Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/326874
28 | Boating Industry | July 2014 [ Build your sales training playbook ] www.BoatingIndustry.com Two-for-one training Amanda Blackstone and Duncan Butler, a two- person consulting team from Atlanta-based The Butler Group, focus on what they call "front of the house" sales concerns that help dealers im- prove their sales game. For dealerships looking to start a sales train- ing program, Blackstone suggests management begins with a focus on the building blocks of customer service — prompt in-person greetings, answering the phone "with a smile" and aggres- sive customer follow-ups. "Duncan and I travel all over the country and we walk into different dealerships, even dealer- ships that we don't work with, and we'll just go in for a drop-in visit," said Blackstone. "Nine times out of ten, we're not greeted, so it's getting dealerships back to basics and back to what is their sales practice and what steps do they use to stay on top of their sales team." Once the essentials of good customer service are in place, they suggest formalizing a sales pro- cess that examines every aspect of the customer experience, starting with how customers flow through the dealerships, how units are shown off, ensuring a checklist is followed for every sale and making sure that somebody is in charge of managing leads that come in through the web- site, from the OEMs or through the store's lead management system — an essential step as traffic picks up in an improving economy. "From there, we figure out what behavior is being used in the dealership and from there we go in and train them … and measure where their successes are and where their opportuni- ties are," Blackstone said. "When we go in and have them truly start using a lead manager sys- tem the way it should be used, they will see their sales increase." Blackstone and Butler support all forms of training, from webinars to trade show seminars, but agreed that the fastest way to ramp up a store's sales department is to bring in a third- party trainer who can evaluate the dealership's performance with an unbiased perspective. Beyond exposing sales staff to in-depth train- ing, part of the training process is ensuring that established practices are followed going forward. One way to ensure that is incentivizing desired behavior so it's in the salesperson's financial in- terest to adhere to new policies. "If you put a salesperson there with a salary, he makes the same whether he's there four hours a day, six hours a day, whether he sells one boat [or] 10 boats," Butler said. "You've got to keep your salesperson hungry to get that behavior going, to get that momentum going, to get those sales driving through the front door." Once policies are in place, repeating the mes- sage helps achieve consistency in practice and in terms of the customer experience. "It doesn't mean that [the salespeople] didn't get it, but you're still going over their log, how they spoke to that customer, how did they feel that they were successful, where did they feel they were weak," Butler said. "As the manager you should be constantly coaching and training and leading them to become the best salesperson they can be." With store traffic generally increasing across the country, many dealers are reverting back to conditions seen in the past where everybody has started wearing more hats than before. In this environment, many dealers are scared to ramp their payrolls back to pre-recession levels, but Blackstone said dealers need to shed their fear of ramping their payrolls back up to allow "manag- ers to be managers." Both contend that in-person training is the most effective way to make big strides in the shortest possible timeframe. One-on-one exer- cises like role-playing help sales staff slow down the actual sales process, increase their own confi- dence and ensure that basic procedures are being followed with every customer. "The basics [means] having a sales process, knowing your inventory, making sure your sales staff is confident, putting that first step forward, knowing the products they carry and constantly, constantly training on the product that's in the store," Butler said. Focusing on attitude Anyone who attended last year's MDCE key- note address knows that sales trainer Jeffrey Gitomer has a unique, enthusiastic approach to how customers should be treated in a dealer- ship. Building upon his experience at MDCE, Gitomer has partnered with the Marine Retail- ers Association of the Americas to create the MRAA Interactive Virtual Training System that's available to its members. The goal of the video-based Virtual Training System is to offer low-cost training that covers many different topics in small, 15-minute bites so salespeople can fit training into their workdays and to get the repetition he says is required for training to stick and be most effective. "The way to train salespeople is to take a topic like attitude or a topic like questioning or a topic like engagement or … follow-up or … clos- ing the sale and creating repetition for that sales- person so that, number one, they feel supported and, number two, they feel like they're getting that education that they need, the answers that they need and, number three, by practice and becoming proficient at it until they ultimately become masters of it," he said. As the marine industry enters a healthier phase, Gitomer sees unique challenges aris- ing from new generations of family members moving into leadership roles at dealerships across the country. Their success or failure, he said, would depend on how well they've stud- ied the industry, how much training they've been exposed to and how involved they were in the business. "The ones that realize that training's avail- able, they'll do fine even if they don't have all the training that they needed when they were "You've got to keep your salesperson hungry to get that behavior going, to get that momentum going, to get those sales driving through the front door." — Duncan Butler, The Butler Group P26x31-BI14JUL-TrainingPrograms.indd 28 5/28/14 12:04 PM