As most dealerships’ new consumer traffic increases with the season, I have found myself spending time working with dealerships on the flawless execution of fundamentals.
Spring training is necessary for a professional baseball player to be sharp once the season opens. How many opportunities are lost for those who have to get into shape as the season starts? Fundamentals put people in a position to execute all the skills each individual has.
As I was doing fundamentals training with a series of Principle Centered Selling lessons, I noticed a recurring and unsurprising theme. People execute to their level of understanding. Foundations are not just base techniques and processes. Understanding why these were put in place in the first place is another foundation.
Dealership growth starts with culture encouraging development. Principles are the next step in improving a business. Principles guide our behaviors when no one else is looking.
When your salespeople are out on the sales lot, their words and actions follow their most comfortable actions. Their guiding principles are what salespeople understand and execute. How do we know what their words and actions are and the impact they will have?
As I have covered in previous articles, principles are written to enable salespeople to get paid what they are worth. They can be emphasized through training, focusing on the principles guiding their decisions. Principle-centered decisions produce success. If sales professionals are principle-centered, everything they do and say will lead to a positive customer buying experience and, ultimately, a deal.
Their sales team’s productivity determines managers’ and owners’ existence. Recognizing principles in play enables leadership to identify top performer traits and characteristics quickly. Selling today in this market is different, and selling will change in the future. Principles hold no matter the marketplace conditions or who is performing the work.
Training sales staff on principles is essential. The training helps everyone have the same road map, game plan or job description when navigating consumers’ experiences. When training on principles, ask everyone to share an example. Ask everyone whether they believe in the principle at the training session’s conclusion. Asking the questions will enable everyone to understand and hold each other accountable while building the type of dealership where they want to work.
A couple of examples of these principles are:
Principle 22: No One Leaves Unhappy
We used to say, “If a client leaves your business unhappy, they will tell 10 friends, who will tell ten more friends. In a month, over 100 people will be unhappy with your business.”
The message was right, but as time went by, technology made this much more dramatic. If a client leaves unhappy today, 3,000 of their friends may know their problems with you in less than five minutes.
A good rule to follow would be to put a price or value on what it costs to bring a client into your business. For example, take the amount of money that you make and divide it by the number of clients who purchase. If you find that you pay $500 per RV sold in advertising, you may not want that client to leave and infect your right to bring others into your business. Fixing a negative reputation could double your advertising costs.
If you think of your client as a $500 opportunity, you must take appropriate actions before the client leaves unhappy. As a rule, if you have tried to do everything you can to fix how an unhappy client feels without positive results, get help. Find another salesperson or manager who can identify and isolate the problem for immediate remediation. In this example, changing the outcome is a $1,000 swing in money, plus the immeasurable cost the unhappy clients leave with friends they infect.
Everyone in your store should easily buy off on this principle and help each other reinforce it. The negative review cost is beyond individual measure but hurts everyone’s opportunities.
Let’s make sure we execute a principle-centered process well enough so no consumer leaves unhappy.
Principle 14: Because of Our Clients We Exist
If you are in the service industry, you are in sales. Whatever your dealership role is, without your clients, you would not have a job.
A young store manager once posted a large sign on his door that read: Because of our clients, we exist!
To turn the phrase into an effective business culture, every person who entered his office was told to read the phrase out loud.
The readings changed the way the ensuing conversations unfolded. Employees never complained about a client, ever! Everyone knew, clearly, that if they did not have clients, they had no job.
The principle’s simplicity is critical to implementing a company culture shift. An analogy would be an American Lung Association slogan: “When you can’t breathe, nothing else matters!”
The slogan is a simple statement requiring no explanation.
Once your business culture accepts this principle, you can move on to implementation.
The next direction is to focus on what our clients need from us. Because our clients have thought about owning our products for some time, shopped online and possibly visited the competition, their goal is to own and use the RV. Again, their goal is not to shop and not to buy but to own and use the product. Thus, our goal is to help our clients get out camping. Let’s keep this principle short and sweet.
By understanding every technique to help our consumers reach their goals, salespeople easily understand and execute the methods. A process cannot be put in place that violates this understanding if we all are on the same page: Because of our clients, we exist!
For a more thorough explanation or examples of principles, you can read some of my RV News articles online at www.rvnews.com. You also can pick up the book “Principle Centered Selling” by Randy Sobel.
With continued work on principles, dealerships can expect better process execution. Adults need to know why they are doing something if you want them to follow through.
Dealership growth starts with culture encouraging development. Principles are the next step in improving business. With that foundation, we can move the goal continuously forward, and the team can continue to rise to the occasion.
Jered Sobel serves as president of Sobel University, a company providing training for management, salespeople and consumers across North America. He is best known for designing the industry-standard onboarding sales training manual and co-authoring the consumer guide to purchasing an RV. Among his previous work experiences are roles as a dealership salesperson, a general sales manager and hiring dealer staff.
