In any retail environment, we know that today’s customers want transparency, timeliness, and information. That’s why it’s imperative that your sales and service teams have these 5 essential sales skills to help them most effectively work with their customers.
Here, we’ll explore the essential sales skills that every sales professional needs to master. We’ll also discuss why these skills matter, whether you’re just starting your career or are a seasoned sales professional. These valuable skills and actionable insights will help you improve your customer service, close rates, and drive more revenue.
1. Build Influence – This is the foundation of the sales process and applies to both auto sales and service. This is the process of establishing credibility and trust with your customers, whether they’re new or returning. This step is crucial in sales because customers are more likely to buy from someone they trust and respect. Mastering this skill will allow you to connect with your customers and will make them feel like individuals and not just a name on a piece of paper. By understanding that people are different and the need to interact with them differently, you can tailor the information you provide to them in a way that will best resonate with them. At Quantum5, we teach you how to connect with individuals and position yourself as a valuable resource. We help you understand what type of customer you're working with and what medium will help you accomplish your goal.
2. Discover Needs – This is the process of learning about the customer’s current needs, wants, motivations, and challenges. This information will help inform you on how best to address their specific needs. In this stage, active listening, asking open-ended questions, and building rapport will help you gain a deeper understanding of the customer’s unique situation. This is critical and can help lead towards a more successful outcome. For example, if you know you’re working with someone who owns a 15+ year old vehicle, they might want to learn about new vehicle features (blind spot monitoring, lane-keep assist, adaptive cruise control, smartphone integrations, etc.). Other customers might not care what’s new (or they already know), but maybe they’re color driven, or want one particular style of vehicle, etc. This is our opportunity to understand who they are and tailor questions to get to the customer’s motivation, which is beyond just features and benefits. By understanding what's motivating them to make a purchase – are they buying because their family has outgrown their current vehicle or technology and safety features are more important to them – you can tailor your conversation to focus on what they’re really looking for. This applies to the service side too, where you’re not just asking the diagnostic questions, but you’re really drilling down to get to the underlying information.
3. Provide Solutions – For dealership salespeople, this has traditionally been referred to as the feature-benefit presentation. On the service side, this is the traditional MPI presentation (multi-point inspection). Instead of the basic process, we teach you how to go deeper than that. Instead of just checking a box on the walkaround and seeming almost robotic, this is where you can demonstrate that you listened to the customer and heard what they were saying. Here, you can reiterate what you heard – that safety is important, they need space for the kids, sports gear, etc. – instead of just talking about the cupholders or the horsepower, you can demonstrate the ease of putting car seats in, you can talk about the sports equipment that would fit in the trunk and so on. This is your opportunity to tailor the experience to them instead of just being cookie cutter. On the service side, it’s important that service advisors don't sound robotic so it’s best to slow down and prioritize the NPI in a way that’s meaningful for each customer.
4. Direction Forward – We know that not everyone says yes, in either sales or service. This is essentially the ‘overcoming objections’ phase. In this phase, we don’t want to use specific word tracks because we want to sound conversational and do what's best for each customer. Though we try to stay proactive, service is sometimes naturally reactive as customers come in because they’re experiencing an issue with their vehicle. Also, not everyone enjoys car shopping so they might automatically be on defense when they come in. We teach you how to be conversational, understand what customers are saying no to, and how to overcome those objections (although sometimes certain objections can’t be overcome). You want to earn their business long-term rather than forcing them into a decision that’s only going to benefit both parties in the short-term. Earning their long-term business is the real goal.
5. Lifetime Value – This is the culmination of the 4 previous steps. If we do the other 4 steps well, we create an experience for the customer that is beyond the traditional process. By slowing down, listening, understanding, not abandoning your customers when they transition to the finance step, not forcing unnecessary things on them in sales or service, we’ll create customers for life. The goal is to make people come back and ask for you by name (rather than just submitting an internet lead and working with someone new, or going to a new dealership all together). In the service drive, it’s important to provide a baseline level of service but you will really stand out by walking a customer to their car instead of just handing them their keys, for example. On the sales side, it's more than just pairing the cell phone, but helping them set the radio presets, setting their seat settings, showing them how to fold down seats, how to turn on headlights, etc. These little things will set you and your dealership apart and be that extra special something that the customer remembers. People don’t often remember your every action but they will remember how you made them feel.
These 5 essential sales skills are all covered in depth in our Frictionless Sales training program. They all relate back to one another and are taught in sequential order, as each one builds on the previous skill. From a dealer’s perspective, it doesn’t matter if you have a traditional or modern operations perspective, these skills are agnostic to any dealer’s process; the 10-step sales process is the same for any dealer. For service, the steps are the same no matter where you go in the country. These skills can fit into any dealer’s process.
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