Dealer exec: Put training efforts where customers are

Matt Walsh, vice president of operations for Carter Myers Automotive in Charlottesville, Va., thinks service advisers need sales training as much as — and maybe more than — the vehicle sales and finance and insurance staffs because they meet far more customers face-to-face.

“Most dealerships tend to put all the [sales] training in the front half of the house and not enough in the back half of the house,” Walsh says. “I would argue that it’s more important [to train advisers] because we sold 13,900 cars last year, but we wrote 160,000 customer-pay tickets. That’s like 12 times as many customers, and that’s not including warranty or internal [repair orders], just customer-pay tickets.”

Walsh says Carter Myers hired DealerPro Training for the service department at its Buick-GMC-Cadillac store and saw the service department’s monthly sales grow from $250,000 to $300,000, helping it go from a breakeven operation to one that’s profitable.

“We wanted a fresh set of eyes,” Walsh says of the training. “They diagnosed what was wrong, did a lot of observation, helped us reduce costs, helped us with how to overcome objections [from customers] when calling back on declined work. We saw that our service advisers had a better skill set in front of customers and were better on the phone.”

The success of the initial program led Carter Myers to train service advisers from the group’s other 14 dealerships, bringing them to a classroom setting in a central location.

“We have seen our hours per [repair order] and our effective labor rates go up,” Walsh says. “I can’t necessarily attribute this to the training, but we also have very low turnover among service advisers, so there’s more stability now.”

Training also boosted morale and engagement among service advisers.

“When they saw that we were investing in their skill sets and their ability to learn, a lot of the advisers loved the attention they were getting and loved the training,” Walsh says. “They would apply what they learned and try it out on the floor. They’d come back with questions the next time the trainer would come by. You could tell they were engaged by the questions they asked.”

Walsh thinks any sales training needs to include face-to-face interaction with an instructor because all the variables involved in talking with customers can’t be distilled into a computer program.

“It needs to be role-playing, rehearsing, going over word tracks that work and lower the anxiety of a customer who’s hearing them,” he says. “There are 10 ways to say the same thing, and if they do it in a way that educates the customer, lowers their anxiety, then the better they are. I don’t care if it’s in the finance department, on the sales floor or on the service drive, there’s certain ways to do things that are more effective than others.”