06 May 2014

You can have the best sales process in the world, but you still need staff that are genuinely helpful and who can think of others’ needs first in order to do well. Highlighting this point this week was a survey by What Car? magazine, which contacted 100 franchised retailers to ask about real-world fuel consumption. This is something that not even the latest tablet-based process system is going to be able to handle.

However, it is something that a genuine car buyer could ask.

 What was great to see was that despite some negative spin put on the story, in the majority of cases retailers were helpful and did their best to answer the question. And this put me in mind an experience of my own this week. It was a little thing, but again showed that having friendly and helpful staff can do your business a world of good.

 While queuing to pay for my weekly shop, the person in front asked if I would like her ‘school vouchers’ as she didn’t have kids (clearly I look like I do, despite not having mine with me at the time). The point is, she was in her work uniform, which clearly showed she works for Colborne VW (recently bought by Lookers). And as a result I came away with a good impression of my local VW retailer.

 With both my small interaction and the What Car? survey, there’s no way you can have a process for these things. It’s just a case of hiring staff that want to help other people, be they customers or not. Now all you have to do is work out how to find (if you don’t have them already) and retain these people.

 Tristan Young

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Tags: Colborne, Lookers, sales, sales process, staff, Volkswagen