The Number-One Telephone Skill

In BHPH, the phone is used the same as in any retail automobile operation. You use the phone to get customers to your store. You make contact and share information with your prospects, so they will come to the dealership ready to do business. Sharing information is a very important concept when discussing phone usage.

How many times have you heard one of your sales team answer the phone, “This is Jim … the price is $14,995. It has 87,000 miles … OK, ask for Jim.” Jim's next call should be for a ride home. At the very least, Jim needs to know to whom he was speaking and how to get in touch with them. I tell my salespeople that every contact you make is another part of your customer base.

Building a base is very important for any salesperson who is making a career from automobile sales (or any sales for that matter). As a salesperson, you should be mining and storing every contact you make. If these contacts cannot buy today, they may be able to buy later. Ever heard the old saying about birds of a feather? Your contact may not be able to buy, but their friends and family are generally in similar situations.

When you speak with a prospect on the phone, you need to engage them by asking questions. Who are they? Why did they call? What is their situation as it applies to your business? How can you help them? You should, at the very least, be setting up a reason to call these prospects back. If you cannot make an appointment for a visit, then make a commitment to call the prospect back with some information you discussed.

Over my years of being in the car business, I have been around some great car salespeople. In every store I have been a part of, there have always been one or two people who were always at their desks working. Everyone else was in a “scrum” (bunched up in a tight little group), griping about it being slow or how they couldn’t get any deals approved. A customer would arrive on the lot, and the scrum would have to break up so someone could go field the customer. In less than a minute, that salesman would be playing traffic cop and pointing in the window at the hard-working salesman.

We have all seen this many times over. You have heard the names: house mouse, manager’s pet and lots of others (some cannot be published). The real truth is the successful guys are working their customer bases. The salesman who isn’t scrumming with the guys is on the phone calling everyone he has made contact with. Have you ever had to replace a phone due to overuse? I have a few times.

Ken Brown in Dallas is the best example I can give. I trained Ken in BHPH about 10 years ago. He had been laid off from the telecom industry again, and he didn’t want to go back. He was in his forties by then and wanted to know how to make a good living in the car business. I asked him to dedicate himself to what I told him, and he did.

I explained that you consider every contact you make at the store, or in public, as a prospect. Find out about their situation and establish when and what they might be buying next. Keep that information in writing or on the computer. Make a note in your planner about when and why you need to contact them, and work your planner without fail. If you cannot reach them by phone, send a letter; then call again. You contact every customer you have sold soon after the sale and every 90 to 120 days thereafter.

Make sure you have a personal reason to call. Ken always kept notes on personal details about the customer’s life (e.g., kids in school, parents, church they attended, anything to follow up with the customer about besides the car). Ken also sends out birthday cards for each customer and he sends one to the car also. I even had him put a stick of gum in each card for a “present” to the customer. He would get almost as many incoming calls as he made outgoing. Ken would always have a personal question to ask them from his notes.

Today, Ken is one of the most successful Lexus salespeople in Dallas. There can be snow on the ground, and Ken is in his office burning up the phone. Ken even has an assistant to help with his sales. When Ken got the opportunity to jump to Lexus, he was concerned. “I don’t know if I can make this work,” he said to me. I told him to treat those Lexus customers exactly the same as he treated our BHPH customers. If he worked as hard in Lexus as he did in BHPH, it would pay dividends. Ken is very successful due in part to his hard work combined with his personality and his ability to work the phone.

The number-one telephone skill you should have is dedication. Make daily calls, and keep good records. The salespeople who are always busy and have steady sales are the guys working the phones even when they have busy days. Go to work to work and have a plan to succeed and stick with it.