MOST DEALERSHIPS WILL NOT BE AFRAID TO SPEND THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS ON AN ADVERTISING CAMPAIGN IN ORDER TO DRIVE MORE TRAFFIC INTO THE STORE. TO SELL MORE VEHICLES, THEY HAVE A BUDGET OF 300…400…OR EVEN 600 DOLLARS PER CAR. YET, WHEN YOU ASK THEM HOW MUCH THEIR TRAINING BUDGET IS, THEY LOOK AT YOU AS IF YOU WERE SPEAKING CHINESE.

Consider this: most dealers complain about how their employees treat their clients, but we pay money to increase traffic for them to mishandle. Is it the fault of the salesperson? Certainly not! In the automobile industry, our hiring process leaves a lot to be desired. The term that comes to mind is “if they can fog a mirror.” We hire them in the hopes that they will find it out while shadowing a “senior salesperson” who is likely to have some bad habits of their own. It doesn’t appear like we are preparing them for success.

Is the manager to blame? Man, most sales managers are being asked to do more and more with what appears to be dwindling daytime hours. With a 70-100 percent turnover rate in most businesses, I believe they are continuously onboarding new employees with little opportunity to spend time training them.

So consider the following. We’ll spend a lot of money on advertising to get more traffic, we’ll recruit just about anyone, throw them out there, and then whine when they don’t treat our consumers the way we want them to be treated.

I know that the average consumer spends 19 hours researching and visits 1.2 stores, so they are far more informed than ever before and may want less from our salespeople. Our objective, on the other hand, should be 1. It’s not the.2 that they go to. People prefer to purchase from people they like. A well-trained salesperson can overcome obstacles and deal with situations that unprepared salespeople couldn’t handle. According to a study conducted by salesforce, 71 percent of respondents rely their purchasing decisions on trust and credibility. Unfortunately, if our salespeople are baffled by basic objections and can’t identify the difference between a stated and an actual problem, we will lose.

So, what’s the answer? What is this, a training seminar? Is it possible to hire a sales trainer for a day? Both of these options have flaws. According to research on the Forgetting Curve, people forget 50 percent of what they’ve learned in one day and 85 percent in a month. So, no matter how skilled the trainer or how fantastic the seminar was, they will forget practically everything they learned.

Training is something that you do, not something that you did. That’s all there is to it. If we treat training as a one-time event rather than a continuous process, it will never stay, and we will be discouraged by the lack of results. Repetition is the only way to improve at something. Repetition to the point of unconsciousness. Consider when you first learned to drive… Your hands were 10 and 2, and you were hyper-alert. You checked your mirrors every 2 seconds, read every sign on the road, and observed every automobile in front of you. Now consider your last night’s travel home. When you first started driving, you probably didn’t pay half as much attention as you should have. You probably pulled into your driveway before pondering how you got there in the first place. It’s because you’ve done it hundreds of times and it’s become second nature to you. That’s the direction we need to go with our employee training. It must be done so frequently and in such a way that the staff is able to address complaints without even thinking about it. The salesperson’s response to a customer who says “your price is too high” should be natural. Without even thinking about it, it was as if we were having a normal chat.

So, what’s the answer? Training. Training on a daily basis. Role-playing. Doesn’t that sound awful? There are a plethora of options available to assist you in training your employees, so I’m not going to promote my own. However, remember that educating your employees is more vital than advertising. We have more business coming out the front door than we could possibly handle if we could simply close the door properly. So, educating your employees is a waste of time. Constantly training your employees, on the other hand, is gold.

What if we put all of this time, money, effort, and energy into training only to have our salesperson leave? I’ll ask you this: what happens if you don’t spend any time training them and they stick around?

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