Your Guide to Automotive Industry Digital Marketing

By Brian M. Hosenfeld, President, Performance Aftermarket Consulting

Discover a great free training course that everyone selling in the aftermarket industry should take.

Do you have all the information you need to be an effective salesman?  What about your counter employees?

The common thought on education in the automotive aftermarket typically centers on the information the local manufacturers rep passed along or the recent product catalog your warehouse distributor sent.  Is this really educational material?  The short answer is no.  Its only information.  Education is defined as acquiring general knowledge AND developing the powers of reasoning and judgment.  Is that catalog that you just shoved under the counter educating you?  Reasoning says no!  Education in the automotive aftermarket is centered on product training and personal and professional development.

Unless you’re one of the lucky few who have a manufacturers rep who stops by frequently and actually understands the lines they represent, it’s been up to you to get the right product knowledge and information on all the latest and greatest new products.  If you’re an even smaller group in that lucky few, those high speed manufacturer reps might conduct product training classes for your sales staff.

Personal and professional development in the aftermarket has been non-existent.  Unless you have a good line on some off the shelf (read: expensive) development courses or have the cash to send your folks to a Dale Carnegie seminar, you’re probably like the majority and overlooked this side of training.

Giving your counter folks or phone staff the right tools to open and navigate to the close of a sale isn’t an easy skill to foster.  Product knowledge alone doesn’t create sales.  Trained, confident employees create sales!  But where are you going to find these training courses while not breaking the bank?

SEMA Education Institute has created several personal and professional development courses located in their Online Learning Center.  The first course covers the five step sales process aptly given an easy to remember acronym G.E.A.R.S.  This introduction to selling walks the student through a video presentation on the right and wrong way to approach each step in the sales process and has several quizzes throughout the course and a final exam at the end.  The second course covers a very specific situation in every sales process; handling customer objections.  This course teaches the student how to identify a customer objection like indifference or doubt and how to ask the right questions to move the customer past the objection and into the close.  Each course takes about an hour to complete.  Prior to enrolling and taking these courses, each student will need to visit SEMA’s home page and register for an account.  Not a SEMA member?  No problem!  Registration and both courses are FREE!  Try getting Dale Carnegie to give you two hours of professional training for free!

Start getting educated today!  Your cash register will thank you!

Author Bio:

Brian M. Hosenfeld is the President of Performance Aftermarket Consulting. His company specializes in Performance Automotive, Truck Accessory, Auto Accessory and Powersports shop marketing and best business practices. Putting his years of experience in leadership, building store inventories and product displays to work for customers all across the Country are Brian’s primary focus.