Learning to Connect With Your Team and Your Customers for Higher Sales, Better CSI and Lower Employee Turnover

Leadership is Influence. Simply put, learning to better connect with your team leads to higher unit sales, better CSI, and lower employee turnover.

“The key to your staff’s performance lies within you,” says industry expert and trainer Kirk Manzo. As a John Maxwell-certified trainer and coach, Manzo specializes in working with automotive dealerships in sales, sales management and F&I management. nationally and throughout Latin America.

Manzo bases his sessions on the John C. Maxwell Team’s leadership and communications principles, known as a top motivation and leadership program throughout the world, with millions of books sold worldwide.

“In order to achieve increases in sales productivity and effort, dealers must move beyond cooperation based on rules or hierarchy, to cooperation based on inspiration — you have a connection with them.”

Manzo says to develop leadership that drives sales people to succeed, managers must consider these questions:

• What are the three three questions to use when conducting one-on-ones with salespeople?
• What are your connecting strengths and how do you capitalize on them?
• What is the difference between high achieving and low achieving managers/leaders?
• What is the Inspiration Equation and how do you implement it?
• Why credibility determines your long term success?

“A key to a manager’s success,” says Manzo, “is to develop team members by guiding them into new positions with new skills, so they become successful and add to the overall success of the team.”

Manzo gives this “in the trenches” example of how situations without thoughtful leadership can lead to reactive, competition-based outcomes that are actually unproductive for the sales force:

“Battlefield promotions are common for dealerships. An underperforming sales manager is removed and replaced by a high performing salesperson. Now, that ‘lone-wolf’ mentality that served that new manager well as an individual performer, actually works against him. His only success has been through individual accomplishment. Achieving success through the group requires a new and different set of skills.”

Manzo says both new and established managers will benefit from this approach of team building through inspirational leadership. “It will also assist them in learning how to better connect with their customers,” adds Manzo.

Since 1996 Manzo has specialized in the retail automotive industry and is the former director of consulting at the Ziegler Corporations. He was a session leader at the 11th Digital Dealer in 2011 and has conducted hundreds of trainings both nationwide and in Latin America. Manzo’s insights from more than 30 years of sales, marketing, and consulting experience are invaluable tools for managers of all departments and levels.