On this week’s episode of On the Mark, Mark Tewart explains how making a full commitment to your career as a salesperson is the only way to truly succeed in the automotive industry.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
Speaker 1: You’re watching On the Mark, with Mark Tewart.
Mark Tewart: Hi, I’m Mark Tewart. Welcome to On the Mark on CBT News. In today’s show, I want to talk to you salespeople, and I mean the salespeople working every day to support your career, to support your family, trying to get better. Here’s something that I want to say to you. Make a career decision. Maybe you already have, and if you have, you have my apologies because this is for the other part of you that maybe have not. You have to make a career decision. If you do not commit, if you get in this business, which maybe a lot of us did in the beginning to try it out, then what happens is if you just check it out, you wind up checking out. Somewhere along the line, to be successful at anything in life, you have to make a commitment.
Mark Tewart: For me… Let me just tell you a defining moment in my life. I was selling cars for about a year. When I first got in the business, I was very young. I was unknowledgeable in any single way about cars or the car business. I really had no clue, no training, nothing like that. So the path of getting better was just trial and error every single month.
Mark Tewart: But somehow, by grace of God, I start to do better. I’m about a year in, and maybe you’ve experienced this, I pretty much took a month off. When I say a month off, if I showed up, it wasn’t mentally, it wasn’t emotionally. I did as little as possible and I had no commitment whatsoever. Just being straight up real, that was my month that month. And I sold next to nothing.
Mark Tewart: I’ll never forget, I had a manager by the name of Milt, and Milt was one of the meanest man I’ve ever met, but he did me a really big favor. He brought me in his office, excuse me, and he sat me down and he looked at me and he stared at me for about two minutes. Now, this guy intimidated me to no end. We used to kid that Milt had three meetings a week and they all sounded like this, “You’re all stupid. You can’t sell. The ad’s the same. Go sell something.” So I’m a young kid. This guy definitely intimidated me. And he looked at me and he said this, he said, “Mark, son, you’re sucking up my air conditioning.”
Mark Tewart: What do you say to that, “Hey, I stink.” I got the point. I said, “I understand. I’m going to make a commitment to this.”
Mark Tewart: He said, “Listen, you’re talented and you’re smart, but you have to make a commitment that this is your career, not something you just do and hang out with, not just something you’re passing time with. You got to commit that this is a career. Because if not, you’re not going to make it. And if you do, you could do very well.”
Mark Tewart: He put me on the dime and I thought about it for the day and he told me I had to go back in his office at 5:00 that day and I had to make a commitment. So when I walked in, I told him I was in. And from that day, when I made the commitment, my life started to change. I started to get serious about what I was doing, my self-growth, trying to look at this as a career path, and to be better. So for any of you out there right now that may be at that same point, there’s no shame in that game. Just make a career decision and tell yourself and make the actual commitment that this is what you’re going to do. You will see your career take off if you do.
Mark Tewart: And now for my segment, Coach’s Corner. I do a little thing called a replay listening technique. It’s not enough to listen to customers, they have to know that you’re listening. They want to know that you care. We’ve all heard that phrase about, “Nobody cares about how much you know, until they know how much you care.” To show somebody and demonstrate to somebody that you care, you have to listen and let them know that you’re listening. How do I do that?
Mark Tewart: Well, I take a key phrase or I take a key word that they say and I repeat that back to them. “So just to clarify my mind or what I’m hearing you say, Mr. Customer, is…” and then I repeat back that phrase, “Hey, let me make sure I have this correct. The most important thing to you is…” or, “You had mentioned X.” And when you do that, they know that you’re listening, you’re demonstrating that you’re listening, and that also that you really, truly care about what they want, not just what you want. That’s what I call the replay listening technique.
Mark Tewart: And now for my segment, Stop It! Hey, in this game, you got to have thick skin. If you’re a thin-skinned person, you’re going to have to buckle up. You’re going to have to get over it because you cannot make it in sales. You cannot make it in business. It’s hard to make it in life unless you’ve got very thick skin. And sometimes that’s not easy, but you just got to do it. You can’t let everything somebody says affect you. What someone thinks of you often has nothing to do with you. Don’t let that phase you at all. You can look inward and say, “What can I improve upon?” But don’t let people in their judgment to you.
Mark Tewart: Every single dealership on earth, I’ve never yet seen one person that wasn’t being judged and often put with labels in a box. Don’t let anybody ever label you. Don’t let anybody ever put you in a box. And I see this on Facebook, people attacking people. Guess what? You’re the same person after you deal with the customer as you were before, only the result changed. So you can’t take that influence from a customer. You can’t take that influence that you have sometimes from a negative Facebook or social media experience or somebody saying something about you. Just let all that stuff go. Hey, they don’t pay your mortgage. They don’t determine your success, you do. Just let it go. Just stop it.
Mark Tewart: Make sure you tune in for next week’s show. I’m Mark Tewart. Make sure you tune into On the Mark on CBT News. We can’t wait to see you there. And as always, contact me at 888-2-TEWART or info@tewart.com. My website is tewart.com. Please check out our next high-performance leadership and management workshop at tewart.com/register. I look forward to seeing you next week.
Speaker 1: Thanks for watching On the Mark, with Mark Tewart. This has been a JBF Business Media production.
