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Every place I travel I keep getting asked the same question, “What is your best tip in Sales?”.  There is one great answer, STOP SELLING.

I encourage all my graduates to give their new title as Sales and Service Liaison at ……

If you surveyed all your clients entering the Dealership and asked them to choose one of these two:

A) I want to be Sold a car.

B) I want to be assisted with my needs.

Any guesses on the answers?  Of course, everyone is going to pick B.  We have to trust our prospective clients to choose us, not rely on aggressiveness to force a decision.  This puts a higher burden on our staff to exceed expectations, truly present real world value in our product, be there now and down the road for their clients, provide a clean maintained facility, and provide information in a straightforward manner.

Our staff have to stop worrying about whether or not they are selling a car right now, and focus on earning loyalty.  It takes just a few minutes to drop a bored service client at the mall, no time to take the call from the guy that bought a car last year that wants to buy another set of floor mats, seconds out of our day to greet the folks wandering around at 9 in the morning like they are here to buy a car even though they may only be in for service.

Every kindness, each show of appreciation for every person in the facility is another step towards staying loyal to the Dealer in the buying cycle.  Can all your Sales Staff look a prospective client in the eye and really say, “When you buy here, I will take care of you better than anyone else.”?  When they can say it, mean it, and live it you start Serving

Welcome all, as January is roaring to an end.  I recently attended a memorial for my Grandma, a feisty 95, and heard something, that upon reflection bears repeating.

My oldest and wisest cousin (he is going to have a big fat head when he reads this) stood up to talk about our Grandma, and said "It is in the doing.".  He went on to talk about many of the things we had done, and learned from our Grandma that we still carry as a bond today, most notably learning how to play Scrabble when we were little.

The memories of my Grandma touched me on that day, but my cousins statement has me thinking about many other areas of life as the days have rolled forward.  Most notably Dealership synergy and retaining Sales Consultants.

When a new Sales Consultant is hired, their view of this industry and consideration for working in your organization long term is established in the first few months.  It is based on availability of clients, earning potential, and a feeling of belonging to a team.  This feeling of belonging is created through the learning of the job, and how hands on the first few months are.  Sales Managers always wonder why Sales Consultants reach out to me, when we have only met for a few days.  It is because I am hands on, and embedding a sharing skill in their DNA.

A prime example is the dreaded snow removal.  For those of us in the Northeast it is grueling to clear off hundreds of cars, move them to plow, and know that business will be slow for that day.  As bad a task as this is there is an upside.  After the snow is cleared almost every Dealer buys pizza for everyone who froze their tail off outside.  While everyone is sitting around eating pizza, there are no stories of stealing clients, no complaining about a lack of customers, no issues with the Management, only stories of clearing snow.  Sales Consultants new and old talk about the worst storms, the times they cleared the lot the fastest, the client that came in and bought a car in the middle of a storm.  They are united in the doing.

It would be so easy to recreate this feeling in the beginning while training a walk around, or a service tour, greeting a client, etc...

We are all busy, there are reports, inventory, ads to write, meetings to go to, and deals to work.  In the middle of all that make the commitment to grow these new employees through doing.  They will stick with you through thick and thin.