As I ate dinner with a large group of friends this weekend the topic turned to car salespeople.  Everyone seemed to have a story about being treated poorly when they wanted to purchase. They were ignored, abandoned, patronized and abused.  

I will spare you the details.  You’re welcome.

As I listened politely and carefully I began to hear a uniform pattern that struck me as odd. Every friend also had a reason for this treatment with some version of the following:

“It’s…

In our business helping veterans improve can be a challenge.  

They know what they are supposed to know.  Usually they think they are actually doing it.

Poke around in the cupboards of the average dealership and you will find training cassettes from the 70's, training videos from the 80's and 90's and DVD's from the last 15 years.  You could reforest Colorado's wildfire area with the trees that made the workbooks from seminars that are…

I often have discussions with employers about their dissatisfaction with certain members of their team.   How can so many prospective employees that seem like good hires turn out to be poor performers?

“Concentrate…..concentrate….”  The instructors voice is intense and close to my right ear.  I concentrate.  I try to remember the 7 or so things he has just taught me. I squeeze the trigger as slowly as I can.

It’s a little Smith and Wesson M&P compact.  It is at home in the gun safe with a variety of sibling guns used by my husband for trap and skeet shooting.   I take it out every so often and go to the gun club range and shoot at some paper…

What happened to the salesperson who was told by their manager:

Every time he brought a deal to the desk “good job”.

They only thing the manager said about the deal that didn’t happen was “Thanks for the TO.  Bring me another customer.”

When the customer was on the wrong car   “Thanks for bringing them to me.  Let’s show them this one.”

When the customer was $10,000 upside down. “You are stronger and braver than most of my…

    In the beginning, there were only customers, and all were good. 

    You expected to sell about one out of four customers, and sometimes you even sold one out of three.

    You did a great greeting and then ran through the steps as far as you could.  If they didn’t go ahead, you just had a manager talk to them, shook it off and went to get another one.

    You did this a lot, people bought cars,  and they called your success beginners luck.

    After a while…

It's sales for beginners.  You must listen to your customer.  Internal or external.

It's so 101 that you could easily blow through this post and tune into the next thing.  Stayed tuned until point three and you'll have something new to try today.

As a salesperson I stood around or sat with other salespeople and shot the breeze while we waited for the next customer.  At any point any one of us might break away and wait on a customer.  If the GM strolled nearby…

We all have a list of questions designed to help salespeople discover customers wants and needs.  The trouble comes when a salesperson hones in on the answers to the questions and runs through their list like an interrogation.

The customer can be put off by this approach.  It can leave a bad taste.  The unfortunate impression is that the salesperson doesn't really care, is just trying to sell them a car as fast as possible, and it comes off as pushy.

I don't…

The Ride

It was the big hills that scared me.  That and the killer outfits some of them were wearing. Not to mention the bikes that weighed about as much as my shoe.  I didn’t want to be the domino that caused the whole group to end up being scraped off the pavement into ambulances.

It was late spring last year. I was at the Village Bike shop, getting my gear out of the car and getting myself into possible pain and humiliation on my first group ride billed as “Ride with the…

Rolling!  Lights, camera, terror.

My first automotive sales manager videoed me doing vehicle presentations and it took me from a knock kneed novice to a top presenter in record time.  For the first time I knew what I looked like when I was presenting.  It turned out that when I was nervous I tended to not only smooth my clothes but grab them and hold the edge of my shirt in a bunch.  Hilarious. Unless it’s you.

Here’s the key.  I only had to see myself do that once.  I fixed it…

My Grandfather Benedict was a United Methodist circuit preacher in Wyoming during the Great Depression He had 4 different churches. They were quite distant from each other so he would do 2 one week and two the second week. He always kept a suitcase in the car, and books and other what not because in Wyoming a storm can come out of nowhere. It could blow for days, and a traveler would simply knock on a door and be taken in until everything cleared up. It is not good to be caught out in a…