Jim Fitzpatrick discusses the key to success in auto retail with Rory Vaden, New York Time’s Bestselling Author of Take The Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving Success and Co-Founder of Southwestern Consulting.
From your perspective and your experience, what is the key to success in car selling in the auto retail industry?
“At Southwestern Consulting, we’re studying successful people the top one percent of earners and what we find is that they don’t like discipline any more than the rest of us. But they have learned to think differently about it. They have learned to train their brain to process things differently.,” says Vaden.
In his book, Take The Stairs: 7 Steps to Achieving Success, Vaden explains that it is the seven misconceptions people have are not as hard to overcome once we think about it the right way.
Making Profitable Decisions
People who are managers know within six weeks if someone is going to make it in sales or not, but it takes them about nine months to fire that person.Dealers can learn from unique environments where their employees either struggle or flourish by paying heed to the paradox principle.
“The key here is, is that problems that are procrastinated on are only amplified. So, the paradox principle is easy short-term decisions lead to long-term consequences. Meanwhile, difficult short-term choices lead to easy long-term consequences,” says Vaden.
Train Your Brain for Sales Success
Self-discipline can be learned, but you have to train your brain beyond survival to take risks for success.
“We think of discipline as either I have it or I don’t. But it is really a brain issue. Your brain is not programmed for success it is programmed for survival. So here is how the brain works, the way that you survive is to conserve energy. So how do you conserve energy? You do this by doing what is safe, by doing what is known and by doing what is comfortable. Left to its own devices, the brain defaults by conserving energy. But how you become successful is the opposite, it is by taking risks and by doing things that are new,” says Vaden.
In order to do this, you must form new neuropathways in your brain and reshape a new thought process about how you think about something. According to Vaden, once you understand this, you can re-establish views about things.”