By Howard Hubler
When I first got involved in the automobile business, conventional wisdom said the average person shops at four dealerships to buy a car. Today that’s down to 1 1/4. With all of the information available to the consumer, most people can determine what they want and how it will perform and what the cost of payment will be before they ever even get in the car to go look at an automobile to replace their current car.
Let’s assume for a moment, that you are one new salesperson who “gets it.” Let’s say you sell three of your four customers and make for a good week pay for yourself and your company. Let’s say another new salesperson who doesn’t get it greets for people and sells either one or no new automobiles in four unique customer visits. The question becomes, how long will this ill-trained person who has very likely little professional curiosity and equal small amounts of drive be allowed to fail before management scoops them up and trains him or her and motivates them or eliminate them?
These closing numbers are often referred to as “hits runs and errors,” a term from baseball. My industry might have finally hit Nirvana; one salesman, one customer, one sale. I am sure other industries are performing just as favorably with the help of all the information their customers have as well.
In your organization how long does it take for you to identify that somebody who is truly creating more harm than good? Is this somebody you’ve tested? Do you measure their drive? Do they have the innate left-brain right-brain skill sets to close the deal? In my industry one thing is certain: you’re better off to double up salesman to try and sell your product short staffed, then to let one good salesman work side-by-side with one bad salesperson because the bad one will do more damage than a good one can create. In an era of short supply retail product to sell, how long will it take to eliminate mediocrity because mediocrity can bring you down?
