Turn off your distractions. You’re here to learn and invest in your future. There’s nothing worse you can do than pay only half attention during this training.
Turn off Facebook, close your browser tabs, put your phone on silent and pay attention.
If possible be in a closed room where customers and staff can’t distract you.
The training takes a few hours to complete. If needed, block of twenty minutes each day over the next few days so that you can commit to this.
Next, turn off your negative thoughts. Positive things happen when you have a positive attitude. If you want to achieve your goals and grow as a person, you to have a positive mindset.
You become the sum of the five people you spend the most time with.
The people who you spend the most within your life are not only your family but also those you work with. Identify who has a negative impact on you, and turn that negative around to a positive. If not a person, then identify the source of the negativity and correct it.

Sell like the plane is about the crash!

Do the government and FAA say “planes cannot fly because this plane crashed”? No! They investigate to find the problem or one flaw that brought the whole thing down. It’s rarely the case that the whole plane was defective.

It’s more likely that everything worked perfectly except one thing caused the crash. The same goes for you. If you have something that didn’t work in the past, find the one flaw instead of writing the whole idea off. In this training, you may be asked to try things that you’ve tried in the past that failed.

Get in the mindset that although something failed in the past, it doesn’t mean it won’t work now.

Our teachings work for every shop, yes, even yours!

But, your shop may not have the same customer demographic of the shop on the opposite coast of yours. You may need to tweak one or two things to make it work better for your customer base. Examine what didn’t work to allow yourself to know what does work.

Please engage with us. Ask questions.

You can start a chat with us, join our Facebook group, or submit a support ticket. There is no such thing as dumb questions, only dumb answers. We do not give dumb answers and neither do the shops in the Facebook group. These shops are about raising the standards of the industry by sharing our knowledge. The flipside to this is sharing knowledge. Please share what you learn so that everyone can grow and be prosperous.

Why should you listen to little old me?

As your trainer, I’ve owned many businesses. My first business was a carpet cleaning business. Do you think people are picky when you service their cars? Try providing a service in their home. I learned the hard way to provide great customer service. This taught me how to make the experience exceptional. As a result, I could sell more profitable services. In this series, I will share my experiences and recommend some books you should have in your shop.

This training will make you a success, no purchase necessary.

With that said, we will be talking about our products. While not required for your success, they will make it a hell of a lot easier! I’ve worked with hundreds of shops over the last 6 years and have gathered a pool of experience in what works. I have over 11 years of experience in sales and marketing and know what needs to happen to maximize your sales. My mission is to work with your shop so you can see the success you desire from your sales and marketing. Take what you learn here for free and I’m confident you will see enough results you’ll want to see what can happen when you pay for my services.

What you’re going to learn in this training can be used for good or evil.

You’ll learn how to make your customers buy more from you with ease. Without pushy tactics, you’ll get your customers to buy a lot more services. You must promise to use this knowledge for good. Only sell your customers things they need! Use your heart and never use your knowledge for evil!

Let’s discuss your successful sales traits.

The top successful sales and customer service people have certain things in common.

Successful people believe in themselves

You must know that you can do whatever you set out to do. You may fail and have to pick yourself up, but you must trust that you will succeed!

Successful people are positive

Remove as much negativity from your life as you can. Positive people are magnetic, they draw other people to them. When people see your positivity they will buy more from you.

Successful people do things that build their confidence

Don’t rely on others to build your confidence for you, it’ll never happen. Figure out what you need to do to feel confident. There are mentors, books, and personal coaches that can help you with this. But the bottom line is that you need to be a confident person to succeed at sales. When customers sense you’re not confident, they’re not confident in buying from you.

Successful people surround themselves with winners and mentors

Get into groups of people who will encourage you, and who are where you want to be. Learn from them and strive to improve every day.

Successful people are always learning

Learning never ends. The industry changes, the people change, there are always new things to learn. Some people get out of high school and college and think “I’m done learning!” In today’s world that’s not possible. Always be willing to learn and improve.

Successful people get accountability

If you don’t tell other people your goals you’ll have a hard time reaching them. Without accountability, you don’t have someone who can ask you “did you achieve your goal?” Find people who can help you with your accountability. Set goals. Without goals where are you going? It’s like driving to New York but you didn’t bring a map. How are you going to get there?

Successful people are problem solvers

Don’t shift problems away from yourself. When something goes wrong in your shop and you have to deal with the customer, don’t blame someone. Tell the customer “we screwed up. I’m really sorry about this but I’m going to make it right for you.” Be the person who takes responsibility and doesn’t shift blame. People respect people who take responsibility.

Successful people take responsibility

Mistakes are going to happen if you’re growing. If you stop learning you won’t make mistakes, but you won’t grow. In our team, we welcome making mistakes as long as we’re learning from it. Make many mistakes. That’s how everything evolves, everything grows. Like the Wright Brothers, they crashed a lot of planes before they got one to fly.

Successful people take action

Take advantage of opportunities when they appear. Take action before someone tells you to. If you see a problem that you have a solution for or an improvement you can make, tell people about them.

Successful people build trust

This is done by doing what you say you’re going to do. If you can’t do something don’t say you are going to do it. Always under-promise and over-deliver. If you tell a customer that her car will be ready by five but you call her at three to pick it up, what did you do? You’ve impressed this customer by over-delivering. Do what you’re going to do when you say you’re going to do it. Lastly, finish what you say you’re going to do.

Using your subconscious mind to boost sales.

Your subconscious makes your heartbeat and your body function without you having to tell it to. As you learn things through life, you pick up habits. The way you drive, the way you sit, and the way you walk are all subconscious. Your brain will do things without you being conscious of it whether it’s good for you or not.

Most of us learned how to have bad posture. It’s something that gets ingrained into us over time. To correct your posture, you need to tell yourself to straighten up your back. Over time your subconscious takes over and it becomes your new habit.

Your subconscious mind can be dangerous to you.

Police have done deep studies of human behavior during mass shootings. People avoided entering doors they have never been down or said: “do not enter”. Most would run back exactly where they came from, even if it keeps them in the direct line of fire! In high-stress situations, people’s subconscious takes over. It’s trying to be efficient in getting you out of harm’s way. It basically says “It’s not safe here, but it’s safe where we came from, go back there!

You may be creating habits in your sales patterns that are not good.

You need to think about what you’re doing and make changes when you have to. If negative things are affecting your sales pattern, you need to notice when it’s happening and do something about it.

By consciously making a change you can create better habits that will serve you in the future.

The most common excuse people use to not making changes is “I don’t have time.” You have to make the time! When it comes to improving, there always has to be time available for it.

This holds true despite how hectic and busy you are.

Like in the caveman cartoon above, two cavemen are pushing a cart with square wheels. Another guy is telling them “look at what I’ve invented!” while holding the round wheel. But the other guys tell him “we don’t have time for that, we have to push this cart!” Think about that.

Are you pushing a cart with square wheels?

Your subconscious mind will have you keep pushing with square wheels. But you can choose to say “let’s think about putting round wheels on the cart instead of square ones”.

Be aware of what your bad subconscious habits are and what good habits you want to get. Write them down and make a list. Read them to yourself often.

Work to replace your bad habits with good ones. Be open to change; you have a lot to gain from it.

A goal without an action plan is just a dream

Setting goals are very important to achieve anything. But having goals alone is not good enough. To get where you want to go, your GPS map gives directions to point you the way to your goal destination. You need to specify your goals with great clarity and directions to get what you want.

You want to be SMART about your goals

A goal needs to be:

Specific
Measurable
Actionable
Reachable
Timely.

Be specific in your goal

Write down what you want to achieve, when it will be achieved, and what results are you going to get from it. Don’t just say “I want to get a million dollars in sales in a year.” You need to say “On December 31st I need to have made $1,000,236.35 in sales.” It may sound crazy to be so specific about your goal, but the more specific you are about what you’re trying to do, the more real it becomes.

Your goal needs to be measurable

Answer the questions “what is the amount that you need to have? When will it be achieved?” When you know how many months or how many dollars, you will know whether you’ve made progress.

Your goal needs to be actionable

You need to know what actions you need to take to achieve your goal. You can discover the actions you need to take by reverse-engineering the goal. To reach a million dollars of sales, how much do you need to sell each month? What do you have to do every week to get the sales you need each month? What does that mean every work order? Break it down to specifics so that you can measure your progress and keep on track to reach your goal.

Your goal needs to be reachable

Is your goal something you can actually achieve? If your goal is to make two million dollars in sales in a year, you need to ask: has anyone done this before? Is this even a possible goal? Make sure your goal is something you can do with a bit of effort, not something impossible for you to do.

Your goal needs to be timely

You need to answer the question “when will this be done?” When do you have to make certain actions? What do you have to do every day to make progress on your goal? What are the steps you have to take and when does each step need to happen?

The last aspect of achieving your goal is this:

Why are you trying to achieve this goal? What do you get out of achieving this goal? What personal growth do you get out of it? How does it affect your life? Is there a certain personal revenue you’re working at? Is there a lifestyle you want to create, quality of life you’re aiming for? What is driving you? Is it your kids, your family? What is the emotional attachment you have to that goal?

Write all of these things down and you will have created a plan that will allow you to reach your goal.

NO hard selling!

The short answer is no. Hard selling is not at all necessary. There’s no need to pressure your customers to buy from you and it’s not necessary if you want to have great success with your sales.

What is it that makes people buy?

The answer is that people buy for emotional reasons. Most people tend to explain the features or the facts to make a sale. This is the worst way to attempt to get a sale. According to research, the majority of people buy for emotional reasons. They use the facts afterward to justify the purchase.

Have you ever bought something you know you weren’t supposed to?
Maybe it was too expensive for your budget or you didn’t talk to your spouse about it beforehand. But in your mind, you just had to have it!

Now you have to present the purchase to your spouse in a way that makes it look like a good idea. Naturally, you’re going to use the facts to justify the purchase.

Selling more with emotions

For example, let’s say you’re looking at a customer’s battery that’s five or six years old. It’s at the end of its life cycle. It could probably last another year or six months, but you don’t know for sure. You think that it’s in the customer’s best interests to replace it now before it dies and leaves them stranded. This is how I would present it.

“Mrs. Smith, I see that this battery’s five years old now. It’s past it’s life span. It could last six or eight more months—we honestly don’t know. I think you’d much rather have it replaced now instead of having it die on the way to a soccer tournament with your kids. Now you’re stuck on the side of the road in an unfamiliar neighborhood, the kids are screaming in the backseat because it’s hot out (but you can’t turn on the air conditioning because the battery’s dead), waiting for an expensive tow truck to pick you up to take you to a shop you don’t trust.”

Compare this to saying

“Your battery is five or six years old, it’s going to die soon.”

Pull your customers into their stories based on the fact that you know Mrs. Smith has 2.5 kids who go to soccer tournaments. Show that the pain of not buying the service is greater than the pain of buying it.

The bottom line: people buy to remove pain, always explain how your service will cause them to have less pain and finally, always ask for the sale.

Sell more by knowing your customer’s story

Customers buy from people they know, like and trust.

The next question is: How do I learn that Mrs. Smith has 2.5 kids? How do I get to know my customers and form a personal connection? This is when to take advantage of Facebook and other social media platforms.

Social media has made connecting with other people so much easier.

If you friend your customers on Facebook and maintain a relationship with them through it, you will be able to form that personal connection. Spend twenty minutes a day and quickly throw a like, heart, or comment on your Facebook customer’s posts. If you engage with your customers’ lives, they will remember it. You are building know, like, and trust. Remember what they’re posting and take note of it, whether it’s their kids’ soccer tournament or their report cards. That way when your customer comes into your shop you can ask “how did Johnny’s soccer tournament go?” first thing.

Think about the impact it has when you get into personal stuff before the sale.

Joe Girard is the record holder for selling the most cars in North America. From 1963 to 1968 he sold over 13,000 vehicles for Chevrolet. In 1973 he sold 1,425 vehicles. What car salesmen do you know who’s selling like this?

Car salesmen today should be able to leave him in the dust with our technology and sales automation tools, but no one has beaten his record yet. The reason why is that nobody is building know, like, and trust the way he did.

Girard focused on the relationship. Too many service advisers are hiding behind the shop counter and logo instead of connecting with the customer. They leave it to the shop marketers to maintain the relationship beyond the front counter for them. It doesn’t work.

Most shops are not trying to connect to the customer. What Girard did differently was writing a newsletter for his customers and he signed each one. At the peak of his career, you’d have to book an appointment on his calendar to buy a car.

Let that sink in for a minute.

You want to buy a car, and the sole man you trust to buy from tells you that you have to wait until next week to do so. Then you’re happy to wait because he’s the man you want to deal with.

This is the kind of personal brand you want to make in your shop. And not only will this benefit you now, but it will also benefit you in the future. People remember you if your shop closes or if you move to a different industry. Build your following!

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What it takes to sell more auto repair services