Monthly Habits of Successful Salespeople

"The backbone of success is hard work, determination, good planning, and perseverance.”
-- Mia Hamm

“Four steps to achievement: Plan purposefully. Prepare prayerfully. Proceed positively. Pursue persistently.”
-- William A. Ward

Hey, this is Jay Rose from Total Dealer Training. I just want to speak about if you're a finance specialist, product specialist or a salesperson out there, and you're looking to be effective this coming month, there's certain things we need to do on a monthly basis. Now I'm sure you've already read our post about what we should do on a daily basis to make sure we achieve this success. Some of the monthly things that are really important are 1) Our Goals. Where are they? You know, we set a goal beginning at a month, we were tracking it every single day with our daily activities, where do we end up and looking at that? Where are we tracking? Are we doing well with our Leads, Appointments, Appointments that Showed up, Applications, Financial Terms, Approvals & Deliveries? Maybe if we didn't get an approval but didn’t deliver them, was it an objection that we needed to overcome or did the customer not qualify for our program? Are we marketing to the wrong customers? That’s why it's so critical that monthly, you sit down and you look at your business, whether or not the manager at your dealership does it with you. You need to know what you need to work on for skills and activities. What's working, what's not working and put a plan together for this coming month on how to make those adjustments and adapt to get the results that you're looking for.

It is also important to look at your advertising sources to make sure you know where your customers you deliver and don’t deliver come from. Say you delivered 25 vehicles for the month. If five were from just walk-in or location, if 15 were from Facebook / Instagram / Social media / Craigslist, wherever is your advertising could be, you need to know which advertising sources those customers are coming from so you can invest more of your time with the better closing ratio customers. For long-term growth and also the best Advertising ROI is to focus on customer referrals, especially when you're talking about subprime and BHPH. You know the old phrase, birds of a feather flock together. Most BHPH customers know many other BHPH referrals, they usually have a whole household or lots of friends that are similar to them. This is the best way to tap into additional customers which I've been doing successfully since 2005.

Another great Advertising ROI for BHPH business is getting professional Business Referrals out there that are prospecting posting or working in retail stores, that when they cannot get a car approved, you're the first person they text just a name and a cell. That's it, anything more than that? You start to get into issues with privacy. The important thing is, is I've have proven this technique since 2005, where my dealerships have up to 88% of all our deliveries were either Business Referrals or from Customer Referrals. So really want to make sure that you want to focus on that to make sure that you not only grow the number of leads for this month, but also to have a better quality lead that you can close at a higher percentage.

Now, the important thing is training and practicing perfect the skills you need to work on every day. Whatever you do to get prepared for your day, whether it's listening to music or doing fitness every single morning, wake up early. Nobody has time for working out, especially when you come home at night. The important thing is to knock it out first thing in the morning, just suck it up because you won’t have time at night. Be disciplined, get your fitness or any other discipline thing in early. I like to kill two birds with one stone, while I'm riding my fitness bike, I like to either listen to a podcast my partner Craig recommended to me or an audio book. It’s really good to help develop skills that are outside the car business, leadership or management stuff. Whether it's a podcast, YouTube video or our TDT online training, listen and practice those skills or techniques you have learned about for at least 30 minutes per day. The important thing is not just gaining knowledge but to turn that knowledge into a skill.

Finish your Tracking at the end of each month and see what goals did you hit? Then treat yourself for each of your goals you achieved. Obviously, you want to make sure the reward is relative to what you did. Like if you delivered one extra vehicle and made $200 extra dollars, don't go buy a new car. But if you've had an incredible month, maybe made an extra $3-4,000, take $500 or a thousand dollars and go treat your spouse or your kids with something nice that is on your bucket list. The key is making sure that it's in proportion to what your success is. Always take the time, give yourself a pat on the back when you accomplish goals because sometimes your managers aren’t recognizing or even rewarding you at work. You need to reward yourself. I'd always stay humble when you're at work, but take advantage of that. Another thing monthly is important to do is make sure your management or you even yourself, are sending out email, blast something positive to everyone. Everyone that has a birthday, everybody that has an anniversary, or maybe a car anniversary, you know, three years ago, this person took delivery, even if it wasn't your customer and you just added that orphan customer to your list, make sure you schedule that in your, your automatic emails once a month. Also send text messages once a month. You can do it all with an excuse for holidays, something going on during the month because every month, there's something like Cinco de Mayo or St. Patty's day or Christmas. The important thing is staying in contact with your customers at least every month, send out a message, even if it's an easy message from you or the dealership, kind of like a newsletter with some helpful tips. Then attend monthly meetings with your chamber of commerce or whatever networking groups you have, just make sure monthly, you do something. That's building your business, creating a new channel or pipeline for new leads. I always go around once a month and check in with all the business referrals I have with my current dealerships that are sending us leads, making sure they're happy, making sure they understand which customers they should be sending us and making sure they're getting paid on time. I usually do it a weekly, but sometimes if someone hasn't sent me leads in a while at the very minimum, once a month, what's going on with customers and business referrals.
These are just some little tips on how to every single month make sure that you're tracking, setting goals, activities, looking at developing your skills and sharpening that saw like we talked about on podcast books, online, whatever that may be, and again, reward yourself. Congratulations on your commitment on improving yourself, we'll see you on the next blog post.