Sales

If you have not read part one of this series please do so first by clicking here. The previous article suggested, using a survey and real life examples, that car sales people are battleing because they have forgoten how to sell cars. During the boom years until 2008 we encouraged sales people to be "order takers". During and after the recession this process of taking orders instead of selling cars has been proved not to work and must be changed if we are going to resurect the automotive industry.

Getting the Prospect into the Showroom

• The real challenge for car sales today is to get the prospects into the showrooms. This may be achieved by a massive drive in advertising but that is beyond this brief. The sales people, on the other hand, can have a very positive impact on this problem and there are a number of ways it can be solved.
• People prefer to buy cars (or anything else for that matter) from people they know and trust. Building a relationship in advance of being a sales person is essential for world-class sales people.
• The Internet is the modern showroom. Brands are chosen, cars are compared and prices are gathered on the Internet. The modern sales person should be working towards a massive Internet presence. Writing articles, posting photographs, writing a blog and becoming an expert are all ways to get to the top of the list on the Google search engine.
• Technology has taken over in relationship development. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and YouTube are wonderful ways to be in contact and develop relationships. Even BBM, What’s App and Skype all have facilities for a buy line in your status.
• Email addresses are essential. If you have my email address you can be in regular contact, offering me specials, telling me about new developments, inviting me to the showroom.
• I have already mentioned YouTube but if I were selling cars I would have a series of short videos on YouTube of me with every new model that comes out together with my contact details. What have you got to lose?
• The traditional ways of getting people into the showrooms are also still valid. Networking functions, Special Days, Open days, charity functions, speaking opportunities etc.etc. There are a million ways to get people into the showrooms.
• As with most things if the above is not measured and monitored it will not get done. Again it is the responsibility of the Sales Managers and Dealer Principals to be aware of the techniques needed and enforce those skills amongst the sales people.

The Solution

While the above activities may be the best way to sell more new cars, the real challenge comes in persuading the sales people to undertake these activities and the sales managers to supervise the process.

Some of the training required is going back to basics. Asking the right “Open” questions, uncovering the prospect’s needs, properly qualifying the prospect and providing benefits that satisfy those needs, are all skills that the sales people have been taught before so there is going to be some resistance. The challenge here is that they are just not applying the skills that have been taught in the past and ways have to be found that keep the pressure up to insure the skills are in place and in use.

New skills to attract prospects into the showrooms are also essential.·Sales people need to be equipped with the skills to use all the appropriate social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, and Sales Managers must encourage this. New skills are also required to put video clips on YouTube and the 30 or so other video sites, as well as creating our own Blogs and keeping the websites up to date etc. There will inevitably be some resistance to this, as there is when any new technology is introduced. We have to find ways to get beyond this resistance if we are going to take advantage of the technology available to create relationships and increase sales.

We will also need to re-train the sales managers, not only with the same techniques that the sales people are being trained, but also how best to ensure that the skills, both old and new, are being applied. Simply measuring the numbers (Quotes, Closed sales, turnover against target etc.) is no longer enough. If the sales people I met in my survey are not using the most basic of selling skills, their sales managers must accept some of the responsibility for not enforcing those skills.

Finally a new level of motivation is required. New cars are being sold. If customers are not coming to us to buy a new car they are going to one of our competitors and it is important to encourage sales people to see the future in a much more positive light if we are going to achieve the positive future we are looking for.

To read the previous article Click Here

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Richard Mulvey, "The International Sales Guru," has directly influenced over 150,000 business people over the last 17 years helping them improve their sales profitability. You can follow the author on·twitter·(richardmulvey) or purchase his DVDs, Books, MP3s etc at·www.richardmulvey.com. You may re-publish this article un-edited in any electronic media as long as this paragraph is at the end.