Handling "Heat"

I learned the following method at a Service Advisor seminar I attended when I was a kid. It’s probably the only thing I took away from that seminar, but it’s served me very well for years.

When handling “Heat” from an angry customer, remember one thing.

DO NOT TALK… Listen!!

The angry customer will tell his story three times. Listen silently as he does. Don’t respond with anything but eye contact. Don’t even “Okie-doke” the guy or say, “I see” or “I understand”. Don’t ask him to clarify anything (until later). At the end of his third time through, the most amazing thing happens, he will stop talking completely. He does this for a few reasons. Please allow me to borrow from the language of “theatre-ease” and explain those reasons as three events. I’ll call them the Rehearsal, the Performance, and the Finale.

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  The Rehearsal: The first time through his story he’ll be ranting, he’ll be emotional, and he won’t have his routine rehearsed well enough. So he’ll have to recount the entire ordeal a second time. It is critical not to engage him while he is emotional. Just listen. Hey, for the last fifteen minutes on his drive to your dealership, he’s been practicing what he’s gonna say to you. And the more he gets fired up, the more he has to remember, and the more he’s gonna read you the riot act when he sees you. Now he’s in front of you and here comes...


• 
  The Performance: This is his second time through; where he’ll say the more clever things he rehearsed in the car. He is so focused at this point; he has nothing else on his mind and he’s just about through. He may catch a second wind here, and really be mean.
  


• The Finale: The third time through is the, “And another thing!” session. And, fueled by emotion, he is likely to say the more insulting things he thought of in the car during the Rehearsal but forgot to throw in during the performance. Again, do NOT respond until he’s done.

Now when the Finale is over, the whole thing will probably end rather abruptly. Here’s why. For the last half hour, this guy has been focused on one thing and one thing only; telling YOU what YOU did wrong. Once he’s got it all out of his head, he is left with nothing more to say – no more unexpressed emotion, and the result is basically silence… …because for the last half hour, he hasn’t been sending anything else into his mental pipeline.

This is when you’ve got the opportunity of a lifetime. Until this very moment, you’ve had a problem to deal with, and nothing with which to fix it. Now, after he has emptied his anger, and before anything else can cloud his head, is when you speak. You get to place the first thing into his drained pipeline.

And you convey to him two things, and only two things; empathy, and a solution. Why? Two reasons; one, because all he wants is empathy and a solution, and two, because he deserves empathy and a solution.

Here’s how we were taught to respond in the Service Advisor seminar. “Mr. Customer, I think I understand how you feel. Here’s how I’d like to offer to resolve the issue.” And then offer a resolution. You’ve told him, on his terms, by addressing his emotion (I think I understand how you FEEL) that you empathize with him. You’ve also told him that a solution to his issue is as important to you as it is to him.

My brother worked as an Assistant Principal in charge of discipline at a high school where he met often with parents appalled that their little angels had broken any rules and were being punished. After one particularly grueling session he called me on his way home to download the event so as not to unleash his pent up fury on his wife and kids over spaghetti and garlic bread. It seemed that he’d tried multiple times with no success to get a word in edgewise during little Johnny’s defense case.

Each time he’d attempted to inject some reason into the conflict, the flames would shoot further out of Dad’s eyes while the filth from his cake-hole got filthier, and Mommy’s head turned 360’s faster and more violently on the end of her neck with each attempted “but…but…” that my brother tried to squeeze in.

As I tried to do my brotherly best to sympathize, the lesson from the Service Advisor seminar began to echo in my head. So I shared it with my struggling sibling in hopes of helping him bring down his stomach acid.

He liked it. He tried it. He was absolutely amazed by the results. From that point forward, my brother found himself dealing with much more reasonable and cooperative parents on a regular basis. That made his disciplinary actions much more effective because he was now able to collaborate with the parents to affect real changes in the kids being disciplined.

Now he told me later that he had to develop a few mental tricks so he wouldn’t interrupt while his attackers did the three round exercise; counting backwards from 1,372,416 by threes always seemed to help. Listen, I know how hard it is to hear that your customers have been failed by your company. And I know how much harder it is when your team did the right thing for the customer and the customer just doesn’t agree.

Will this method work perfectly every time, you might ask? Nope. But here’s my counter question to you. Will it hurt you to try? If you do it right—from the heart—I’m convinced that it can help you can change your corner of the world. You might just make it a little better place to be.

I dare you.

Who is Joe Jones?

Once again, I need your input. Is this an important enough concept that it'll help anyone???

Please... LEAVE COMMENTS!!!

Joe Jones is two different people. Yup, the Joe Jones who walks into the grocery store has a set amount of money that he’ll allow himself to spend; it’s called a budget. He doesn’t necessarily want to spend that money, but he knows he has to. Just like with his house payment, his car payment, etc.
But when that same Joe Jones walks into our realm, he has a much different stack of money to spend; money he wants to spend; money he will absolutely spend… on… something! This money has somehow magically escaped his budget—the needs that he must feed—and now he gets to make some sort of a selfish purchase.
This same guy is NOT the same guy. This is the guy we’re not getting, not because our stuff isn’t cool, but because we’re too often treating him like the other Joe Jones; one who will make decisions from a budget; from an “I have to spend this money” mentality.
I believe that more often than not, the purchase of some of our bigger ticket items just might be the single most selfish act in the life of our customer. Selfish? Well, you tell me. I submit that even the farmer who buys one of our side-by-sides or ATV’s to work on the farm only chooses it because it’s more fun than a tractor!! A tractor is much more easily justified; it’s a necessary expense; a cost of doing business. But an ATV… well they’re just cool!
I’m pretty convinced that some of the success that John Deere enjoys with some of their utility vehicles is because they’re more fun than functional. I’m just saying that in nearly every case, what we have in front of us is a customer who is hoping to justify a purchase that is selfish. …and that changes EVERYTHING!!!
You can’t ask the Joe Jones in the grocery store to buy ice cream if it isn’t in his budget. But the Joe Jones who walks into a motorcycle dealership is looking for a reason to buy the “ice cream”, and more importantly, he’s looking for someone who will tell him its okay!
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People need to give themselves permission to buy our stuff. It’s our job to help them give that permission to themselves. They come in our doors to see if we’re worthy of granting them permission to do something selfish. They’re also looking for someone who will ask them to make that decision; to “give” them permission.
They need that permission because they’re often stuck in the rut of having told themselves “NO” for all the right reasons for so long.

Pricing "Policy" or "Process"?

The following is an excerpt of what I wrote as a comment a discussion about discount pricing. Please leave your comments below and vote whether or not you like it, hate it, whatever. Tell me whether I should turn it into a column. Thanks in advance.

Tim is living in the real world; a word most consultants never see. Scott used a very specific word, "compete". Notice there's a big difference between the word "compete" and the word "competitive". For definition's sake, the verb "to compete" is proactive and indicates that there is a process for doing so. On the other hand, being "competitive" can only be executed as policy NOT process. A discount pricing policy is passive and passive won't keep the doors open in this market.

There must be a willingness and a capacity to effectively negotiate on price, or in essence, to compete.

For most dealers, building value is the best mechanism they have for making the sale when price is an issue. While it should indeed be the first response, it shouldn't be the only available solution. Dealers living in the real world, like Tim, must accommodate the price shopper if they’re going to survive. (Remember, it really is a small minority of the people we view as price shoppers, a mere 16%, that make their buying decision based on price alone.) But if you can't engage price shoppers, you have no way to accommodate customers that buy elsewhere but might have bought from us had we simply engaged in a negotiation and given them an opportunity to adjust both their thinking and ours.

Make no mistake about this; I am by no means advocating being a discount dealer. I'm against discounting as a policy. What I'm advocating, what we teach, is a process designed to allow us to have substantive conversations with customers who are perceived as price shoppers so as to allow us consistent opportunities to earn the business of those customers; possibly by adjusting our pricing on a case by case basis. Policy will rarely even allow those conversations to take place, and it's the conversations that make the sale when prices need to be adjusted.

And there endeth today's rant! Thanks for putting up with me, folks.

Discussion: Motorcycle Dealers Network | LinkedIn

Discussion: Motorcycle Dealers Network | LinkedIn

Otis' RFTD (Rant For The Day)

This was a response to a discussion on LinkedIn. Click HERE to link to that discussion.


Please leave me your thoughts below this post as to whether or not I should turn this into a column. Thanks a bunch.

Let's be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water, Carolyn. There are some really good practices that "outside, non-enthusiast" folks have brought to the industry; practices without which more dealerships may have fallen by the wayside by now. In my opinion, far too many powersports dealers have two things in common with most bar owners: one, they were standing right next to the last owner at the exact moment he got fed up, and two, they were under the influence of the product being served, and thereby not in their right mind.

Don't get me wrong, I completely believe that enthusiasm is a crucial component, but not the sole requirement, of success in this business. I'm also a rider and have been for most of my life. But I want this industry to survive, and it can't without the sound business practices lacking in so many enthusiast oriented industries. There must be a balance.

As a customer, I absolutely want the guy at the scuba shop to know how to make my breathing apparatus work, but I don't particularly care if the kid at the music store can play the guitar or not. (FYI: I spend way too much money at the music store, and frankly, even if I could swim better, I still wouldn't go scuba diving.)

But neither of those two things matter to me as a customer. If the kid at the music store appropriately asks me to buy, I'm more likely to buy than if the expert at the scuba store gives me a perfect expert presentation and neglects to ask for the sale. Asking for the sale is a process that frankly most enthusiasts don't see a need for; after all they love it and think everyone else should too. Asking for the sale must be done on purpose, and that, when it's made policy, is the kind of thing that "outsiders" have brought to the mix.

And there endeth my rant for the day!