Selling In The Motor Trade

If a customer walked onto your forecourt, got ignored for three minutes, then was told to hang on while nobody came back, heads would roll. You'd call it a process failure and fix it that day. So why is exactly that happening on your phone every single day? Roughly one in three callers never gets through to someone who can help. They're not cold leads. They want to buy or book. And when they can't reach you, they don't wait around. They phone the independent down the road who picks up. Phone leads convert at nearly double the rate of internet leads, yet they're the ones we let slip through. This episode lays out where the calls fail, why voicemail is a dead end, and five fixes you can check today.
What's covered:
• The one in three callers you never knew you were losing 
• Why phone leads convert at nearly double internet leads and still get neglected
• Hold times, voicemail and the exact points where calls fall over 
• The Monday morning crunch that makes the service desk the biggest offender 
• How missed calls are quietly costing you service loyalty and repeat sales 
• What happens to your net promoter score when a customer has to explain themselves three times 
• Five fixes, including the one most owners never do: dial your own dealership
Host Simon Bowkett, or Skippy to regular listeners, runs sales training company Symco Training and spends his days inside real dealerships. This one is data led and personal. It started when he couldn't get hold of a newly acquired group on the phone, and a business partner asked him why it's so hard to spend money with dealers.
Before you spend another penny on marketing, listen to this and go dial your own dealership. You might not like what you hear.
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 is the trade-off nobody on the sales floor wants to admit. Every time your salesperson says just sell it to We Buy Any Car to kill a part-exchange objection, they are handing your best stock to someone else. Quick for them. Expensive for you. Simon sold four of his own cars through Motorway, Carwow and We Buy Any Car to see the process from the customer's side, and it was worse than he expected. Late outsourced drivers. An app arguing about a tyre inflation kit on run-flat tyres. A finance settlement that nearly left a black mark over £60. But the sharp end is this. Your used car department is your profit centre, and you are letting it starve to make one objection go away. This episode is about taking that stock back.
What's covered:
• The easy objection-buster that quietly drains your used car stock
• What really happens at a We Buy Any Car drop-in centre
• Why Motorway and Carwow quote almost identical prices to the pound
• The outsourced drivers and app mistakes that put deals at risk
• Why finance settlements through these services are not as seamless as they look
• The window of opportunity close that keeps the trade-in with you
• The one to ten condition question that stops distance sales going wrong
• Why used car managers should worry more about their own salespeople mis-describing cars than customers
If you run a forecourt and you want to stop feeding your rivals, listen to this before your next sales meeting.
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 is the uncomfortable bit. Your VHC videos probably aren't broken.
Your technicians' script is. In this episode, Simon Bowkett, Skippy to most of the trade, explains why so many vehicle health check videos get filmed, sent, and then convert nothing. The camera was meant to fix a strange problem in the motor trade, the expert who inspects the car never actually speaks to the customer. But most technicians narrate like mechanics reading a chart. Amber, red, green, borderline, two millimetres. The customer hears noise, not risk. Skippy breaks down the SWOP process Symco teaches, shows how to make a worn tyre feel like a real decision rather than a line on a checklist, and hands you six steps to put back into the business for immediate results.

What's covered:
• The real reason VHC videos get watched but don't sell the work
• Why 'amber, red, green' narration quietly kills conversion
• The SWOP process: see it, why it happened, the outcome, the proposal
• The doctor and receptionist problem, and why the expert must speak
to the customer
• How to explain a two millimetre tyre so the customer feels the risk
• How the right video hands the service advisor an easier, more credible call
• Six steps to lift VHC conversion, ready to use straight away

If your health check videos are getting filmed but not converting,  take the six steps in this episode and put them in this
week.
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

Most used car managers still price off the auction book. Cazana wants to flip that on its head. In this panel episode, Simon Bowkett sits down with Ian, Mark and Darren from Cazana, the retail valuations platform built on more data than anyone else in the UK, with around 900,000 unique cars tracked every day. The conversation stays practical and commercial throughout: how to value a car retail-down rather than trade-up, why days to sell matters more than gut feel, and why the used EV market has turned hot again. If you buy used cars, run a sales desk or want tighter stock turn, this one is built for your job.
What's covered:
• Why valuing a car retail-down beats pricing up from the auction book 
• How days to sell data sharpens what you pay and what you advertise for 
• Why the used EV market has turned hot again, with dealers struggling to get stock 
• What battery health really does to used EV values, and why it is less of a worry than people think 
• How provenance, MOT history and local stock affect a car's price 
• Why estates, saloons and small petrol hatchbacks are selling quickly right now 
• The pricing strategy that avoids a race to the bottom 
• What the Cazana 500 offer gives independent dealers
Cazana is a used vehicle data and retail valuations platform, originally built in 2012 by Tom Wood, purchased in 2023 by Percayso and relaunched after the Cazoo collapse. Ian leads the business, while Mark and Derren bring years at Experian Automotive and Cap HPI to the table. Eight of the top ten insurers and the Financial Ombudsman already use their valuations, which tells you something about the quality of the data.
If you are a dealer principal, used car manager or buyer trying to buy better and turn stock faster, this is worth your time.
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 is something most sales managers know but cannot prove: the mood on the floor matters more than the morning meeting. Dr. Tharaka is back to put the science behind it. Emotions are contagious. Your team members are copying each other's states right now, not by choice, but because that is how human brains are wired. There is a measurable return on your team's emotional climate. There is also a measurable return on trust, down to the hormone level in the blood. And there are practical tools you can put in place on Monday morning that shift both. This episode covers the mechanisms, the techniques and the brain science in plain language for people in the motor trade.
What's covered:
• Why emotional states transfer between team members and why that is not a soft concept but a performance   
   variable with a commercial return
• The bandwagon bias and why customers and staff alike default to following the crowd, even when it is the wrong 
   crowd
• Why short-term memory evaporates and a practical visual technique for making customer names, partners and 
   even dogs stick
• Why the brain is 60,000 times faster with images than text and how that should change how you show up with a 
   customer
• Time punctuation: how to use the calendar to unstick a team that has run out of momentum, and the dealership 
   example that ran used car targets to the 15th
• Crisis, Crash and Comeback: the three-phase model that explains the bickering, entitlement and initiative loss that 
   followed lockdown
• Oxytocin, trust and why there is a direct financial return on building genuine rapport, backed by experimental 
   transaction data
• The what went well huddle: zero cost, measurable impact, simple enough to start this week
Dr. Tharaka is a neuroscientist, performance psychologist and TEDx speaker who appeared on Channel 4. He advises leaders on the psychological levers behind team performance, motivation and trust. He is not a motivational speaker. He is someone who can tell you what is happening in your team's brains and what you can do about it.
If you want the science behind why your best teams behave the way they do, and the tools to build more of them, this is the episode.
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