selection and because of that it takes the hassle out of shopping. What ever you decide is your strong point, ask yourself this question, “Who cares?” If you can’t tell your customer in a way that benefits them, they won’t care.

Some dealerships have a large database of untapped business. Some dealerships have a great location with many possible synergies with other local businesses that could be explored. Many dealerships have community relationships that could be utilized. Many dealerships have talented but untrained people. Many dealerships are either sending the wrong or mixed message to the market or sending a good message to the wrong market or utilizing either the wrong medium or not enough mediums to reach their market.

Each dealership has assets that contain vast riches if they can be explored and tapped.

http://www.dealersynergy.com 856-546-2440
Internet Director / Internet Sales Manager Responsibilities Part 4 - Automotive Sales - Car Sales

To evaluate means to ascertain or fix the value or worth of something. To examine and judge carefully. Another word for evaluate is appraise. Now that's a word I'm familiar with. Appraise! In the car industry we use this word when we appraise or evaluate a customer's trade. What are we doing when we do this? Besides making our customers upset about what we appraise their trade for, we are examining, evaluating and looking over the trade carefully to see the condition, mileage and real time value of it. The appraisal shows us the trade as it is valued in the condition we see it. Now, if the trade has a dent in one door, is over mileage 20,000 miles and has a cracked bumper, the value of the trade will decrease. There will be deductions made for each area. But if the bumper is not cracked, the mileage is under by 5,000 miles and there are no dents at all on the vehicle the trade will be valued higher. The appraisal reveals to the one evaluating it and the one who owns it not only the actual value of it in the condition it's in now but also the reasons why it's worth what it's worth.

We do appraisals for people every day, but what about ourselves? Now, you might be thinking, "I don't need to do an appraisal on my car because I'm not trading it in!" But I'm not talking about appraising your car. I'm talking about you. Have you done an appraisal on yourself lately? Have you pulled out the "Self Appraisal" and took time to evaluate yourself? What about the "Life Appraisal"? Have you taken time to evaluate, examine and look over your life to see the condition, mileage and real time value of it? Have we been so busy working and evaluating things for everybody else that we've let ourselves' fall apart and we haven't had time to take proper care of us? Take the time to evaluate yourself today so you can fix and improve the areas that have caused you to lose self-value in your life. Here is a sample "Self Appraisal" for you to do right now:

This is just a sample but I trust you get the idea of how you can use this to evaluate your present reality whatever it may be. There are many other types of appraisals you can put together also. Here are a few more to consider:

• Leadership Appraisal
• Work Appraisal
• Emotional Appraisal
• Physical Appraisal
• Spiritual Appraisal
• Social Appraisal
• Management Appraisal
• Sales Appraisal

Now if we were to just do an evaluation and leave it at that than we'd all be depressed and in pretty bad shape. However, the evaluation is necessary to expose to us our current condition right now so we can fix, correct and adjust the value of what we see. This is where education comes in. 

Education

To educate means to provide with knowledge or training in a particular area or for a particular purpose. Once we have done our evaluation now we can fix, correct and adjust the necessary areas we have discovered.

"The great aim of education is not knowledge but action."

Knowledge + Corresponding Action = Education. When we are truly educated in an area we are no longer ignorant in that area. We have the know how to fix, change and adjust ourselves into a higher place than where we were without our education. This is called elevation.

Elevation

Evaluation + Education = Elevation. This is always the result of someone who practices these principles in any area of life. Whether it is the workplace, the sale, the close, life, leadership, management, relationships or anything else this formula will hold true.

As you focus on making it a habit to evaluate and educate yourself in every area of life you will experience being elevated to new positions, promotions and higher levels of responsibility. 

http://www.automotivedigitaltraining.com 856-546-2440
Internet Director - Internet Sales Manager - Responsibilities Part 2 - Automotive Internet Sales

So as you head into the weekend, are you setting the stage to be successful? Are we reaching people how they like to be naturally reached? When you think about the most common and effective ways people communicate today; text messaging, social media, social media messaging and cell phones; are we ignoring these avenues only focusing on sending emails & calling home and work numbers only or are we engaging people the way they naturally communicate. Here is a friendly reminder for you to get ready for the weekend so you can sell more cars, more profitably, more often!

You are who you decide to be at any given moment. It does not take money, a degree, a certain age, a certain appearance, tons of experience, knowing the right people, past success or any other qualifying factor that you may be currently using as a subconscious roadblock to your desired success. Your belief system creates your results both past and present. If your current belief system is not what it should be to support your success, you must fake it, till you make it.

If you currently don’t appear to be on the path that will create the level of success in the form you desire, you must begin to identify the mental programming that is limiting your success before you can change your resulting limiting actions.

You must pay close attention to your inner dialogue when you write goals or have thoughts about anything you desire. When thinking of your goals, if you repeatedly think of the specific reasons of how and why your goal may be hard to obtain, you are creating the “When-Then Syndrome.” Your subconscious identifies your current programming that tells you that for X to occur you must first have Y. If that is the case, your current mental programming is limited and will not allow you to break through your current barriers to further success.

Write down the first twenty mental images or messages you heard or were taught about money. When closely examined, most of the images and messages remembered will be limited, negative, and fear based. Those negative messages and images have taken a life of their own and have been accepted in your subconscious as absolute truths. To increase money, you must identify your current limiting messages and rewrite the messages to create accepted new truths.

Every person you come into contact with tries to define you based upon his/her own thoughts and beliefs. Your workplace is full of people with their own limiting mental programming that want to define you in a way that makes them feel better about themselves. People will create images such as “you are just lucky” or “the favorite of the boss” or “a weak sales person”. So often you act in your work environment in a role based upon the images and messages accepted by your subconscious. Unfortunately, your subconscious accepts all images and messages without filtering. However, you can overwhelm the negative messages with your own positive messages. Your conscious mind will choose and react to the strongest messages being given to it. Don’t allow others to create your destiny based upon their own limited beliefs.

Your subconscious can act as an automatic responder in a positive form just as it can negatively. You must bombard your mind with positive and repetitive images for your conscious mind to react with positive messages. Read and listen to the material that will support you in creating the images you desire, while reducing and eliminating the negative influences you encounter from relatives, co-workers, and the news. You create your own reality. It’s your responsibility to choose the right sources of information to saturate your brain.

To start manifesting your desires, you must become clear on your goals. Write what you want in present tense using vivid details of your emotions and thoughts at the time of obtaining those goals. The repetitive conditioning of your subconscious with the imagery you have created will begin to grow just as your muscles grow by the repetitive action of lifting weights. Soon your positive imagery will be so strong that your belief system will accept this as reality before it has ever transpired as reality. There will be no difference between your chosen reality and your current state. Your belief system will accept each step and each day as a part of your path to success. Dare today to choose what you desire and the actions that support those desires.

Thoreau once said, “Things don’t change, people do.” If things are to happen, you must make them happen. Good people and businesses always make things happen. Let’s look at the essential rules of making things happen.

Rule 1 – Always have a CEO attitude – You must start by taking responsibility for all things both good and bad. Accept that your company signs your check and you fill in the numbers. Your own personal philosophy, which is determined strictly by choice and your own free will, determines your first step in success or failure.

Rule 2 – Every business operates two businesses: People and Marketing. If you are great with people but don’t have people to speak to, you fail. Marketing has become essential to all sales people.

Rule 3 – Lead generation equals dollar creation – The more leads you generate the more money you earn. How do you create leads? Develop a marketing web – Draw a small circle on a piece of paper and put the name of your company in the middle. (Your company, not the one that signs your check). Now draw lines in different directions that look like spokes coming out of the circle. Label each spoke as a source of leads. (Example: walk-ins, incoming sales calls, referrals, repeats, be-backs, service, networking, prospecting etc.) Notice that each spoke can have multiple spokes that sprout from it.

Rule 4 – Add value first – The perception of price is always in relation to the value perceived. Perception is reality for your customers. What do they perceive to be the value in your offer, product, you, or the business? To create value you must TLC—think like a customer--and then take action.

Rule 5 – Give HFG - hope for gain. People always want something better than what they have. It’s human nature. Hope for Gain follows the pleasure versus pain rule of life. People act to either find pleasure or avoid pain. Hope for gain moves people toward pleasure.

Rule 6 – Offer risk reversal - Take away your customers’ risk and it creates urgency in the eyes of the customer. You must lower the barriers of entry that discourage customer traffic. Risk reversal allows your customer to avoid pain.

Rule 7 – Provide leverage – Hope for gain and risk reversal provide leverage for people to take action. You must always be thinking of ways that your customers can get excited about contacting you now. Urgency, emotions, social proof, incentives and testimonials all provide leverage.

Rule 8 – Facts tell; stories sell- Stories add the most important element of sales and marketing. People think in pictures. People relate to stories that they can see themselves in the staring role. Make them the star. People will avoid advertising and marketing on purpose, but they will react to a good story.

Rule 9 – Utilize the law of obligation and reciprocation – In sales or marketing, you must be willing to add the wow factor. You must be willing to give people extra service, extra offers, extra emotion, extra humor, extra enthusiasm... extra everything, until the customer feels an overwhelming obligation to give you a chance.

Now let me give you some examples to create leads using these rules.

1. – Record a two to five minute be-back CD that you give to each customer who doesn’t buy a car and ask them to play it on the way home. On the CD, thank the customer for the opportunity, tell them your SDP--specific defining proposition- to get them excited about doing business with you and purchase your product.

2. Nice trade call – Every time you take a nice trade-in, call at least 20 of your sold customers and let them in on a secret. Let them know about the beautiful vehicle you now have and how it hasn’t been put all the way though service and clean-up yet. Let them know you’re calling a few of your preferred customers about the newly acquired vehicle. If they don’t want it, ask them who might be.

3. Create affiliations – Who does business with whom you want to do business? Always think of how you can add value to them first. What can you do to help their business? Offer coupon swaps. Offer to create a coupon for a two for one special at their restaurant. In return, ask that they distribute a coupon from your business.

4. Offer a free program – Offer a thirty minute program to some of the varying associations on how to buy a vehicle. Take brochures with coupons offering value that would make them take action to receive something of value from you. Create a lead first.

5. Postcards – Postcards are cheap. You can send to targeted markets, with a targeted message, such as, “Employee Purchase Program – Buy a vehicle for what I would pay!”

6. Val-Packs – Postcard advertising made even cheaper.

7. Orphan Owners - Call every orphan owner and offer them something of value. If you offer all the clients who’ve not been contacted the chance to do business with you, a large percentage will consider doing more business with you in the future.

8. FSBO call – Call everyone selling your brand of vehicle and ask them about their trade. Offer to get an appraisal and to help them purchase their new vehicle.

9. Create a Free Special Report – “How to buy a vehicle” – You could combine your postcards with this message and once you’ve created a lead through their response by fax, phone or email, you can follow up after sending your special report.

10. Create your own web site – Put your web site address on all your business cards, mailing, materials etc. Put your picture, biography, special offers, recipe of the month, etc. Make people go to your site for a special offer.

John Wooden said, “Don’t let what you can’t do interfere with what you can do.” You can’t change economies, but you can work daily to change your actions. A little extra effort put forth everyday will help build a successful business. Make it happen!

Sales people provide life for all companies. If everything starts with sales people, it only makes sense to make sure that you are recruiting the best potential sales people

Tip 1: Recruit from want, not need. Make recruiting an everyday activity, don’t wait until you need it.

Tip 2: Have a strategy to recruit people all the time. To orchestrate a successful ongoing recruiting program you must first have a game-plan. Plan and develop a flow chart of your desired results. Write down the obvious. You must know why you are looking to create a recruiting strategy. “When the why gets strong, the how gets easy.”

Tip 3: Know who is in charge of recruiting and his/her qualifications. People must be educated on creating and orchestrating a strategy that works. Don’t leave the who and how to chance.

Tip 4: Newspaper ads – the Sunday paper is full of ads for sales people. If you plan on using help wanted ads as part of your recruiting, you must write the ad with the mindset of the good sales person you are looking to recruit. Use two age-old formulas: WIIFM – “What’s in it for me?” and AIDA – “Attention, interest, desire and action” when creating your ads.

Tip 5: Try using several avenues to recruit such as full color newspaper inserts, business journal classifieds, a banner ad on your web site, local colleges, Internet job postings, radio ads, military bases, job fairs and employee referral program. Never leave the vitality of your company to just one avenue of marketing. You must build a marketing web that has many marketing branches to attract good people.

Tip 6: Have an “ideal employee” profile. Know who you are looking for before you find them. When you’ve developed a precise guideline of what the perfect recruit looks like, you can begin your process with that in mind and then remove the emotions involved in interviewing.

Tip 7: Payment plans satisfy base-level needs of the potential recruit. Pay all recruits during training and guarantee them a living wage during their learning curve. Many potentially good sales people are not given the chance to ever enter the business. Lower the barriers of entry in order to find the best people.

Tip 8: Have at least 50 written interview questions. Don’t you show a sales person how to profile customers? Preparation is key to a good interview. Be ready with sub questions to the interviewee’s answers that allow him or her to elaborate and communicate in detail. A good interview will follow the 80/20-rule and allow the recruit to speak 80% of the time.

Tip 9: Test and profile a potential sales person. Anyone who has interviewed people has come across a great interview, horrible employee. A good recruiting strategy must utilize many tools to reduce the emotion and help to make a more logical and quantitative selection. There are many tools today that can be used to gauge the personality, sales aptitude, emotional IQ, intelligence and just about anything else you want to know about a possible future employee

Tip 10: Don’t hire people based only upon resumes. If you want to hire good sales people, recruit and hire based on talent and attitude and teach them the necessary skills.

Recruiting and hiring effectively is a continuous process that is both part science and being creative. Having a consistent plan will make your recruiting a success.

As we approach the end of this month let's finish strong and remember to:

1. Follow through and follow up with any leads that you haven't reached within the past 30 days.

2. Look over any deals you were working that came in this month that you weren't able to put together for some reason or another and bring it back to your desk and see if there's any life left in it. I always would say to my team, "You can't lose something that you don't have! So you have nothing to lose by working further and asking if there's anything else that can be done both to the customer and your management team!" Ask your manager these questions:

• What else can we do to make this deal happen?
• How can we be creative to find a way to make this come together?
• Is there any money left in the trade?
• Can we extend terms?
• Can we show them the option of a new or newer vehicle instead?
• How about a lease instead of a buy?
• How about a one pay lease instead of them paying cash?
• What if they put down more money?
• If they had a cosigner can we make this happen?
• If we could make the first payment start in 45 days instead of 30 days, could that help?
• Can we include an extended service contract to sweeten the deal?

3. Managers get involved and follow up with the people who were in your store but didn't buy this month. See if there's anything you can do to influence moving this forward.

4. Managers confirm any set appointments for the weekend. This is what my one GM had said, "Puts Glue On Them!" This helps the appointment stick more when a manager confirms it.

5. Send out a blast email to all your active leads inviting them in for an end of the month Sale! Make it seem as if it's exclusive to them and time sensitive.

I trust this will help you in finishing your month with a strong finish!

Being in the business for my short time, I've realized this one thing. Most dealerships are doing the same thing. Now I didn't say, "ALL Dealerships are doing the same thing" because I realize that there are some that really have set themselves apart from the masses of mediocrity. However, most dealerships are working to be the best of the worst instead of creating a different culture, a different atmosphere and a different experience to the customer and employee. 

I heard a dealer principal say, "Our problem as a dealer, is that we set our standards based off of what other dealers are doing, rather than setting a higher standard to doing what's right and different whether other dealers are doing it or not! If we keep using each other as a standard, then we will only ever achieve being the best of the worst!"

I love walking into dealerships that could care less about what the other guy is doing, because they are so focused on doing what they're supposed to be doing that they have no time to WASTE TIME watching the other guys. When you know your purpose and when you are attacking your mission to serve your community and client base, then you are focused and driven to reach your targets.

When you're watching everyone else, all you're doing is simply reading the temperature. You're never setting the tone or adjusting the thermostat to set the temperature because you're too busy studying, examining and watching the thermometer go up and down based on the market and the competition. 

You can't change the temperature of other stores that you are not in, but you can certainly change the temperature of the store that you're in. You can make a difference in how your customer base and fellow employees experience life in your store. Here are some easy ways to adjust the thermostat and change the atmosphere and culture of your customer employee experience:

1. Evaluate your current processes. 

You can do this by asking some very simple questions regarding them. 

• How are they working?
• Are they too complicated?
• Can we adjust them in any way to make the overall experience BETTER?
• What do the employees have to say regarding them? 
• What do the customers think about them?
• Are they in line with our mission as a company?
• Are we creating an atmosphere to cultivate customer loyalty? 
• If we've been here for 5 or more years and are not seeing a large number of repeat and referral business, then what are we doing wrong and how can we fix it and make it right?
• What does our reputation look like online? 
• How do people view their experience with our store?
• How do employees view the customer experience at the store?

If employees and their family members are not buying vehicles from your store for other reasons beyond not liking the inventory make or models on the ground then there may be some digging that needs to be done. I can come up with a bunch more but I'm sure this helps get the juices flowing.

2. Educate & Train Your Team.

Dealers spend thousands of dollars a month to beautify the grounds, the buildings, the appearance of their inventory, to advertise their inventory and bring as many people as possible to come in online, on the phone or on the lot and fail to spend any further money on training, educating and building their sales team. Many times the people are the right people for the job, but they just haven't been PROPERLY trained. I emphasize PROPERLY because if you've been in the car business for any amount of time training has always been a majority problem for dealers. The greatest asset to your store is YOU! Without you and the people you have serving and selling the products, the products can't be sold. So instead of having them shadow other salesmen, and instead of having them watch VCR tapes of training from 20 years ago, invest in a current up to date trainer and training materials to help aid them in becoming a success in their positions. As they're successful, you'll be successful! 

3. Lead From Your Feet Not Your Seat

The success or failure of a department and store falls on the leadership. Don’t hide behind your computers in your office counting beans, analyzing charts, numbers and averages all day. Get up and touch the people who are working with and for your success. Get involved. Ask questions. Interact. See and hear what your people are saying and what’s being said. Stay touchable, accessible and seen. 

I trust this will help you. Have a great finish to the end of your month and if you'd like to contact me please do so at any time. Have a great day!