Lonely Days follow this blog post

posted by Jim Vogel on Jan. 4, 2008

Lonely days and lonely nights, where would I be without my recruits... To paraphraze an oldie, these are the quiet times in the automotive sales recruiting arena. I simply do not have quantity. The quality of the candidate does increase in softer times, but as I recruit to get to March 1st with the people I need I am resorting to more classical approaches... When I meet someone in my spending or social network who impresses me for their customer focus and service, I offer them a job... 

 

I know the recruits will come as the year gets older and warmer, but I need people NOW...

 

I hope you all have a great 08!! Send me peeps!!!  

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•  Martin Snyder

  1 point 22 months ago

  I sold cars in college and could not believe how badly the whole thing worked. You had 25 guys on a Saturday waiting on floor traffic and lucky to have two good encounters, while the rest of the week they just stood against a wall and smoked. People (ups) would hit the lot and whatever random salesperson who happened to be smoking at the time would be the salesperson they got.

  Some salespeople were great openers, others were great closers, and others had good middle games, yet each was forced to play all three roles, all week long.

  If I owned a dealership, it would be a different story. I would develop a small core group of openers and closers, keep them full time and pay them very well, and then recruit and deploy a vast force of middle players whose only jobs would be to pick cars off the lot, get people going on test drives, hand them the printed information they need, and correctly take a hand-off from a skilled opener and correctly hand-off to a skilled closer regardless of the sales stage.

  IMHO few sales are made (and many lost) in that middle game because that is when the customer is interacting directly with the product- when sales skills are at the lowest ebb. Now most salespeople and dealers will say otherwise- they will say that those are the critical moments- but they are wrong.

  The critical moments are the arrival and initial handle, qualification, and the moment of conversion into a buying process from a shopping process.

  In Mil speak, its the OODA loop- the customer observes, orients, decides, and acts in that order, and a skilled salesperson knows that the orientation and decision stages are the keys.

  A customer can do the observing and acting with almost no input at all from a salesperson; you know when you like a car or you don't, and no salesperson is going to change that. You also know how to say I want it, and again, no saleserson is needed to help you express that idea.

  By smoothly mixing up the approach to an open, a middle, and a close, a dealer can get inside the OODA loop to control the orientation aspects with a (skilled opener) and the decision aspects (skilled closer).

  This way your top openers and closers make a ton of money, your middle players dont need to worry about making deals all week, while your lot has full coverage at all times and your recruiting challenges are cut way down.

  Anyway, I dont own a dealership, but those would be the priciples I would use if I did.

  Send me a car !

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