Richard's Review
Four weeks ago a client (Mark Warncke from Waterfront Leathers in Cape Town) who had attended some of my seminars with his team 5 years ago approached me with the following challenge:
Your courses have been attended by ourselves and by our staff. We always find your courses very helpful good for staff morale, but do find that the results wear off very quickly and they go back to the same old habits in no time at all. We are a small company so cannot afford to keep attending courses from a cost as well as a time point of view as our shop is open from 9am till 9pm seven days a week. Perhaps you have some advice on this problem?
I replied straight away with the following:
My wife and I are building again. It seems to be a constant thing in our lives and to be honest we both love it. Two years ago we bought a holiday home on the south coast with a run down cottage that we have decided to demolish and replace. In addition, 8 months ago we moved into a house in Durban North that had been rented for 4 years and empty for 4 months, and we are rebuilding much of that as well.
To be honest, the actual building is not my favorite. Brick dust everywhere and contractors that seem to take great pleasure in letting you down, can be very draining. There are two parts of building or rebuilding that we both really enjoy; designing the home, and living in the finished product.
Why am I telling you this?
Last night a client sent me an email suggesting an interesting a book I should be reading (when I finish it I will let you know if it is worth reading).·Going straight to my iPhone I looked for the book, downloaded and started reading. Later today when I connect my phone to my computer it will automatically download my ebook to my library containing hundreds of similar books and then be available for use on my ipad (unfortunately they won’t let me read books on my iPhone on the plane… yet!)
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 average sales person spends very little of his time actually selling. Very often the time is spent Travelling, Waiting in Reception, Idle talk, Lunch, Paperwork, Research, Internal Meetings, Reading the Junk Mail, and other apparently important pastimes. The good salesperson will know that time is money, and every moment should be used productively.
The following are suggestions to improve productivity:
Over the many years I have been working with Sales People I have always had the same mantra. “Sales people never lie to a customer”.
Of course this is tough sometimes but it is a fundamental principle of good salesmanship. We should never lie to the customer and there are some pretty compelling reason why this is so.
129 · ·The Death of the Order Taker in the Automotive industry
Bill Gates is quoted as saying “Success is a lousy teacher” and if anybody knows about success it is Bill Gates. Prior to the recession we had seven full years of growth, of success if you like, and during those years we learnt that we no longer need to sell, we simply need to take orders to be successful. During the recession we became accustomed to much lower sales and those companies that survived the recession became leaner and more efficient. Most of those companies, however, had become so used to taking orders rather than selling their product or service that the habit was hard to break.
Body Language is the silent signals we use to communicate and has changed very little over the last 100,000 years. Modern society sees words as the main source of communication between humans and much of our education focuses on the correct use of words to get the message across.
Before you start to hire a sales person you will need to analyze what sort of business you are in and what sort of sales person you want to help grow your business.
Do you need someone who is hungry to close or are you looking for someone who will take time to form long lasting relationships? Do you need someone selling on the phone or are you expecting him or her to go out and meet with potential customers. Each of the above tasks requires different types of sales people to perform well. Presuming you are looking for a sales person who will meet with your customers, there are a few common traits that all sales people should posses.
Don’t you hate sales people? When they get you on the phone or approach you in a shop and you know they only want to sell you something… anything! Then they start to talk. They have this idea that if they talk you to death you will buy something, and maybe even sometimes you do, just to get rid of them.
When that happens to me, I want to shake them. Don’t they know this isn’t what selling is all about? These sales people give the whole profession a bad name. Would you go back to a business that employs this sales person? Of course not!
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