Selling In The Motor Trade

Ever been told to go and prospect local businesses and thought, right, where do I even start?
This one is for you.
Simon Bowkett takes a client question about local business users, the buyers who are not quite fleet and not quite retail, and turns it into a step by step approach you can use this week.
It begins with a business you already look after. From there you find their competitors, use that connection to get past the gatekeeper, and give the decision maker a proper reason to meet you.
Simon also shares the referral question that gets customers introducing you themselves, the voicemail messages that actually get returned, and a simple idea sitting in your own accounts department that almost nobody uses.
Practical, honest, and built for a busy week on the forecourt.
•    Where to start when you have been told to go and prospect local businesses
•    How to use AI to build a list of a customer's direct competitors
•    What to say to the gatekeeper so your call gets put through
•    How to ask for a referral in a way people actually answer
•    Why your dealership's supplier list is full of easy appointments
•    Three voicemail messages that get a call back
•    Handling the "we already have a supplier" brush off
•    Why face to face still beats email and LinkedIn for this buyer

Simon Bowkett is the host of Selling in The Motor Trade and the founder of Symco Training, which coach sales and aftersales teams across UK dealerships. He runs a small business himself, so he knows why these buyers go quiet and how to bring them back.
The whole episode is built around a real question from a client. 
Share it with anyone on your team who has a local business patch and is not sure what to do with it.
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon's words 'real world', it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visit: www.symcotraining.co.uk

Think about every amber tyre your department advised on last year. Now count the customers who rang back and booked in purely to have them done. It fits on one hand. Colin McAllister spotted two in a single day across John Clark Motor Group recently and it was unusual enough that he noticed, in a group with a site running 40 retail ramps. In this episode Simon Bowkett, Colin McAllister and Darren Bedford of Symco Training work through how red and amber work actually gets communicated, from the drop off conversation to the phone call that decides whether the customer says yes or drives to a fast fit. The line that kills your update calls. The rule that settles whether an item is red or amber. And why quoting your competitor's tyre price yourself is the fastest way to keep the job in house.
•    Separating the customer appointment from the car appointment so the golden hour survives a full drop off rush
•    The drop off agenda: payment method, VHC explanation, best number for the advisor, email for the technician's video
•    "If you don't hear from me, that's good news, and I'll see you at four o'clock", and what it does to your inbound calls
•    Why the health check should wait until the diagnostic the customer actually paid for is finished
•    The grandma rule for settling red or amber, and the version technicians should be using on themselves
•    Quoting the fast fit price yourself, and why a five pound gap per tyre closes on convenience
•    "Did you need to get back to me about the price, or about when we could fit it?"
•    The tyre card John Clark hand to customers, printed 1.6mm thick because that is the legal limit
Colin McAllister runs group training and development at John Clark Motor Group and brings the tools they put in advisors' hands, including the percentage worn tyre card and the Tyre Safe link that takes the argument off the dealer. Darren Bedford is sales director at Symco Training and spends his weeks inside service departments, which is why he keeps pulling this back to language rather than effort.
If your amber work goes quiet after the phone call, play this to your service advisors before Monday's drop offs.
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon's words 'real world', it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visit: www.symcotraining.co.uk

Simon Bowkett is joined by Colin McAllister of John Clark Motor Group and Darren Bedford of Symco Training for a proper after sales conversation. They get into service plans and retention, the golden hour, how quickly a VHC video needs to reach the customer, and what happens to the job when authorisation lands three hours too late. Colin shares the real auto authorisation figures across the group, and there are two cracking stories in here about the value of a good technician, one involving a coffee machine and one involving a screwdriver and a very large invoice.
 
• Service plans, price protection and why they hold retention together when money is tight
• The golden hour, and the 15 minute standard through technician, parts and front desk
• Real auto authorisation rates across John Clark, plus how fast customers respond to the video
• Why long lead times push away the service customers you actually want
• Getting credit for diagnostic work instead of handing over a no fault found
• The coffee machine story and the FedEx invoice, and what they say about your labour rate
• Where technicians are coming from now, apprenticeships, ex forces recruits and fast track Level 3
• Simple contact habits at drop off that get you an answer while the car is still up in the air
 
Colin McAllister is group training and development manager at John Clark Motor Group and looks after training across the group's dealerships, including its apprentice programmes. Darren Bedford is sales director at Symco Training and works with service departments across the country on process and workshop planning. Both have been on the show before and both know the trade from the inside.
 
Send this to your service advisors and your service manager, then look out for part two next week where the guys cover how to put it into practice in your own dealership.
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon's words 'real world', it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visit: www.symcotraining.co.uk

Do you actually want to be in the tyre business? It sounds like a simple question, and most dealers answer it with a quick look at the margin. Simon Bowkett reckons that's the wrong test. In this episode he explains why tyres are worth doing even close to break even, because of what they protect. Keep the tyre work and you keep the customer. Lose it and you hand a fast fit the chance to sell them servicing, wipers, batteries and a winter check. He also covers the practical side. How to quote, how to explain tread depth so it actually registers, how to get tyres checked early enough to sell them, and why sitting on the fence causes more problems than staying out altogether.
•    The real question to ask before you commit to selling tyres
•    Why stopping defection matters more than the margin on the tyre
•    How to quote the fast fit price yourself and keep the customer's trust
•    A clearer way to explain tread depth than talking in percentages
•    Checking tyres at drop off, the way many US service departments do it
•    What mismatched tyres do to noise, handling and stopping distance
•    How to give the customer a choice instead of a flat no
This one is Simon Bowkett on his own, drawing on years of training sales and aftersales teams in UK dealerships. Everything he covers here also runs through Symco's Sales Fitness and Today's Service Advisor programmes.
If you run or work in a service department and tyres feel like more hassle than they're worth, give this one a listen before you decide.
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon's words 'real world', it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visit: www.symcotraining.co.uk

Here's the upsell that costs you nothing in workshop grief. No cars pulled back off the ramps at ten to four. No service advisor watching their CSI score go out the window. Air conditioning servicing runs itself. The technician sets the machine going and gets on with the rest of the job. Yet most departments barely offer it. In this episode, Simon Bowkett lays out why that's a missed opportunity and how to fix it. He starts with belief, because a service advisor who thinks air con doesn't really need doing will pitch it exactly that way. Then he works through the whole process and the word tracks that make it land. This is about turning a quiet job into steady profit without piling more pressure on an already stretched team.
What's covered:
• The real reason air con servicing beats most red and amber upsells: the machine does the work
• Why a stone through the condenser is diagnostic work, not a service, and why that distinction protects your credibility
• The five touchpoints to sell it, and why you pitch at more than one 
• The SWAP format that lets the technician's video do the selling for you 
• Killing the 'I hardly use it' objection with the boiler analogy 
• Why the word 're-gas' is costing you money and confidence 
• The promise-me close that banks the sale twelve months out • What gets measured gets done: a simple leaderboard for air con servicing
Simon Bowkett, Skippy to most of the trade, runs Symco Training and hosts this show. He's not a technician and says so, but he's sat on enough Monday-morning service counters to know where the process falls apart. His job here is the sales and belief side, and he hands the technical weight to the people who fix the cars.
If you're a head of business, after-sales manager or service advisor, this is a quick win hiding in plain sight.
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon's words 'real world', it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visit: www.symcotraining.co.uk