Hendrick ‘University’ fights car salesmen stigmas

By Dennis Quick
Assistant Editor/News & Features
Charleston Regional Business Journal

In a 1996 Gallup Poll surveying 26 occupations for honesty and ethics, Americans rated car salesmen dead last — as they had every year since 1977, when the profession first appeared in the poll.

“It’s high time the industry did something about its image,” says Brad Davis, executive general manager of Rick Hendrick Imports on Savannah Highway. “Car dealerships are multi-million-dollar corporations and should take a corporate, professional approach to selling.”

The Hendrick Automotive Group is doing just that with its Charlotte, N.C.-based Hendrick University. There, says Davis, sales trainees take a number of courses, from communication skills to the Hendrick auto dealership’s culture and business philosophy, plus sales training classes.

"A lot of the courses are pretty basic,” says Davis. “Trainees learn how to greet customers, how to present a product, how to take a customer on a road test, how to get to the customer’s real wants and needs to make sure they are being sold the right car. In addition, there are classes in telephone skills, time management and prospecting.”

After the four-day session, trainees return to their regional dealerships and are paired with senior sales reps. “This is when the sales trainees see how things flow at the dealership and learn ‘the road to the sale,’ so to speak,” Davis explains.

Finally, as a follow-up to the Hendrick University session, trainees enroll in a three-day class at the dealership, where they ask more informed questions about the job and review what they’ve learned.

The Hendrick Group uses a selling and management technique created by Kansas-based MBS Inc. called Management By Strength. “You study the temperament traits of people and adjust yourself according to their traits,” explains Davis.

MBS consists of four traits:

– Directness, in which people are hard-driving, decisive and focus on results

– Extroversion, denoting people who are enthusiastic, pleasant and like teamwork

– Pace, describing those of us who are easygoing, well-tempered and plan ahead to avoid being rushed

– Structure, describing well-organized, rule-abiding people who hate making mistakes.

The traits are color-coded — red for directness, green for extroversion, blue for pace, yellow for structure — and Hendrick employees wear nametags with color graphs depicting their MBS traits.

“For instance, when you see a co-worker whose tag has Pace as the highest peak on their graph, you know not to rush them,” explains Davis. “Rick Hendrick has used this for 15 years, and other large corporations use it as well. We teach sales reps to use this technique in reading customers.”

In 2001 the Hendrick Auto Group will incorporate a sales certification program focusing on law and ethics. “We’re also steering new employees down career paths,” adds Davis. “We’re creating a corporate environment to make employees feel they’re a part of the company. It’s this kind of philosophy that’s improving the car salesman image.”