How Are You Coaching Your Team?

I was doing some 1:1 coaching last week and in it I was going through live demos. I would go through the digital lead process that I teach. After the call we would dissect the call.

Live Demo

One of the calls was an interesting one. An enquiry had come in on a new 7 Seater. I rang the lady and during the course of the conversation it turns out that there wasn't a need for a 7 Seater. We carried on our chat and then discovered that it was not a new car we were looking at.

We had a good rapport which is crucial on these calls. My energy was high and enthusiasm higher. We chatted some more and I soon discovered that she was close to doing a deal in an other dealership on a different car.

The car the lady was close to doing a deal on was a 3 year old SUV. An old model of that car. Now I have leverage. The car I had for sale was a current model. The lady had said that she had her car up for sale. I checked the car online and realised that spec wasn't a high priority for her. She wanted to move up in the years keep her cost of change as low as possible.

I knew from the call the exact car I was going to send her a video on. This car ticked all the boxes.

After The Call

We dissected the call afterwards and I always get the sales execs to talk about what they liked and didn't like.

Here's where this type of training has the biggest impact, I talk the sales execs through my thought process.

How often are you working with your teams and taking them through your thought process? Rarely if ever I would imagine. I've worked in car dealerships and I know first hand how busy they are. Whether you are selling new cars or used cars the pace is relentless.

The market is so competitive now that you can't afford to have people calling these digital leads in a half hearted manner. Or making these calls lacking the tools and skills they need. But that's what's happening.

There's a thing called loss aversion that comes to mind when it comes to training sales staff.

Here's a piece I have taken from thedecisionlad.com that perfectly explains it.

What is loss aversion?

Loss aversion is a cognitive bias that describes why, for individuals, the pain of losing is psychologically twice as powerful as the pleasure of gaining. The loss felt from money, or any other valuable object, can feel worse than gaining that same thing.1 Loss aversion refers to an individual’s tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains. Simply put, it’s better not to lose $20, than to find $20.

In other words, the small cost of upskilling our staff takes more precedence over increasing their conversion rates.

Say you're a dealership that gets 200 digital leads a month. If your current conversion rate is 15% and we could increase it by 5%, what's that worth? We have now gained an extra 10 sales per month. 120 sales per annum.

It really is a no brainer.