The Quality Sales Presentation
by Jim Ziegler
From handshake to the desk, the average sales person today has become a track star.
Over the last seventeen years I have visited and interacted with more than 1000 new car franchised dealerships in almost every state in the union. It really doesn’t matter whether or not you are talking about a domestic dealership or an import dealership, a high-line store, or a Hyundai dealership the story is the same. If you put a stopwatch on a sales person the moment they first shake hands with a customer, they will usually show up at the sale desk trying to work figures in less than twenty minutes after they first met and greeted the customer.
A quality sales process involves building a relationship with the customer and with the car, as well as presenting the dealership to the customer. An automobile isn’t a commodity…we’re not talking about a can of Folgers coffee on the shelf here.
An automobile is 15,000 component parts made of plastic, metal, rubber, glass, and space age materials. Some of these parts are moving at incredible speeds in excess of ten thousand RPMs with less than three one-thousandths of an inch of clearance and less than one one-thousandth of an inch of lubrication in the presence of high levels of heat. All of these parts are constantly rubbing and abrading against each other. Your new automobile is a complex, high technology machine with more than 100 times the computer memory that first put Apollo 11 on the moon.
Personally, I couldn’t conceive of anyone who would want to purchase a new automobile without a complete, quality presentation. In my travels, the highest commissioned sales people with the best CSI surveys were always those who gave their customers the best quality presentation of the product.
Unfortunately, today’s sales person often skips the presentation stage of the sale. I can say with absolute certainty that most sales people never present the features and the benefits to the customer.
The presentation is the value-building part of the sales process that justifies the price (profit). If the customer is more emotionally bonded to their money than they are to the car, they will not buy today. The walk-around is the part of the process where the customer actually buys the car. This is when it stops being “A NEW CAR” and it becomes “THEIR NEW CAR”. Once again, in my travels, I am amazed at just how terrible the product knowledge is of some sales people.
SAFETY IS THE SALE
...the biggest single item the customer must be presented is the safety of the car. With all of the bad press we’ve had, the sales person needs to spend a lot of time showing and explaining the safety technology of the new car to the customer. Believe me, most of them (customers) are not aware of everything they are being asked to pay for here.
WHY ARE SALES PEOPLE TAKING SHORTCUTS?
If management were hyper-aware of every deal in progress, there would never be any missed walk-arounds. Just because your sales people do great walk-arounds in the classroom, don’t assume they are wasting any of these skills on actual customers.
Personally, I would never work figures on a deal with a customer that hadn’t actually driven the car and been given a quality presentation by a sales professional.
If my alleged sales person was consistently too weak to persuade customers to become involved with the car before they became involved with the money, I’d have to help them by freeing up their future. You don’t develop sales people by catering to personality weaknesses.
Jim Ziegler
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