Welcome And Leadership Pillars

SPEAKER_00 0:24

All right, rock and roll. Welcome to Prepare to Win. I'm David Lowe, the automotive sales coach. Obviously, this podcast is focused on preparing you to win, being better today than yesterday. And in these few minutes, I want to help introduce you to the next level of leadership. And we're going to talk about that today with Eric Sargent, our guest, GM of Toyota, Edmark Toyota in Noblesville. Eric, thank you for joining us.

SPEAKER_01 0:52

Thanks for having me.

The Weekly Email Scoreboard System

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Yeah, so you've been our partner for about three years. It's been awesome. Known you for longer than that. Maybe that story will come out or not. But I watched your leadership. And the reason I asked Eric to be on today, quite frankly, is we teach the four pillars of leadership, right? Lead by example, set clear and high expectations, hold your team positively accountable, and love them unconditionally. That is, coach and correct and congratulate with respect, right? Those four pillars that drives everything. And Eric, you really live those four pillars. And one specific thing that you do that I love because you copy me on them is your tracking system. You actually track so much of what's going on, communicate it once or twice a week to your team, and use it to that. That's the four pillars. Leave by example, set clear and high expectation, the accountability, that reporting, and then you can use that reporting to correct. But I I was wondering if you could walk people through what you do, why you do, how you do, whatever, uh, about this powerful leadership tool. I've watched you catapult that store, and I know that this is one of the tools that you use to do that.

SPEAKER_01 2:07

Sure. Yeah, I mean, appreciate thank you for the compliment. Um so yeah, we have um basically one of the biggest things that I, you know, attribute um, you know, um the the unify, like the team being on the same, on the same uh, on the same playing field, I guess, is that we we know exactly where we're at at any point in time throughout the month. It's not you know um an autopsy at the end of the month. We're really trying to figure it out as we go throughout the month, day by day, and then week by week. So the reports that that you reference that I send um to my team um is we have really two main emails um that we go over in a meeting format in person with uh with everybody. So the the Saturday morning uh meeting is basically um I send it out kind of like a PowerPoint style format where I take um every every piece of information that I think is irrelevant to the day or to the week, and then I put it into an email, and then we kind of just enter I'm in our conference room here, and we got three 85-inch TVs on the wall, so we kind of it's hooked up to a surface, and so we kind of scroll through the email. So everybody has a historical record of it that they can save in their inbox to look back. Oh, where where were we, you know, last week, where are we today? Can we compare the notes? And then, of course, we get we talk about it in real time, and and uh and everybody participates in it. So the the sales, the finance managers, the the sales consultants, um, the the internet department, everybody is in the same room at the same time. So we have like 30 chairs in here, and it's and it's a there's standing room in some on depending on if anyone's off or not. But we go through all the metrics that are important, you know, the case the you know, how many appointments have we set, how many appointments were what's our shown percentage, uh, what's our walk-in uh traffic like, what's our walk-in uh closing percentage, what's our internet closing percentage, what's our phone closing percentage, where are we at with our environmental products? Because that's an absolutely huge push. Um we can talk about new trades, we talk about um what's hot, what's coming in, what percentage of our inventory is pre-sold, what percentage of uh of our inventory is available. Um so really just there's a plethora of metrics that are that I find to be extremely important. Um, and then we go through it and we talk about it and we do it again and again and again. And I think that's part of the consistency is extremely important because you know the first time that you you talk about something, somebody may be their head may not be in the right spot. But after you've done it, you know, for we've been in this building for 96 months now, uh, since we opened. Um, and and it's just one of those things like everybody knows the drill. Any one of my sales consultants, any one of my managers can run the meeting. Once an email gets sent out, there's a format, this is what we're talking about, and that's what we have, that's what we all have to be on the same page.

Building Reports From CRM And DMS

SPEAKER_00 4:46

It's awesome. So if I could stop right there, you might have more thoughts to add to this. Don't forget though. So basically, we always say you huddle up daily and warm up your skills and then cover the game plan. What do you need to know to win today? And your email, you send them an email that tells them here's where we are, and here's some information you need. So where we are, results, sales, totals, like you said, walk-ins, closing, for blah, blah, blah. So there's results. Where are we? And you give them tools. You just said fresh use cars. I've noticed problem use cars on your list. You get those out before they become a big problem. I've also noticed looking at your list, incoming new cars, new cars on the lot, not sold, available. You provide them a lot of tools, top-of-mind awareness that gives them kind of a game plan for the day. Here's your tools, people, get out and make it happen. I think that's a driving force. Uh, not just in your numbers, your sales numbers, your gross profit is excellent. But when I walk into your store, it's different. The culture there is excellent, and your turnover is really low. And that's a testament to your leadership. And I think this tool that you just described that sets clear and high expectations and holds them accountable because the numbers are right there. There's individual numbers, there's store numbers, and then there's inventory information, right? And so it's pretty simple. I I love it. So, how long does it take you to put together? That must be a big job.

SPEAKER_01 6:29

So we we really have the the meeting that we just referred to my is my Saturday morning meeting. I get in around 6 a.m. and the meeting is at 8 30. So I typically take you know two, two and a half hours to prepare everything because there's a lot of data that we get from our CRM, a lot of data from our DMS, a lot of data from um from our vendors, like you know, our our our uh our iPacket and our video vendor and um and all that. So there's like a lot of compiling, the review websites, like just going through lots of different websites to compile it and all kind of download it to Excel, make it uniform so it's all you know very organized and legible. A couple hours. And then on Sunday, I do the same thing for manager meeting on Monday morning, which is a very, you know, it's a lot of the same data, but it's got Saturday numbers built into it, which Saturday's meeting is in the morning, so it's only up to Friday. But then you we could talk about a little bit more confidential information. Where are we at with our you know, our gross profits, our finance numbers? We really get to dive to the next level on Monday. And then Tuesday through Friday, it's just sales huddle, sales training. Um, in the meeting, we go through obviously your program, and we could you know go into details of that as well. But about two hours, two to two and a half hours per, about four hours total, you know, two to two out, two and a half hours per meeting um to prepare to make sure that um everybody's on the same page. And the cool thing too is that because I I never skip a beat, even when I'm on vacation, um, I can go back literally, I can go back six years, seven years worth of info of weeks, and I can see exactly where we were at this time last year, and so on and so forth. It's without having to pull financial statements and pull a whole lot of reporting, it's it's all right there in the in the folder that I that I um that I save it to.

From Whiteboard To A Repeatable Format

SPEAKER_00 8:10

To me, that's that's real leadership. Now I so it's worth the time, isn't it? A lot of you are so busy, everybody's moving counterclockwise, reacting to things. I believe that this reporting, this communication, this setting expectations, holding your team accountable through this reporting every week is moving you clockwise forward instead of counterclockwise. In fact, you're not probably answering questions all day because you're answering them up front in your huddle in so many ways, especially with inventory and stuff like that. I feel like this great. Now I remember, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I remember years ago when we first started talking coming in, and you had a whiteboard you did this on. So this is this is really it's next level where you're at now. Is there a little bit of an evolution there, learning curve for you, development?

SPEAKER_01 9:03

I don't know if you remember that the first time we met, but I remember you when you were you were just starting automotive sales coach, and um, and you asked if we had time to meet, and I was just so busy, I was working you know, 80 hours a week, and I didn't have time to meet with anyone. So I said, if you can come in on Saturday morning at 5 a.m., I'll be at the store preparing for my meeting, and you can talk to me while I prepare for my meeting. I was trying to maximize my time, and and I did not think that you would actually say yes, but you're like, Yeah, I'll come in at five o'clock in the morning. So literally it was dark outside. You you can't, you know, you were knocking on the window at 5 o'clock in the morning. And before I had, you know, I mean, everything is uh everything kind of uh evolves in time, and so my like the the the the format that we're that we're discussing today, you know, that wasn't always like that, of course, you know. Um it it started with you know um printing all my specs and then handwriting it on a whiteboard in the in the in the boardroom before the meeting, and I had to go through you know our district rankings and how we're doing in our in our in our region and how are we doing you know versus our competition, and it was a lot. And my handwriting's horrible too. Yeah, so you know it's just one of those things that you know as time evolved, we switch it to an email format, and then obviously it's been fine tuned for many years at this point.

Manager Led Training And Daily Huddles

SPEAKER_00 10:17

So it's I it is pretty good, but uh so you made the commitment early to do it and you got there early, it's on you, but the format you've constantly improved right now. I look through it. You should I'm lucky enough to get a copy of it, and thank you for that. Keep that coming. I love looking through it, and I can scan it so quickly, see the good, the bad, and ugly so quickly. And I love the fact that you've got you know pace, goal, right? And it is I I love the fact that you've got your goal and your current pace on your actual. You've got those three graphs all the time. I love looking at those, and it gives your whole team that where are we at on the field? What down is it? What you know, how many yards for first down, you know what I mean? What's the score? And I think that scoreboard, we have that on the playbook using a scoreboard. You've just taken that, you're basically that score pad that's in the offensive coordinator's booth up there in the sky with the seven spotters counting everything. On the field, the players have this scoreboard, and you're providing them after-game analysis weekly. That here, not only did we win or lose, but let me show you how we're winning and how we're losing in great detail. And let me give you some information that's gonna help you win today. Beautiful. So that's fantastic. So you you segued into what does training look like at your dealership? And you said you've got the Saturday is that review, the whole team, Monday is the manager training. Of course, that's where you get the finance numbers and all that stuff. Like you said, Tuesday through Friday, you huddle every day, you do training. Tell us about that in just a minute.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

Yep. Yeah, so Mondays are Mondays. Uh, you got a lot of internet leads, and you got a lot of you know, Saturday recovery to do. So we don't have a sales huddle on Monday morning typically in terms of training. We usually we do we we do typically have some uh after the manager meeting, the managers will go out and have a little pow-wow. But in terms of training specifically, yeah, where we bring in the playbook, um, especially you know, like the the new version with the with the AI modules and stuff, we do that on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. So at our dealership, we have 23 sales consultants. So a lot of people are they're always they're all off on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. So Monday, Friday, Saturday, we have all hands unless somebody's on uh PPO. So during those days, we really do the same thing. Um, you know, for the past three or four weeks, we've been going through the AI modules, which has been just awesome. We started the year off with the new program. So we we kind of went through the 21-day fast start, everybody's done it, which is great because you you got to redo it every year, you know. I love the way that you set it up so that you redo it every year because you Toyota training, Toyota certification training, it's the same thing. At the end of the year, same thing with our harassment, our cyber training, all that stuff. You got to do it all every single year because you know, things update, and also um, you just don't retain things, you know.

SPEAKER_00 13:02

It's not about completion, right? It's about continuous constant problem. Like uh an offensive lineman would never say, I practiced blocking last year. Same thing. Yeah, great. Keep going, that's great. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:14

So with the with the with the with the huddles, um, all hands on, I mean, we have to all all sales managers, all finance managers, and all sales consultants have to be in the in the board room at the you know, we start at 8 45. We typically we we usually say we end at nine, but we typically go, you know, five, ten minutes over. Um, but lately we have a video conference, we have a video on our uh a video sound bar, um, and it has and so we we we let the sales consultants log into their uh automotive sales coach account and they and we'll do the AI role play on the spot in front of 30 people. Um is it talk about being put on the spot. Um and and always the first person that you know kind of gets if you some of them are prepared, they've done it before, they're ready to not be embarrassed, and then some of them they didn't take the time to practice, and then they have to kind of get put on the spot. And then uh, you know, as as we do two or three a day, we kind of get throughout the week. We can we can we can we can flush a whole lesson out. Um it's just it's just great being put on the spot. It's so much you're already on the spot because you know you're being scorecarded by an AI agent, but then you throw on the fact that you got all you know your managers and you got your coworkers on it. It's it's such good training. It's really it really adds another layer of you know uh of legitimacy to it by doing it in a group setting.

SPEAKER_00 14:27

So you're sending it's just like a football practice. They all huddle around and they watch the plays, right? You got to be able to perform to be on the team and to be on the field. And I I I I love that. So a couple things about that. I notice uh the pace of the leaders, pace of the pack. That's not about the salespeople, this is about everybody, your manager is first. In fact, I think you told me the other day that you're a little pissy because somebody had more points than you. Is that correct?

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Yeah, yeah. So that yeah, on the new on the new on the new play, but on the new on the new platform, yeah, you get um, you know, there's an algorithm, but you know, you get X amount of points for doing X amount of modules. And yeah, I had a sales, I got a I got a couple sales consultants that are ahead of me on the leaderboard right now. So, you know, when I say everybody has to do the training, I'm talking not just sales consultants, not just sales managers, but the finance managers and myself, you know. Yeah, you can't ask somebody to do something that you're not willing to do. So, you know, I I gotta do my AI modules before the end of the week. I gotta follow through and make sure that we're all on point because at the end of the year, we gotta, it's gonna reset. We're gonna have to do it again. So, yeah.

AI Roleplay And Leading The Leaderboard

ROI And Culture Gains From Training

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Dude, I I I absolutely love that. So I I work with a lot of dealerships, obviously, and a lot of dealers push this down to managers, a lot of managers push it down to sales, and that's not we call that the traditional. The Cardone and the Verdi, hey, buy our system and then use these reports to not pay or pay your people if they did it, you know? That's the traditional way training's been in the car business. We're more the team way, right? The manager-led culture. That's what you're using right now. Now, we've got teams that do that, and that's fine if that's all they're ready to do. That's better than nothing. You get return. But maximum return comes from manager-led manager involved. In fact, I think managers are the biggest pivot point in the dealership, and you're certainly doing. That's awesome. So, daily training, discipline training, team training, managers in the training, you're hitting all the that's you're like Audible sales coach, that's the check, check, check, check. So lastly, Eric, I know we're running out of time, but lastly, the how do you feel this has affected your results? Because we always talk about we're not task-oriented, we're result-oriented. And we believe that if you prepare well, you'll play well, and if you play well, you'll get good results, right? But preparation is that confidence, what to do, why to do it, how to do it. Preparation is that skill, can do it. Execution, right, creates the results. So, how do you feel that your training, the dealership playbook, and your your guidance here with the reports and the training protocol, manager-led, uh, have affected your results and your team? Sure.

SPEAKER_01 17:09

So, yeah, results. I mean, the there's a I my um my instincts are going two different directions. So I can kind of quantify like an ROI, um, but I can also kind of tell you more of like a cultural result. So there's different ways, a couple of different ways of maybe answering the question. I'm not sure which way we're going, but I'll just kind of tell you both thoughts since I got a fresh. Um, so the first thing is like you results are part of part of results are gonna be like adding to the culture of the store. You know, when it's expected that every single person has to do this, it really helps for like the succession of like when we have a finance manager opening or we have a sales manager opening, everybody's on board. There's no you gotta start the training and you gotta get on board like no, you're already, you know, we only hire from within. So it's you have to, you know, you you kind of have to already be up to par. So there isn't, you know, you're always training for that next job uh for free. That's just how life works. So you know, you gotta wait for the moment to arrive. So I think the results are definitely driven organically by everybody being on board. Because when we when we say, you know, the five-step negotiation or the re-ask resell, like you, you, you, you can't you kind of have to know what we're talking about. The lingo is the salespeople can't know the lingo and the managers don't know the lingo. It doesn't matter if you're finance manager and that you do something different, these principles still translate to life in general, and of course, the you know, automotive industry. So I think that's partially you know a result that is gonna be organic through the culture. But if you're if the question is more geared toward like, are we gonna get like a return on the tool? I mean, the the uh I had a manager like when I started in the car business, a general manager of mine 20 years ago, he he told me something, and I don't even know if this is true, but he he told me this and it always stuck with me when I got into management. It was when you're when you have an expense, you need to find a way of getting a 10x return on that. And so, you know, at my store, based on our user account, we pay a couple thousand dollars a month or something like that for the for the program. So I you know, it might we have to make twenty thousand dollars in my mind to make that a to make it a plausible uh expense. Otherwise, you know, if you if you pay for it and you don't use it, then you know it's it's a true expense, and that's not really how business works. You know, we have to get everything. Uh not only a return, but a 10x return. You know, we we get to be frugal with the in with the money. Um, and so ultimately, you know, I the way I look at it um is I I I want to figure out am I gonna make at least a twenty thousand dollar return on the tool? Because that's 10 times what I'm paying for it. And so, you know, there's a lot of different ways of looking at it. I mean, just you know, basic math. If you're if you sell four cars and your PVR front and back is five thousand dollars and that's added to the books that you wouldn't have got before, that's twenty thousand dollars. Okay, so that that could be a check. If your PVR is not five thousand dollars, then maybe you need 10 cars to do it. And and and so there are some quantifiable ways, you know. I know that we sell more than 10 cars, and I know our PVR is what it is, so I I know I'm getting a great return on it. But there's a lot of unquantifiable you know things too. Like, you know, if if are is uh are because my salespeople are professionally trained to negotiate, because they're doing sale and appraisals and they know how to do it properly, and because they know the you know the elements of of uh of the training, the reason for cell, and so on and so forth, you know, are what is the true PVR bump on all 300 to 400 cars that we're selling per month, uh depending on the month. So at the end of the day, you know, if it's if it's$300 and you're selling 300 cars on a on a worst case month, that's$90,000. And that's not including adding sales to the book. So there's there's different ways of looking at it. It may not be$300, maybe it's$100, maybe it's$500. You you really just don't know exactly what that is, but that's that's just the unquantifiable. But then you could take it to the next level and you could say, you know, yeah, I sold 10 extra cars or five extra cars, but you know, how many extra trades did I get? How many lifetime oil customers did I get? You know, so it really is a stair step. It just stacks on itself over and over and over from every different layer, if that makes it sense. I love that, yeah.

Steal Great Ideas And Final CTA

SPEAKER_00 21:07

I I believe that too. I think that it's really hard because you know, inventories climb, markets change to kind of say this is the dollar amount, but boy, you can visibly see the change. When I put this in place at the last store I ran at VW, became one of the top five VW dealerships in the country. Our gross was six times the national average. So you say what it wasn't before to what it grew, but there's so many factors in there, right? And growth went up so much exponentially. But what you said, I think even at sales and growth, we know that's going up, but just the cultural change. How about the joy, peace, and satisfaction? Walk into showroom floor and knowing your team gets it, and they're all moving in the same direction with the same it's just to me uh success, excellence is the condition of my team and my Business, right? If it's as if it's excellent, I have that joy, peace, and satisfaction. And of course, excellent does report is going to return an excellent return. But really, there's a lot of satisfaction in just the operation. I think a lot of people have forgot that. We've become all about just that that bottom line, and that's super important. But what creates the bottom line is our people and what our people do, the quality of what they do. So thank you for that. This is awesome. You've shared with us a lot of great things. Number one, I think those four pillars of leadership through your tracking your information systems, and you actually provide it to them individually, they can look through. You can look through back forever, but you do it, review it live with your team every week. Here's where we are, here's where we're going, and here's the things you have at your fingertips to make it so. That is truly the type of huddle. Then your ongoing training, managers involved, you're involved every day, Tuesday through Friday, and even role-playing using AIs. That's incredible. And of course, you know, hey, I'm in it because I'm a well, the group is counting on me to return on investment, right? And I'm in it because ultimately it's not task-oriented, it's results-oriented. Better people doing things better create better results. And there's a lot of ways that you could see that. So thank you for all that. I really appreciate you being with us. I think that dealers, managers, listen to this and measure and say, what can I steal from Eric to put in place today? Is that what our job is? Constantly looking around, trying to think, wow, that's great. I'm taking that from now on. And I think I think one of the keys is if I have a map in my hand, this is how I always do it, and you have a map in your hand, and it's better than my map, guess what I'm doing? I'm throwing my map away and asking you for a copy of yours. I'm not an idiot. Today there's a lot of people ego-driven that would rather this is just the way I do it. And you can't be that way with today's the speed of technology. You have to always be looking to be better today than you were yesterday and keep your eyes open so that you can learn from the best and the worst. But you're certainly the best. I thank you for your time, Eric, and good selling. Let's have a great April. Thanks, Ed. Thank you again for joining us for Prepare to Win. We hope today's insights are of benefit to you. If you like this podcast, send us a message, would you? If you want to see certain topics, let us know. Like, subscribe, tell your friends, and become better today than you were yesterday. Good selling.