OUR world has drastically changed in the past four months – especially here in North America on the other side of the Pacific you Aussies.

Virtually every dealer over here leaned out staff levels or laid off their sales staff during the pandemic.

Now that markets are opening up, they have a unique opportunity to ‘re-hire’ their team. Dealers are asking questions like:

• What will business look like post-pandemic?
• Which sales staff should I bring back?
• How many staff will I need?
• How many staff can I afford?

Perhaps there is an even more important question…what are the top skills needed for the sales professional of the future?

At a recent Sales Leadership session we conducted online I asked top dealers this question and here are their answers:

• They need to be tech-savvy, skilled at interacting digitally with a customer.
• They need to be organised, managing their time and their customer contacts.
• They need to be innovators, finding new ways to enhance the online and offline purchase experience.
• They need to have strong phone skills, as the phone continues to be the strongest link between the digital and physical showroom.
• They need to have a customer service orientation, with a willingness to serve the customer.

Wow, what happened to closing skills or the ability to hold gross profit? Our world certainly has changed.

The big challenge comes when we look at our pre-pandemic sales roster. How many of our top performers have all of these five skills? Not enough!

Is the answer to hire a totally new team? Of course not. We all have many good people, and some excellent people. But we all know that yesterday’s skills alone won’t be enough.

The good news is that top sales performers are typically very resilient and adaptable, and they know that the world has drastically changed.

Dealers also intuitively know which of their team have the most capacity to adapt and learn these new skills. But knowing who to hire back is not the full solution.

It matters less which sales professionals you bring back, and more what kind of culture you bring them back into. Do we bring them back into a re-active culture where we wait for customers to show up? If that’s the case, we don’t need very many staff, do we?

The key is to rehire the sales staff who you believe have the right skills and potential, BUT to bring them back into a pro-active Appointment Culture, where they are responsible for creating selling opportunities every day.

A Culture of Service where we are willing to “go to the customer”. A Culture where we do the hard work of preparing well in advance for each customer appointment and we are passionate about delivering a high value customer experience.

So, let’s go even deeper, and ask another even more challenging question. What are the skills needed of a sales manager to create and sustain the Appointment Culture?

Historically sales managers have led from the authority of their position. Much of this authority came from the industry information that was so closely guarded.

Their leadership style was to “direct and correct”. They spent the majority of their time as “fixers”, managing inventory, structuring deals for profit, and supervising the activity of their sales professionals.

Today, so many of yesterday’s operational functions have been automated with more automation coming. It’s not the “hard skills” of appraising a trade or structuring a deal that will win and secure the customer or the sales team of the future, rather it’s the “soft skills” of coaching and leading.

Here are the traits of a successful sales manager:

• Successful sales managers today are learning to “Inspire Activity” rather than “Direct and Correct”, and they are active on the showroom floor, leading their team and modelling how to connect, demonstrate value and create a high value customer experience.

• They focus on activity first and results second because if they can inspire appointment-making activity there will be no shortage of selling opportunities.

• They establish a daily cadence of accountability for appointment making and selling activity. Every day counts for the success of the sales team.

• Training also becomes a crucial component of the sales manager’s daily activity and the manager’s willingness to learn new appointment-making skills and serve the customers sets a powerful example for the team to follow.

• They celebrate team members who perform and position the celebration around how the success was a result of following the right process.

• Sales managers who can rally their sales team every day to fight for appointments are the rainmakers of the future. To be blunt, in 24 years in the retail auto industry, I have never known a sales manager who was fired because their team had too many appointments.

The Appointment Culture also simplifies the recruiting process. The lazy or opportunistic salespeople, and those unwilling to change, won’t be attracted to the disciplines required to succeed. But for those who are willing, there is a clear pathway to success.

For the dealers with an Appointment Culture their success becomes intentional rather than accidental because every day their team is focused on creating and then maximizing selling opportunities.

When our teams can create enough appointment opportunities every day to be successful, our dealership is positioned to deliver a High Value Customer Experience, growing our sales TODAY and TOMORROW.

JEFF WILLIAMS, the president and CEO of the Canadian-based customer retention, training and sales events group, Absolute Results.

The next instalment in this series will be published in August with a third instalment will be published in September.

By Jeff Williams