Has your selling process fallen apart? Has the Evaporation factor eaten you up? A little slide here and there? Does one manager do it one way and another manager do it another way?

Have you ever hired a training company to come into your dealership to install a training process? You know one of those 10 step systems that may or may not include an up system, four square or whatever?

I’m thinking you probably raised your hand and answered yes to my little question. I’m willing to bet at the completion of the training that your business improved and you saw an increase in volume, gross or both. I can also bet that over time your selling process began to evaporate.

The selling process to me is much like my “Life Cycle Management Section” in my used car workshop. The key to life cycle management is to recognize a problem car on day one not day sixty-one.

The problem with a selling process is we are often in denial that it’s actually falling apart. We want so much to believe that we have it right and that everyone is doing it right that we ignore the obvious.

Often the management team will say they have a selling process but they don’t follow the steps or they don’t have one and they just kind of wing it.

The most fundamental aspect of the car business, that hasn’t changed since the invention of the closing statement “would you take…,” is to have a selling process that all the members of the management team understand and believe in.

Dealers frequently complain about gross, volume or both. If you want to improve all the above then take a hard look at your selling process.

I’m a firm believer that a deal has three parts. A beginning, a middle and an end. All three are critical if you are to maximize results.

I like to think of the 1st stage, the beginning, as the greeting, fact finding, qualifying, or “make-a-friend” stage. Call it what you want. Managers who really know what they are doing have a keen eye for what’s going on in this stage. This is the stage where deals unwind or blow up, and then we wonder what the heck happened. Personally, I’ll execute a T.O. at this stage just as fast as I would in the closing stage, maybe even faster. If this gets screwed up you ain’t got a chance.

The 2nd stage or the middle of the deal involves a lot of the actual selling. It’s the story about the car, the dealership and why they should buy here.

And of course the last stage is the close itself. We all know that if stages 1 and 2 are done well then stage 3 is a cake-walk.

With all the amazing technology available to us today it would be easy to see how one might view a selling process as the old frontier which is tired, worn out and outdated. Nothing could be further from the truth.

It’s the old frontier that actually presents the most interesting opportunities to charge ahead of the competition. Attacking and tailoring your selling process with real innovation presents a unique challenge for the new age of selling into which we are evolving.

Don’t sell it short, or should I say don’t cut your selling process short. If you’re serious about improving gross and volume then maybe now is the time to re-evaluate what you do and how you do it. That’s all I’m gonna say, Tommy Gibbs