Return to Selling

The all-manager meeting 0:00

Steve Shaw: Dave Rogers, what is going on? How you doing today?

Dave Rogers: I'm doing fan-damn-tastic, Steve. Couldn't be better.

Steve Shaw: I love it. I'm doing amazing as well. Life is good in 2026.

Dave Rogers: Absolutely. Everything's fantastic. Family, work, everything's good.

Steve Shaw: Awesome. Well, we won't go into the weather, because everybody knows by now it's cold in Philadelphia. Is that a TV show?

Dave Rogers: I think it's "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," but it hasn't been that much lately. Actually, we hit 50 degrees this week. That's like summertime.

Steve Shaw: It's funny how we have different reactions to 50 degrees, because it's 50 here now and it is cold. So much for not talking about the weather. The last time you and I spoke, you were telling me you guys were getting ready to have an all-manager meeting. I'm really curious. How did that all-manager meeting go?

Dave Rogers: It went good. We probably had 90% of my service managers show up, everyone that could make it based on vacations and whatever. We actually had two of our service managers do most of the talking. One of them is really into selling, which was rather unique for a lot of the tech guys in the room, the old-school service managers. And one of my other managers runs a really big Honda store in Pottstown. He could have listened to our first three or four podcasts. It could have been just you and I talking. He talked about production and setting objectives. It was really good, and I think it went over well. Instead of Tony or myself or an outside trainer or a consulting group talking to these guys, we let them speak, and it went over well.

Steve Shaw: I think those are the best classes we do, when we break the room up, put the whiteboard up and everybody goes around and speaks about that topic. I don't think there's really anything new in the fixed operations arena, and there's so much talent and knowledge within your managers and within the managers in the business. Let them talk and let them share, because they're the people out there doing it. At some point you get tired of hearing my voice or your voice or somebody else's. I call it Steve Shaw fatigue. So I think most people walk away from those going, "That's the best thing we've ever done," because they taught the class. That's very cool.

A service manager who sells 2:57

Dave Rogers: It's like the adults in Charlie Brown: "Wah wah wah wah." They don't hear anything. And I get it. It was well received. The interesting part was we had a young lady service manager talking about selling. Some of the old-school, atypical service managers who grew up in the business as technicians and worked their way through the grind, selling has never been their number one thing. I think they really opened their eyes listening to her. She came from the showroom and the retail world.

She was talking about putting little notes next to our advisors when they're talking to a customer about tires: "Don't forget the road hazard." Coaching them up. And watching the eyes light up on some of the old-school guys, like, "I would never think of that." It struck a point, and it made a lot of sense to everybody else in the room. And it got me thinking. About 25 years ago I was at a Toyota store, and the mechanics would come out of the shop to the desk and say, "Here, sell this." And we'd be like, "You're not allowed to say the word sell back here." And I was thinking, wow, how far we've come in 25 years. Now we're actually telling people to sell, sell, sell.

Steve Shaw: People think we bring people into the business for customer service, and there's no selling involved. We want a good person, and then they find out there's actually selling involved, versus hiring a salesperson. The business has changed a lot that way. We went from taking technical people, bringing them in and trying to get them to sell, and then we had shitty CSI, forgive me, because our technicians didn't do a good job of taking care of the customer. Maybe they were on the warranty path, back when warranty was so big, before we got into customer pay. It was very hard for those guys to go from a technical service advisor to a sales service advisor.

The good ones did, but some of them aren't with us anymore, and some of them retired. Then what did we do? We said, "We need good people to take care of our customers." But those good people were bartenders or whatever job they had, and now they're required to sell as well. So where's that good selling mentality we really need out there on the drive? It's interesting.

Technicians talk people out of buying 6:09

Dave Rogers: Well, think about it. IT guys are the most famous for this, but any technician will tell you, "I like that computer. Wow, it's great. Except you've got to watch out for this, this, this and this going wrong." A technician will tell you that car is a great car, but once you get over 50,000 miles, it's a piece of junk. I've always said there's a reason why we're not up front selling cars, when I talk to my guys in the back as technicians. Because we would talk people out of buying cars. That's what we did.

Steve Shaw: "You don't really need to do this today. You don't have to replace your air filter. It can keep going for a little bit longer."

Dave Rogers: How often do you hear that? That's the way I grew up in the business. You were always giving people an out, a cop-out, like the yellow, "You could do it next time." It was different when you saw somebody four times a year. If I saw you every 3,700 miles, every three months, I could probably put the brakes off three months. That's probably where some of that came from. But it's also because a lot of us, and I'm one of those people, didn't come from the sales end. I got into the business as a technician. I did sell cars for a period of time, but in hindsight, back in the early eighties when I got into the business, I was a dumbass. I should have sold cars. Those guys were making tons of money. Salesmen were making a half a million dollars back then.

Chuck, the natural-born salesman 7:35

Dave Rogers: I've told you about this guy Chuck, the greatest salesman ever. In the late seventies he was working at a local bank. The dealership, the same Toyota store where we wound up working together, was signing recourse on all these Toyotas back in the early eighties. They were just selling cars, and the bank was signing off on these things. So he's working at the bank watching these deals come in with a hand truck full of deals. He's processing the deals, and he starts looking at the commission sheets, and he's like, "What the hell am I doing here?" So he goes to the dealership and says, "I want to sell cars." And that's how he got into the car business.

He was a natural-born salesman. I never saw anybody like Chuck. We worked together briefly in the early nineties, and then I hired him in 2000 when I got to the Toyota store. This guy taught me that we're there to sell. I learned about selling from this guy. It's been 25 years now, but all of a sudden I flipped the switch: wait a second, that's what this business is about. And it's hard to take a technician and move him up front unless he's got that different personality.

Training that never taught selling 9:09

Steve Shaw: I remember when I was writing service at a Pontiac dealer, they sent me to a training class. I was a young kid, a tech who moved into it, and I always thought I was going to be a great salesperson, because I didn't have any fear. I was going to ask everybody to buy anything. The first guy was talking to me about customer service, about being nice, and CSI was just getting started. The only reason I stayed in class was he said, "Your job is to get as much money from the customer as you can, but you've got to make them feel good about giving it to you." And I was like, "Okay, I'm going to stay, because I'm going to make some money."

But then CSI started, and we had to really get into taking care of our customers, and I probably backed off as well. I probably wasn't as aggressive for a period of time trying to make that sale. And nobody ever taught us back then. In the nineties, there wasn't a Steve Shaw type of character who would go out and give you the words or teach you what to do. The class I was at was put on by GM and Pontiac, so that guy wasn't giving you sales skills. He was giving you customer service skills or process, how to walk around a car. That type of training really wasn't available to us, and we all just backed off.

I remember when Ford came out with Around the Wheel and the Works program. They packaged an oil change and a tire rotation together because we didn't want to sell in the drive. That was the big deal: "My God, we're selling an oil change." It's funny how everything has really gone full circle for us. And now here we are selling lots of stuff, or hopefully selling lots of stuff.

Dave Rogers: I don't regret going through all the training and classes I did in the nineties. I learned a lot of technical stuff, how to process warranty, a lot of stuff today's managers have no clue about, which is scary. At Chrysler we used to have a Professional Series diamond-level service manager program. We had four different classes we had to go to, probably three days each. There was HR training, production training, numbers classes, accounting classes. There was a lot of good stuff. But there was never anything on how to sell. Like I said, until I met Chuck, until I woke up and started realizing it. It's definitely come a long way, but we still have to get better at it.

Offense and defense in the service department 12:12

Steve Shaw: You talk about your offensive line. I'm not the football analogy guy, but you've got your offensive line, your defense, this player and that player, and one has to work for the other. They're two different skill sets, correct? There's a sales skill, there's an administrative skill, and on the other side there's your production side: the guy with the technical ability, and the guy managing that technical side. There are lots of interchanging parts. We kind of expect our managers to be good at everything, and maybe they're not. Some of our guys are really good at the technical side or the production side, and the young lady you have is awesome at selling. So we have to look at our teams that way. If I've got a highly technical guy, how do I put him in the role that's going to serve him best, and how do I put her in the role that's going to serve her best in selling?

Dave Rogers: Listen, I've had service managers who were more comfortable at the dispatch desk. They didn't want to be up front. They didn't want to deal with customers. And they'd resist all the things we talk about: maintenance schedules, menus, selling the alignment. My thing would be, all right, you need to find somebody to work out front selling and working with the advisors if you can't do it. You're right, those are two totally different skill sets: production, dealing with the technicians and dispatch, versus selling. If you sell a lot, your production will probably go up naturally, but you still have to have some way of managing that production.

I'll use the football analogy. The selling is like the offense on the football team, and the production would be more like the defense. You're making sure you're stable and you've got everything lined up. The selling is the offense, and I don't mean offensive like offending somebody. I was thinking about it this weekend with the wild card games. Some of these head coaches came from the offensive side of the field, and they're still calling their plays. They didn't let go of that part, but they hired a defensive coordinator to take care of the defense. Some head coaches don't do either one. They just manage the game, with an offensive coordinator and a defensive coordinator, probably because they're not really good at either, but they're good people people. Your Tampa Bay team, Todd Bowles is a defensive guy. He calls his defenses, and he hired an offensive coordinator to call the plays.

It has to be looked at as a part of the business. We want to be technical, we want to be productive, we want to set objectives, we want the techs to make hours, but let's not forget the selling. She just reopened that conversation the other day, and I think that'll be part of our 2026 mantra.

Design the team around your store 15:58

Steve Shaw: I think that's amazing. A lot of people don't think about it, but that's really the first line. Selling cures a lot of stuff. If selling is not your skill, then you certainly need somebody. That's a lot of where driveway managers come into play. We take our best advisor and make them the driveway manager in the hope that they guide these young men and women to be better salespeople as well as better at customer service. Then we get a shop foreman and hope he or she drives production. But what ends up happening is everybody defaults back to their skill set. The guy who likes to dispatch ends up dispatching all the time. A lot of managers like to do reports, because that's their comfort level. They like to sit in their office and do reports.

We used to talk about how there's a time when you're the coach and a time when you're the quarterback. You're the quarterback from open until 10, and then you go coach, do your management and your reporting. But often as a dealership we say, "I need your reports by seven." So the guy's in his office at 7 a.m. doing reports when he should be out on the drive quarterbacking. Some of that is just the nature of the business.

I'm always going to default back to: what's our strategy, and what's my talent? Putting it in the sports analogy, I'm going to design my strategy around the talent I have. Here's my Cardinals reference. I heard today they were talking about how you design your ball team around your home stadium. If you're in Boston, you need right-handed guys who can pull the ball. Somewhere else, you want lefties. So it goes back to what our dealership and our brand are. We're going to design our teams to fit our dealership and our structure. That probably gets lost quite a bit. As much of a strategy guy as I am, now that I'm into sports, quote unquote, learning that and applying it to the business is a powerful lesson: design your team around the company you have versus hiring people willy-nilly.

Process flipped warranty to customer pay 18:37

Dave Rogers: It's true. Brand-specific, there were times I'd go into a Chrysler store doing three to one warranty to customer pay dollars. That's what I'd walk into. And the flip was really just process. It wasn't even me using my sales techniques. Check the car out, do the multi-point. We don't call the customer and tell them what's wrong under warranty until we know what's wrong and what's available for selling. Back then it was 27-point checks. Now it's multi-points. What they were doing in the past was, "Hey Steve, your car needs a transmission. I'll order it, it'll be here in two days." And then when the car was done, they'd call and say, "The car's done. By the way, you need brakes." No, because they didn't check it out. So all we did was flip it: you've got to do the multi-point and go over it all before you tell them what's wrong with the car, or at the same time. And then we'd go three to one customer pay to warranty. I wasn't selling. It was a process thing.

I had people who worked for me who were great salespeople and advisors, and that's really what it took to solve 90% of the problems in the store. This Mazda store I mentioned: she started in May, I think. Prior to that, it was 1.3 hours per RO and an effective labor rate of like $100 an hour. She went from 1.3 in May to almost 1.8, 1.9, right around two hours customer pay by the end of the year. That's what she's been tracking. The effective labor rate is up. It's not 80% of your door rate, but it's probably around 135, 140. And the average repair order has gone up almost $200 in parts and labor sales.

You look at that and go, what a difference a person can make. When I put the 12-month KPI for that store up on the sheet, I said to her, "When did you start?" because I just picked a month like June. She goes, "I started in the middle of May." I go, "Geez, how shocking. You can see the numbers change." I think it's certainly a missing aspect. A lot of my guys, and other women in the group, are going to come up a little bit and say, maybe it's not all about warranty and getting the car done the same day. Maybe there's some gold in them thar hills. Hopefully it triggered more than just my imagination and my desire to go to the next level.

Steve Shaw: We always talk about how it's the manager. You can hire me to come in and train. I've been in some of your stores. Sometimes we knock it out of the park, and other times, why did I show up? It's whether the manager adopts it, takes the ball and runs. If he goes, "Eh, that's BS," or "That's not in my skill set," then it really is a waste of time. Getting them to open their eyes to that is a powerful thing. And kudos to you for putting it out there in a way they could accept, versus a lot of people who would put all their managers in a room and shame them, like the meetings at the publics you talk about, where they tell you you suck. Instead you said, "Look, this actually could happen, and here's the shining star that made it happen."

Fries with the free oil change 22:26

Dave Rogers: We'll get into this in another one, but her store is at almost 95, 96% video, doing the MPIs with video. I don't think that's any accident either. I think they go hand in hand. It's all about learning stuff. I chatted with her probably over the summer. Mazda has their six- and 12-month maintenance free under their regular warranty. And I told her the problem with that is you're not getting any money out of their pocket. People are going to come in twice a year and never give you a dollar. I've seen it in the BMW world, the prepaid world, the free maintenance programs. The first time you ask somebody for money, if they haven't given you money in a year or two, they don't even know why they're saying no. Subconsciously, it just doesn't feel good, because they haven't opened their wallet once in a year.

So she and I were brainstorming, and I said, "Just find something." And I brought up Chuck. The reason I mention Chuck, I should bring him on even though he's retired. He's the greatest guy in the world. I worked next to this guy. He's looking at cars in the shop, Hondas in the eighties, front-wheel-drive cars that came with two little molded mud flaps on the front wheels and nothing on the back. And he'd pick up the phone: "Hey Steve, listen, I see your car's in the shop getting its first oil change. I don't know what the hell's wrong with Honda, but they only give you two mud flaps. Your car looks off balance. I've got a set of mud flaps I could sell you for 80 bucks." And the guy was in for his first oil change, which was free.

Or he'd see a pack of cigarettes in your pocket. I always thought this was genius. "Hey Steve, you smoke, right? You ever notice when you crack the window, the water drips on your power window switch? Eventually that switch is going to go bad." And the guy's like, "Well, that's a bad design." "I've got a fix for that." Rain gutter guards, an aftermarket product, and he used to sell them on the first oil change. It's those things.

So what Chrissy started doing was, when they get the free oil change and tire rotation at six months, she offers a balance on the two front tires for 29 bucks or whatever it is, and she's getting like an 80% take rate. Just by asking. The customer's like, "Really? It's only 29 bucks? I'll take that." Think about that. It's genius, and she came up with that on her own.

Steve Shaw: That's your fries. "Would you like fries with that?" That's amazing. We're getting a little long here, but I remember Toyota for a while had free maintenance up to 30,000.

Dave Rogers: They still do. Two years, they still do.

Steve Shaw: And at 30,000, you ask them for $500 or whatever for a 30K, and they go, "Ah, that's too much money," and they walk. That's when retention would just fall off. That waterfall chart, as they call it, would fall off the map, because we asked them for money at the highest point we could ever ask. So, absolutely a great idea.

Dave Rogers: Well, let's talk about that prepaid factory maintenance on the next episode. To me, that's a defection thing and a lack of retention. The manufacturers are pushing the wrong narrative, and I think it's causing real problems in the business.

Steve Shaw: You're on. Let's talk about prepaid maintenance and the lack of fries, because I've got a great story you reminded me of. Let's get out of here right now. We've kept everybody 26 minutes. I'll see you on the next round.

Dave Rogers: All right, man, take care. Talk to you soon.