Frictionless (eBook)

Closing and Negotiating with Purpose

Tim Kintz (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
200 Seiten
Lioncrest Publishing (Verlag)
978-1-5445-0685-2 (ISBN)

Infos

No matter how you entered the car business, you know the frustrations that come with the job. Customers are savvier than ever, so without knowing how to negotiate and close deals, you'll find yourself selling out of desperation instead of inspiration. You know selling is a zero-sum game-either you sell them or someone else does. You want to improve your selling skills; unfortunately, available training is outdated or irrelevant. You just need someone to show you the proven path to negotiate and close deals more effectively so you can maximize your earning potential. Industry veteran and top sales trainer Tim Kintz is here to help. In Frictionless, Tim shares strategies and techniques you can use to create a win-win negotiation, deliver an exceptional experience while holding gross, and set up future deals. By shifting your mindset toward becoming a relational salesperson-rather than a transactional one-you'll go from simply surviving to succeeding in car sales. You'll make more money, enjoy a higher quality of life, have happier customers, and go from having a job to a full-blown career.

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Introduction

Selling cars can be the easiest high-paying job you’ll ever have or the hardest low-paying job you’ll ever have. It’s your choice to make, but I will tell you that if you decide to be 100 percent committed to becoming a professional, you can have the life you deserve.

Chances are, most of you are like me—you never grew up wanting to be in car sales. I always say that getting into the car business is kind of like going to Denny’s: you never plan to go there, you just end up there at one in the morning.

I got into the car business because of the earning potential—and because I needed a job. It’s not that I regret the choice. I just didn’t intend to make it. Car sales came at the end of my dream of becoming a big-league baseball player, which was an especially stressful time because I hadn’t put much effort into academics.

Let me set the stage: I grew up in a small town outside of St. Louis, Missouri, in a middle-class family with the hardest working parents I’ve ever seen—and I dreamed of and believed I was going to be a big-league baseball player. I was lucky enough to get a baseball scholarship to a school in Arizona, so I started chasing that dream. Needless to say, academics weren’t high on my priority list.

I did accomplish something that very few have or will: I spent four years in college, stayed eligible to play baseball all four years, and still didn’t have enough credits to get a two-year degree.

I don’t say that because it’s something that I’m proud of—I say that because, regardless of your education level or choices you made in the past, I believe anyone with drive, desire, and discipline can make more money than they ever imagined if they make the right choices.

On one side of my life I saw my buddies playing ball for $15,000 to $65,000 a year, and on the other side there were the salespeople that I detailed cars for at the Honda/Acura store making $100,000 to 200,000. I made the choice to give selling cars a shot and then, like most of us, I was thrown to the wolves to figure the rest out by myself.

Now, with what feels like a lifetime of experience in just about every role in the store and nearly two decades as a trainer, I see that story repeated more often than not, especially on the sales floor.

The story we’re all told when we get hired is true. I don’t know of any other career where you can make the money we make with the limited education that a lot of us have. The great thing about selling cars is that you don’t have to be an elite athlete or have a college degree to make six figures.

The potential upside is amazing. If you’re good, if you bust your ass, if you develop the needed skills, if you have the intestinal fortitude to survive, if you care about customers…Then yes, you will make great money and have a fantastic career.

As I said in the beginning, selling cars can be the easiest high-paying job you’ll ever have or the hardest low-paying job you’ll ever have. You are the deciding factor, and the way you approach closing and negotiating is a critical key to your success—or failure.

The Promise versus Reality

Some people say that great salespeople are born. Some people believe they’re made. I guess the actual answer is that it’s both. At some point, great salespeople were all born—but even for people who seem like naturals, somewhere along the line, something or someone influenced them. Maybe they were in the military and that’s where they learned to be disciplined. Maybe they learned to communicate and that’s how they got so good with customers. Maybe they were an athlete like me—as the top pitcher, I knew that the guys behind me were working as hard as they could to take my spot. I had to work just as hard as them, if not harder, to keep my spot. That taught me so much about competition, coachability, and work ethic, and all of those skills served me well in sales.

Unfortunately, none of that shows up on the job description or in the onboarding or initial training.

Typically, the help wanted ad is all about the unlimited earning potential and how the dealership has more leads than they know what to do with. How many ads have you seen like this:

Business is booming! Have traffic, need people. Excellent pay. Control your future! Be in business for yourself—full inventory at your fingertips. We train and support!

And how long did it take for those promises to fall apart?

You pass the drug screen, have a decent driving record, and John in HR tells you that you’re good to go. Then you show up Monday with a spark in your eye, spring in your step, and smile on your face—but John’s nowhere to be found. Jill, one of the managers, doesn’t even know who you are. She welcomes you aboard anyway and sends you off to the showroom floor to get to know the team. Two hours later, you go looking for Jill, who’s forgotten you’re even there. She introduces you to Steve—the loyal, underachieving six-car guy—and asks him to get you up to speed.

That guy shows you the new cars, the used cars, the key board with all the keys, and sets you up in the CRM. He takes you upstairs to watch the OEM product training videos and leaves, where you sit for hours on end to get certified and hope you don’t fall asleep.

Eventually, you emerge from the shadows and they partner you back up with six-car Steve. Someone will walk onto the lot and they tell you to take that “up” and do the best you can—just as long as you don’t let them go without talking to a manager first.

Sure, we all make some sales and can get pretty good grosses on them. Especially early on, when enthusiasm takes over. We assume everyone’s a buyer. We go on demos because we want to drive the car more than the customer does, and we don’t get into price conversations. We haven’t had time to build bad habits, customers like us, and we make it through just fine.

Then the Ninety-Day Wonder kicks in: ninety days later, you wonder why you can’t sell cars.

Becoming the Expert in the People Business

Even though we all know that a large part of success comes from repeatable processes, in most stores there are none for us to follow. We get minimal training, few resources, and whatever support we’re lucky enough to latch on to. Settling in under these conditions was hard enough when I got started—new folks today are selling to customers who often know more than we do about the product and process, and we have decades of a less-than-honest reputation to overcome. Relevant, belly-to-belly sales training has never been more important, and it’s just as hard to get as ever.

You’ll hear war stories about how we used to be able to make so much more on a car. That was then, and this is now. Today, manufacturers have compressed the profit margin so far that we have to get creative to make a reasonable profit. Customers aren’t just dividing a car price by sixty and expecting that to be their payment—they have payment calculators and trade values and price comparisons from all competitors, including traditional and newer nontraditional competitors. We can’t skate by with surface skills anymore. It’s an uphill battle.

The whole dynamic is a shame, really. I don’t want to know more about what’s wrong with me than my doctor knows. The problem is, customers don’t think of us as the experts anymore. They’ve dealt with too many amateurs to believe otherwise.

Listen, I realize that all businesses change and evolve. Selling cars isn’t the same today as it was ten, fifteen, or even twenty years ago. I get it—in fact, a lot of what I’ll teach you in this book has to do with the way the car business is evolving and how we need to grow with it. But the bottom line is that we’re still in the people business.

If you want to guarantee your current and future success in sales, you need to be the expert. You need to know how to deliver an exceptional customer experience every time. That starts by setting up and executing a successful win-win negotiation, and ultimately selling the car the right way the first time so you can manage the customer’s trade cycle.

If we want to become the expert, rediscover those first months’ excitement, and enjoy a sustainable career in car sales, we clearly have some work to do. And it’s not fun. Practice is boring. I can’t even compare it to sports, because hitting golf balls and shooting free throws is fun. At least then you can see the results and get some instant gratification. Practicing selling scripts doesn’t come with any result or reward until it’s been mastered.

As Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach famously said, “Any spectacular achievement was preceded by a bunch of unspectacular practice.”

If we want to make this industry work for us, we have to get to work on ourselves, even when it feels like unspectacular practice.

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

Everybody wants to be great at closing and negotiating, but all too often we just want to pick up a book full of tips and skim it until we find a magic pill. We don’t want to do the work, or maybe we don’t know what work we need to do. Everyone...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 10.3.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Wirtschaft ► Betriebswirtschaft / Management ► Marketing / Vertrieb
• ISBN-10: 1-5445-0685-6 / 1544506856
• ISBN-13: 978-1-5445-0685-2 / 9781544506852