A disease that every salesperson comes down with during his
or her career is called..."Expertise." When a salesperson
contracts a case of "expertise" they feel that they no
longer need to follow all of the steps or they feel that
they can side-step some of the steps, eliminate some of the
steps or maybe just work their own program all together.
If you ever get to a point where you feel that you are so
good that you "don't need to do it this way any more,"
that's when your sales and commissions will decline... Until
you are cured of your expertise. Remember when you were
brand new in the autosales industry, with excitement,
enthusiasm and eager to get started doing what you were
taught in training? The first month was probably one of not
knowing exactly what you were doing, working every customer
that you could get your hands on and most likely selling
several cars because you did everything by the rules and did
exactly what your manager told you to do. After a while, you
began to notice that all of the so called " veterans " were
not as busy and were not doing all the steps that you were.
Gradually, you began to lose sight of your standards and
began to look at these new "role models " and their methods
as the right way to do things. After all, they must be the
experts, they've been doing it longer than you have. The
truth is, they probably don't sell as many cars as you sold
your first month and with lower grosses as well. Exposing
yourself to any contagious disease always endangers your
well being unless you have taken preventive steps to insure
your immunity.
I. Establish your immediate and long-term goals and commit
to them daily.
II. Develop a plan to reach your goals
a. How many people must you talk to everyday to reach unit
and gross sales goals. b. Organize your efforts to attract
business from 4 necessary sources:
1. Walk ins 2. Referrals 3. Phone leads 4. Outside
prospecting - You develop discipline to place more
importance on success and motivation than poor work habits
and a " lazy " outlook.
III. Performance standards - establish and maintain your own
standards that relate to your goals; don't worry about what
others are doing or not doing. Above all, try to preserve
that feeling of being "new". Because when you're "green"
you're growing, when you're ripe you're almost "rotten".
When the sales team members feel that they are too smart and
start taking short cuts or there seems to be too many
excuses as to why a customer won't buy today, ask them the
following questions:
In addition to the road to the sale....
1. Did the customer feel comfortable? 2. Did you sell
yourself? 3. Did they want and desire the car? 4. Did you
over qualify? 5. How could you have made the deal right then
and there? 6. Did the customer taken mental ownership? 7.
Why should he have bought the car? 8. What were his buying
motives? 9. How could you have better served him?
If one of my sales people consistently felt the need to take
short cuts because they were too good to follow the road to
the sale, I'd have to help them out by freeing up their
future. You don't develop sales people by catering to their
perceived level of expertise.
Jim
PS. - The following message is from a friend of mine, Mr.
Paul Borgese. His content is excellent.
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Contact Jim Ziegler at 800.726.0510
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