You’ve hired some wonderful people to help your dealership sell vehicles, but the numbers just aren’t where they should be. Why are the KPIs not spiking? The first place to look is training. Talent is important, but if it’s not supported by disciplined on-brand messaging even the best team is going to struggle.
Every dealership needs training programs that are reliable, data-driven, and based on real-world feedback, but a lot of programs are just well-packaged videos, dull slideshows, or impersonal seminars in a crowded hotel ballroom that only vaguely relate to your business. These expensive one-and-done strategies are generic and will never get to the bottom of the challenges you need to address to help your team improve.
Programs that build a real mentor-mentee relationship with your staff are the gold standard. Bringing in caring professionals who will not just teach your employees, but also test, evaluate, coach, and teach them to troubleshoot scenarios from their actual daily work is the key to making real gains in the automotive industry. Here are the elements you should look for in a car dealer sales training program.
In-Depth Scripts
Having a trainer deliver an hour-long lecture about overcoming objections and closing strategies may boost morale, but it won’t give employees practical guidance to navigate the moment-to-moment nuances of a real sales call. Even if your team remembers the bullet points, they still have to come up with all the details on the fly. That’s no way to keep everyone efficiently on point and on brand.
This is where high-quality, customized sales scripts can streamline and unify your entire customer service experience. These scripts should be created under the guidance of industry professionals who have decades of experience handling customer relations and sales, and be tailored to meet your specific business needs. Good scripts are solid tools that keep customer interactions focused on the big picture and assure a consistent experience no matter which employee picks up the phone.
As a conversation with a customer develops, these deep scripts branch into situationally-appropriate responses that are proven to boost lead generation and provide uniform, consistent service. And when difficult situations arise, these scripts give your employees a solid playbook to help them capitalize on challenging customer interactions and pushback that would cost even the most talented salesperson a commission.
To succeed in car dealer sales, training programs that work are critical, and good scripts are tools that will serve your employees for the rest of their careers.
Active Coaching and Training
Professional sports teams don’t just toss their athletes a playbook and set them loose. Interactive coaching is the key to developing player skills and team cohesion. Regardless of your industry, hands-on, repeat coaching experiences beat isolated training sessions every time, and in interaction-heavy sectors like car sales it can be the difference between meeting your goals and shuttering your windows.
Look for training companies that offer multiple one-on-one training sessions with your associates over time. Real growth takes repetition and effort, and single-point training modules and seminars simply won’t provide the repetition it takes to develop winning habits. After all, each one of your employees has their own unique strengths and weaknesses, so you want individualized, personal training to leverage what they do well and improve the rest along the way.
Finally, car dealer sales training programs need to be industry-focused experts. Beware of inexperienced generalists! Unless trainers have decades of experience selling cars, there’s no way they can provide you with insider guidance you’re going to need to make a real impact on your bottom line.
Experience-Based Feedback and Coaching
This is where so many training programs fall short: they might give wonderful information… but they don’t rely on analysis and data to generate feedback to make sure it sticks. Unless coaches actively evaluate how well your employees are using the training every day in your business and then coaching them on the results, there’s no guarantee any of it has sunk in.
A great way to get this feedback is to look for companies that offer mystery shops. Customer comment cards and surveys are informative up to a point, but they strip out a lot of vital information. By posing as a customer, mystery shoppers provide detailed feedback on the customer experience so trainers can further work with your staff to hone their skills to ever-higher levels in car dealer sales.
Training programs that work often include at least some of these mystery shops at no charge so you can evaluate how the business relationship is developing.
Inbound and Outbound Call Coaching
Whether you’re following up fresh leads, checking in on existing customers, or contacting a referral, almost nothing beats the warmth and validation of a human being on the other end of the phone. Every employee needs a solid skill bank that allows them to handle any situation with professionalism, care, and grace.
The training company you select needs to deliver scripts and active coaching on a variety of possible sales scenarios so your team is ready to handle all the situations they will encounter—not just the most common ones that are easy to convert. Make sure the car dealer sales training company you choose delivers a comprehensive program that matches the real-world needs of your team.
Pick the Right Partner
As a successful business owner, you know how you run your business is only part of the puzzle. Another huge piece is the quality of businesses with whom you partner.
Phone Ninjas is an automotive sales and phone training company founded and staffed by industry professionals with decades of experience selling cars and trucks. Our experience means we’ve built car dealer sales training programs that reliably produce results, and are based on practical training tips that can help any sales team improve.
Our scripts are hand tailored to fit your business, and our trainers work to develop your team’s skills over months of personalized one-on-one training and coaching. We’ll provide feedback to help your employees grow, and show you how the quality of your dealership’s customer consistency improves before and after extensive coaching. We even throw in two mystery shops for free so you can gauge how the training and coaching are improving your sales team without breaking the bank.
If you’d like to see if Phone Ninjas can turbocharge your sales game and boost your revenues, contact us today and schedule your free demo.
As the COO | Partner of Phone Ninjas, Chris delivers leadership, coaching, and mentorship to 55 team members providing software sales and phone skills coaching. He fosters powerful partnerships and collaborations with leaders across various business sectors, establishing expectations, communicating vision, and escalating performance to maximize productivity and effectiveness.
Chris is an innovation-driven business executive with over 25 years of experience delivering leadership to teams of up to 75 overseeing development, launch, and sale of website lead acquisition, reconditioning process software systems, and technology that support automotive dealerships across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.
