If I Had to Start My Car Sales Career Over Again, I'd Do THIS

If I were starting my car sales career earlier, this is the few things that I would change or what I would do. My name is Christopher and I've been a car salesman for over 10 years. I've worked in the industry as a salesperson, as a finance manager, and as management. And I get asked a lot what I would do if I was starting out. So I wanted to share my tips in this video. If you guys are new here, subscribe, hit that thumbs up button. We're always posting more car and automotive content. If I was starting my career over, the first thing I would do would be learning how to sell. A lot of new salespeople get kind of overwhelmed with learning the product knowledge, learning the cars, learning the horsepower, learning the specs of every car on their lot. I would be focusing on learning how to sell. You don't have to know everything about the car. You can find that information. The information is online. The information is on the web. It's in pamphlets. And a lot of customers have already educated themselves on a lot of that info. The main thing that I would be focusing on is learning how to sell to people, learning how to ask the right questions, learning how to qualify people, really honing my sales person craft, learning how to break the ice and be comfortable and not be nervous. That is the main thing that I would be focusing on. Again, you can find the answers about the cars. If there's something that you don't know, you can just tell people that you're new and you're going to look up that answer, but you can not look up how to connect with people, how to sell, how to qualify them, how to close them. I would be learning that right away. And that's one thing I didn't do early. I focused a lot on learning product knowledge and things like that. And that's kind of the training that most dealerships give you. Most dealerships will put you on the sales floor and teach you a lot about the cars, but nobody really teaches you how to sell and how to connect with people. The fundamentals are super important and there's a reason why Kobe Bryant would take a thousand free throw shots or a thousand three pointers practice and just go through the fundamentals because he wanted to focus on the basics. And that's what you guys need to do. Now the next thing that I would fix or I would train is just stop trying to like know everything. I would try to make sure that you are still a cup half filled and you want to keep working towards filling your cup. It's okay to say to a customer, you know what, I'm not sure about that answer, but let me get it for you. You don't want to pretend like you're the expert and then get caught giving them wrong information. That always kind of dumbs down the sales process. You want to make sure that you know a little more than the customer, but you're not going to lie to them. You want to show that, Hey, if I don't know something, I'm going to find out the answer and it's okay to be like, Hey guys, like that's a good question. I'm not sure. Like let's look it up or something like that or pull up the information on your phone. You don't want to just guess at something and then down the road the customer finds out that you told them the wrong answer because that's really going to take you down a peg in the customer's life. When I first started out, I would try to pretend like I knew everything and if I didn't know the answer, I would almost guess and that kind of led me into, we call it paddling upstream in your canoe where you are trying to reverse back from something that you said. We are literally up a Creek without a paddle. Another big thing, even I didn't do this when I first started out, but learning how to manage your time effectively is crucial in car sales. Again, your commission base. I've mentioned this in my training videos before. No one is going to tell you in car sales to get to work. Nobody's going to tell you to pick up the phone and start calling customers. They're going to rely on you to call your customers and you need to manage your time effectively. So if you spend an hour of your day shopping online or browsing social media, you are not managing your time effectively. Learning how to still close customers and deal with your appointments, but finding the time to make 30 to 50 phone calls a day or send 30 to 50 text messages is huge and that's something that I had to learn quickly in my career and I wish I started doing it earlier. Again, car sales is a weird job where you can show up to work and sit in a chair all day and do nothing and nobody's going to tell you to get to work. You want to be personally motivated and manage your time and I didn't learn that again until about year two or year three. I didn't learn that right out of the gate. If I saw other salespeople standing around talking, I would go into those circles and talk to them. You got to avoid the huddles so to speak because nothing effective happens in those kind of huddles. So make sure you come for an eight hour shift. Make sure you're putting in a full eight hours of work so that you are the most efficient. Again, you got to remember you're working for yourself. Think of you are the business. Yes, your dealership gives you a phone, a desk, a chair, a computer, but you are the one who should be driving business and you have to look at yourself almost like an entrepreneur. The other thing I would focus on is really building my database. Having a strong database and a CRM is crucial and when I first started, a lot of times I would write customers names and phone numbers on a piece of paper and I wouldn't save them for the future. Once I was done with them or I closed them, I would put that paper in the garbage. You want to make sure you're importing everything into an effective CRM and you are taking strong data points because those data points and all the information that you collect from customers will make it much easier when you get to year two and year three in your followup so that you have repeat customers and you have a strong database that you can send emails out to or mailers or you can call so that you're constantly driving repeat business. And when I was in car sales at the start, I didn't fully start taking advantage of my CRM really into like year four. That I actually started using my CRM to the most power that it was. So you want to make sure you build your database, build your portfolio and really start generating a database of clients that you can reach out to for referrals and for repeat business because that's going to be your bread and butter if you plan on making this a career. To go off that, the other thing I wish I used earlier and this is kind of a time constraint because earlier in my sales career, this technology wasn't around, but that was using automations. So for example, when I first started in car sales, if I booked an appointment with someone, I would manually type in a confirmation and I would send it to them maybe the day before their appointment and I would do this all every single day. I would be sending people confirmations of their appointments or I'd be manually texting customers the same thing over and over again. I would start using automation. So if your CRM has some sort of automation function, this is great for appointment reminders, email blasts, text message blasts. Sometimes I'll just text my whole database like 500 text messages or even a thousand text messages will go out to my whole database at once and I can really generate leads and appointments while I'm sleeping using automation and I talk about this all. If you guys want to learn how to do all this, I've created my full Cars Unlocked Academy, which is a full curated online course where I teach you guys all these things I'm talking to you about in a full course. The link is in the description below. You can level up your career by using our Cars Unlocked Academy. So you don't have that kind of slow growth that I did. You can just accelerate right away. Now my last tip would be to kind of build your reputation or build your rapport and this kind of still happens to me this day. It actually happened to me last week and it actually irked me. It really irks me when I see someone outside of work, for example, at my church or in my community, in my sports leagues or at the gym, I see someone and they say, Oh, do you work at Nissan? And then I say, yes. And they say, Oh, like my mom was there and we saw you and my mom ended up buying a car from somewhere else. When someone says that to me, that tells me that I haven't communicated to that customer previously or that person previously that I work at Nissan and I haven't fully built my reputation up because the last thing I want them to do is walk in here and buy a car from someone else and they didn't know I work here. So I try to build my reputation using social media, using word of mouth, just introducing your people, shaking hands, carrying business cards with you. I try to build my reputation up outside of work so that everybody in my network or in my circle, you know, there's always two to three points of separation from everybody. I love when people who have never walked into my dealership that I know from somewhere else from a community that I'm in or an outside community that I am, reach out to me and say, Hey, do you work at Nissan? My cousin's looking to buy a Nissan. They come in and I'm able to get that sale. That tells me that I've done my job communicating to all the people in my social groups where I work and what I do, but when it doesn't happen, I feel failed. So what I wish I did at the start of my career was really get that word out of who I am and where I work. And that's what every new car sales person should be doing. They should be communicating to everybody. They see where they work and what they do so that friends, family members, referrals will all come in and buy a car off them. So if you're in car sales and you're not doing that, use social media, use word of mouth, use text messages, get everything out so that you can generate easy sales from referrals and repeat business. Now, lastly, think about your career as a whole. I've seen this happen to so many people where they start thinking, Oh, I want to be a finance manager one day. And they try to jump into a car dealership and learn everything about financing because they want to become a finance manager eventually, but they forget the first part about it is learning how to sell. So yes, it's great to have aspirations to be a finance manager, but you need to learn the basics. The road to becoming a finance manager or a manager is first becoming a great car sales person. So make sure you are the best at that first and then start doing more training to learn other aspects of the automotive industry. So those are a lot of things I wish I did when I kind of first started out and a lot of things I would change looking back on my career. I shared them with you guys today so you guys can learn how to grow quickly and we would love for you guys to either hone your craft by joining our academy or you can become a YouTube member where we post training videos on a weekly basis. We'll see you guys there. Hit that join button, or if you just want free training, check out our other videos and I'll see you in the next one.