The Car Sales Trainer You Need to Hone Your Sales Team’s Skills

If you’re looking for an expert sales trainer to coach your people up to new levels of excellence, you already know how many options are out there. The right training partner can supercharge how your dealership does business—but the wrong choice will drain your budget and frustrate your sales team. 

So, what are the factors you should be considering to ensure you make the right choice for your dealership? You’ll need a partner who has a deep understanding of the auto industry as well as a thorough awareness of how modern sales strategies function, but there are many other aspects to consider as well. 

Fortunately, choosing the right sales trainer is not as complicated as it might seem. Here’s everything you need to know to find the perfect fit for your business. 

What to Look for in a Training Partner

There are many different styles of instruction and business models out there, but the effectiveness of these approaches varies widely. Less expensive, one-and-done solutions are cheap, but they tend to result in lower long-term retention rates of just 10%.  On the other hand, long-term partnerships will cost more, but repetition offers far more durable returns on your investment.

Here are important things to look for in training partners:

Presentation Style

The way the information is presented to your staff matters a lot. For instance, an hour-long lecture will probably make your team check out quickly regardless of how valuable the information is. The same is true for programs that don’t allow for a lot of engagement—without any coaching to support new skills, they will likely fade quickly if they’re retained at all.

For a program that will ensure you get the biggest bang for your buck, look for training partners that structure presentations with the following elements in mind:

• Session structures should feature “show/do” cycles, or short periods of instruction followed by interactive group activities that use the information just learned. Full presentations are built by linking several of these cycles together.
• Presentations should be dynamic and colorful, ideally with bullet points and scrolling information on screens to reinforce a spoken message, and vice versa. 
• Presentations should be limited to just two or three main points and then tested in group activities to solidify key concepts. 
• Activities should be varied in type and content from cycle to cycle to increase engagement and cater to all styles of learners. Short competitions with prizes, video games, Q&A sessions, hands-on activities, and role-playing are all excellent examples. 

Active Coaching Model

The initial presentation is where many sales trainers are finished, but building long-term durable skills is a process that takes time. An active coaching relationship should be built into your partner’s business model. But what form should this take? 

One-on-one mentoring is the most powerful learning tool. Weekly individual sessions are a perfect interval for meetings, as they give the learner time to absorb what was discussed at the previous session and practice the advice given by the mentor. Also, an experienced coach will be able to identify teaching points and present them to team members in as little as 15-20 minutes so they’re not eating into time on the sales floor. 

The benefits of mentorship for the learner are many:

• Promotes faster learning, as wrong paths are avoided.
• It provides sales team members with broad context for core concepts as well as specific advice that leads directly to closing more deals. 
• Mentors can see the desired arc of improvement over time and know the different stages along the path to mastery. 
• Mentorship relationships shave months, even years off a learning curve.

Verify the Learning on the Ground

There are a number of ways to check skills in the workplace, but the best is through mystery shopping. Good mystery shoppers get an unvarnished look at what’s actually happening on sales calls and can convert that information into actionable points for maximizing revenue opportunities. 

A sales trainer who uses mystery shopping to verify instruction has multiple benefits:

• They experience your employees’ new skills just as any customer will, giving your sales trainer detailed feedback on their performance.
• It produces teaching points that can benefit the entire team.
• It allows coaches to catch and correct mistakes efficiently.

Business Model

How the sales trainer structures the business relationship with you is critical. The whole point of consultants is to improve performance while making your life simpler. Here are some items to look for to ensure your partner will be a good match:

• Your car sales trainer should take the time to really get to know your goals and people so they can perfectly match their instruction to your unique business dynamic.
• Supplemental materials such as sales scripts, learning aids, materials, etc. should be included in the cost of their program. Avoid agents who nickel-and-dime you.
• Look for agencies that handle all aspects of the training program as autonomously as possible to avoid overburdening GMs and owners. 
• Long-term contracts should be avoided, as this locks you into a long-term expense. Month-to-month arrangements are ideal.

Make the Right Choice for You

Your choice of sales trainer is crucial for the long-term health of your business. Trust us, we know. That’s why Phone Ninjas offers all the best points we talked about above as well as many more benefits surrounding every aspect of dealership activities. 

We don’t charge start-up fees, and work on a month-to-month basis so you pay when you need us, not when you don’t. Our coaches are experienced mentors and work with your team in one-on-one weekly sessions where we dissect calls they took for your dealership, so skills are based on real-world interactions instead of classroom role-playing.

Our mystery shoppers check your team’s performance in the field, ensuring you know exactly how your customers are experiencing your business. If we identify something that needs work, our coaches follow up. Our clients routinely see 60-80% appointment set rates from call traffic from our unique industry-leading approach, far above the industry average of 28%.

Contact Phone Ninjas today for a free demo and two free mystery shops and find out what the perfect car sales trainer can do for your business.