How to Hire the Best Salespeople

Why do we treat our dealerships as if they have revolving doors with concern to our salespeople?

It’s costing your dealership precious resources. It’s also costing your reputation within your community, your sales team morale, and your bottom line. We have no choice but to modernize the way we hire, train and care for our salespeople.

“The days of hiring them in masses, training them in classes and fire their asses, that mindset is over.”

If we can’t retain quality salespeople, we’ll never be able to effectively retain our customers. Here are 3 Key Facts you need to remember to do just that.

1. Hire the Right People

• Always be Recruiting. You’ll find your best candidates when you don’t need someone. Shift your perspective. Interviewing isn’t a hiring process, it’s a firing process. You’re not trying to select them, you’re trying to reject them. The one you can’t reject is the one who makes the cut. Pro tip: play your hand close to the chest.

2. Secure a Superb Training System to immediately get your new hires off on the right foot.

• Always start with strong onboard training. Don’t allow your new hire’s techniques to be corrupted by misinformation from unqualified sources within the dealership. Facilitate continuous improvements with an on-going training program. Value one-on-one quality floor time with your salespeople to measure their progress on a regular basis. Never forget, their success is your success.

3. Treat New Hires Fairly by divorcing traditional pay plans and processes within the dealership.

• Always make an honest appraisal of your payment plans. Most of our pay plans were designed 40 years ago with big packs and big commissions. But here’s the kicker, we’re not even making enough gross to cover such packs. Consequentially, we’re not compensating our salespeople fairly. What’s at the heart of our 40-year-old pay plans? To sell one car to a customer. That’s no longer our goal. Our goal is retention, to sell that third, fourth, fifth car to our customers.

Exactly how much is hiring the wrong salespeople costing your dealership?

First, calculate the cost of a single turnover of a salesperson. Second, go to your controller for the number of W2’s (or T4’s, hi Canadian friends!) that were sent to salespeople last year who are no longer with the dealership. Thirdly, multiply the number of W2’s (or T4’s) by the cost of a single turnover and that’s your total cost. Is it worth it?

Spoiler: It’s not. Propel your store’s profitability and only hire the best salespeople.

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