From handshake to the desk, the average sales person today
has become a track star.
Over the years I have visited and interacted with more than
1000 new car franchised dealerships in almost every state in
the union. It really doesn't matter whether or not you are
talking about a domestic dealership or an import dealership,
a high-line store, or a Hyundai dealership the story is the
same. If you put a stopwatch on a sales person the moment
they first shake hands with a customer, they will usually
show up at the sale desk trying to work figures in less than
twenty minutes after they first met and greeted the
customer.
A quality sales process involves building a relationship
with the customer and with the car, as well as presenting
the dealership to the customer. An automobile isn't a
commodity...we're not talking about a can of Folgers coffee
on the shelf here.
An automobile is 15,000 component parts made of plastic,
metal, rubber, glass, and space age materials. Some of these
parts are moving at incredible speeds in excess of ten
thousand RPMs with less than three one-thousandths of an
inch of clearance and less than one one-thousandth of an
inch of lubrication in the presence of high levels of heat.
All of these parts are constantly rubbing and abrading
against each other. Your new automobile is a complex, high
technology machine with more than 100 times the computer
memory that first put Apollo 11 on the moon.
Personally, I couldn't conceive of anyone who would want to
purchase a new automobile without a complete, quality
presentation. In my travels, the highest commissioned sales
people with the best CSI surveys were always those who gave
their customers the best quality presentation of the
product.
Unfortunately, today's sales person often skips the
presentation stage of the sale. I can say with absolute
certainty that most sales people never present the features
and the benefits to the customer.
The presentation is the value-building part of the sales
process that justifies the price (profit). If the customer
is more emotionally bonded to their money than they are to
the car, they will not buy today. The walk-around is the
part of the process where the customer actually buys the
car. This is when it stops being "A NEW CAR" and it becomes
"THEIR NEW CAR". Once again, in my travels, I am amazed at
just how terrible the product knowledge is of some sales
people.
There are four parts to a quality presentation...
Safety Quality Luxury Technology SAFETY IS THE SALE
...the biggest single item the customer must be presented is
the safety of the car. With all of the bad press we've had,
the sales person needs to spend a lot of time showing and
explaining the safety technology of the new car to the
customer. Believe me, most of them (customers) are not aware
of everything they are being asked to pay for here.
WHY ARE SALES PEOPLE TAKING SHORTCUTS?
The answer is two-fold:
Lack of Training Lack of Management
If management were hyper-aware of every deal in progress,
there would never be any missed walk-arounds. Just because
your sales people do great walk-arounds in the classroom,
don't assume they are wasting any of these skills on actual
customers.
Personally, I would never work figures on a deal with a
customer that hadn't actually driven the car and been given
a quality presentation by a sales professional.
If my alleged sales person was consistently too weak to
persuade customers to become involved with the car before
they became involved with the money, I'd have to help them
by freeing up their future. You don't develop sales people
by catering to personality weaknesses.
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