Episode #371
SDR #371 - Selling Cars From The Service Drive
What if your service drive became one of your dealership's most powerful—and consistent—vehicle sales channels? In this episode of Service Drive Revolution, Chris Collins, Hogi, and Adam reveal how dealerships can turn everyday service appointments into organic sales and trade-in opportunities without making customers feel pressured. The key isn't occasionally sending a salesperson into the drive—it's building a dedicated system where sales and service operate as one team. You'll discover how to: • Embed dedicated salespeople inside the service department • Use equity mining to identify the right opportunities • Incentivize advisors to facilitate strong customer handoffs • Introduce trade-in conversations before the appointment • Acquire valuable used inventory without relying on auctions • Use maintenance programs to create familiarity, trust, and retention • Build toward the future "portfolio manager" model—one person managing the customer's entire ownership journey The team also breaks down leadership lessons from Hard Knocks, explains why attention reveals a leader's true priorities, and explores how great systems make exceptional performance repeatable. If your dealership has "tried selling from the service drive" before and it didn't work, this episode will show you what was probably missing. #ServiceDriveRevolution #FixedOps #AutomotiveLeadership #AutomotiveSales #ServiceDrive #DealershipTraining SDR Live Academy Online Training For Huge Results: https://chriscollinsinc.com/op/sdr-live-weekly/?=sdrpod Book your Profit Gap Analysis Now: https://calendly.com/byron-webster/30min Best Selling books on making Fixed Ops a money printer: https://chriscollinsinc.com/shop/ Got a question? Call us at 1-833-3-ASK-SDR Want to work with the best? https://chriscollinsinc.com/careers/ Grab Chris' New Leadership Book I AM LEADER: https://iamleader.com Service Drive Revolution - Episode #371 Transcript How to Sell Vehicles From the Service Drive Service Drive Revolution — Chris Collins, Inc. Hosts: Chris Collins, Hogi, Adam Craig Summary Chris Collins, Hogi, and Adam Craig explain how franchised car dealerships can consistently sell vehicles out of the service drive. The core argument: dealerships that succeed at this dedicate salespeople to service full-time rather than rotating them in occasionally. The episode covers compensation structures for advisors, equity mining inside the service scheduling process, using salespeople for appointment confirmation calls, and why Chris believes dealerships will eventually merge the service advisor and salesperson roles into a single "portfolio manager." The show also answers audience questions on new-vehicle maintenance packages and covers a fake forum post attacking the CCI program. Key topics: selling cars from the service drive · dedicated service-drive salespeople · advisor bird-dog compensation · equity mining · trade-in acquisition · new vehicle maintenance packages · the portfolio manager model Key Takeaways Dedicated salespeople are the single biggest factor. A salesperson assigned to service full-time — present at the 6:45 AM shift meeting before a 7:00 AM service open — works. Rotating salespeople through service a few days a month does not. Top-performing dealerships convert about 4–5% of RO count into vehicle sales. That's a handful of cars a day out of the drive. Compensate the advisor. An advisor loses the RO when a customer buys a vehicle. Without a bird-dog or bonus, they have no reason to want the sale. Lead with acquisition, not sales. "Your vehicle is in high demand and we need it on our used car lot" outperforms "do you want a new car." Have salespeople make the appointment confirmation call. It creates a warm, casual introduction rather than a predatory one. Stores that sell well from the drive also acquire well from the drive — sourcing used inventory outside the auction is a major competitive advantage in the current market. Maintenance packages aren't the enemy — the one-item RO is. Add declined multi-point items to those tickets before judging profitability. 50–60% of customers never use their free oil changes. Phone calls, not emails, are what get them in. How to Sell Vehicles From the Service Drive Service Drive Revolution — Chris Collins, Inc. Hosts: Chris Collins, Hogi, Adam Krey Summary Chris Collins, Hogi, and Adam Krey explain how franchised car dealerships can consistently sell vehicles out of the service drive. The core argument: dealerships that succeed at this dedicate salespeople to service full-time rather than rotating them in occasionally. The episode covers compensation structures for advisors, equity mining inside the service scheduling process, using salespeople for appointment confirmation calls, and why Chris believes dealerships will eventually merge the service advisor and salesperson roles into a single "portfolio manager." The show also answers audience questions on new-vehicle maintenance packages and covers a fake forum post attacking the CCI program. Key topics: selling cars from the service drive · dedicated service-drive salespeople · advisor bird-dog compensation · equity mining · trade-in acquisition · new vehicle maintenance packages · the portfolio manager model Key Takeaways Dedicated salespeople are the single biggest factor. A salesperson assigned to service full-time — present at the 6:45 AM shift meeting before a 7:00 AM service open — works. Rotating salespeople through service a few days a month does not. Top-performing dealerships convert about 4–5% of RO count into vehicle sales. That's a handful of cars a day out of the drive. Compensate the advisor. An advisor loses the RO when a customer buys a vehicle. Without a bird-dog or bonus, they have no reason to want the sale. Lead with acquisition, not sales. "Your vehicle is in high demand and we need it on our used car lot" outperforms "do you want a new car." Have salespeople make the appointment confirmation call. It creates a warm, casual introduction rather than a predatory one. Stores that sell well from the drive also acquire well from the drive — sourcing used inventory outside the auction is a major competitive advantage in the current market. Maintenance packages aren't the enemy — the one-item RO is. Add declined multi-point items to those tickets before judging profitability. 50–60% of customers never use their free oil changes. Phone calls, not emails, are what get them in. Opening: Hard Knocks as Leadership Training Chris Collins: Welcome everybody to Service Drive Revolution. Hope you're having a great morning. I'm Chris Collins. Hogi is here. Adam — what's up, everybody? We have a great show for you today. Should we start off talking about Hard Knocks ? Anybody watch the greatest leadership training available today? Hogi: I did. I watched it on the plane last night. Chris: Adam, you hate leadership? Adam Krey: I don't hate leadership. I just missed the episode. Chris: It's good. Hard Knocks is really, really fun. It's the Seattle Seahawks this year. The NFL dropped the rule — they used to have a rule that if you made the playoffs you could pass on Hard Knocks . In the new collective bargaining agreement, I think they changed that, and they picked the Super Bowl champions. The Seattle Seahawks, Super Bowl champions, on Hard Knocks . It's an interesting thing to see a team coming off winning the Super Bowl now trying to figure out how to get back there. I think it's harder to get back there than it is to get there, in a lot of ways. Don't you guys agree? Adam: Yeah, totally agree. Not too many do it. Chris: Your team, Hogi — the Chiefs have done it. But it's not common. Hogi: One of my favorite things with that episode was there's just a vibe coming off a Super Bowl win. Those rings are pretty awesome. Whoever designed their Super Bowl rings — they had some cool surprises with it. They hit that little button and it opens up into a stadium. Chris: When we go to Cut in the Beverly Wilshire in Beverly Hills, that jewelry store is in there — Jason of Beverly Hills. When Adam and I went there a few weeks ago, they didn't have it for sale yet. They have one they'll sell to fans. It's like $20,000 and it has real diamonds. It's not the one the players get, but you do get your name on it, and your number is 12, which is the number for the fans. Then they have another one with Swarovski crystal or something that's about $1,500, which doesn't look that cool. Adam: What's the reasoning that you don't get it, Chris? Chris: There are a bunch of reasons, Adam. I know you made the comment that if the Bears won it, you'd buy one — and then I think you kind of backtracked. I'm not going to spend $20,000 on a ring I didn't earn. I don't do anything as a fan. Adam: You were here at our Super Bowl party. Chris: I did nothing. I ate and smoked a cigar. I did nothing but yell at the screen. Football's the best. I'm so excited football's back. It's so nostalgic for me. Football reminds me of my grandpa. I was born a Seahawks fan — my grandpa was so excited when Seattle got a football team. They were an expansion team. I think the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Seahawks came in at the same time, and they never won through my whole youth. I played Pop Warner football and got to play at halftime at a Seahawks game, meet the team, sit on the sidelines. It was such a connection between my grandfather and me. He'd take me to the games, and Mariners games too. The Mariners have never won a World Series, but he would fall asleep listening to Dave Niehaus, a legendary broadcaster in Seattle who called the Mariners games. I still can't believe the Seahawks won the Super Bowl. I love our coach. Why leadership shows up on camera Chris: I'd recommend everybody watch Hard Knocks just from a leadership side. You can look at the teams that have been on Hard Knocks before that didn't win, that didn't make the playoffs — you could tell why by paying attention to the mannerisms and the behaviors. There was an interesting clip I saw the other day of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger doing their annual shareholder meeting. They take questions, and one of them was: how do you avoid getting ripped off in business? Buffett says a lot of people get ripped off — he sees it quite often. And he says they have this way of doing things where they pay attention to what people say, what they're interested in, how they behave, how they act. If you're really paying attention to that, it tells you who somebody is. One of the red flags for them: if they're going to buy a business and the owner says it's easy to run the business, they're out. They're not buying it. Because nobody who runs a successful business long-term ever says anything is easy. If they say it's easy, they know they're just trying to sell something. Their model is to buy out the owner, make them the CEO, give them a bunch of stock and the resources to grow it — they want the owner to stay around. And if somebody says "business is easy," they're not honest. Because it's not easy. Watching Hard Knocks — I think it was last year, maybe the year before — it was the New York Giants. You see the head coach at the combine talking about doing the 40 and foot racing, and he's on his phone the whole time. He's not talking football. He's not engaged in what he's doing. He's not even watching the people on the field doing drills. He's just messing around. He thinks everything is funny. He's gone. He's fired. You can tell by where he's spending his attention. If you think about attention as commerce — as a source of revenue or money — you're spending your attention. You're spending your money by where you put it. He was goofing off. You're at the combine for a week. Your goal is to figure out who the players are that you want to take in the draft. Even if that decision is made by the general manager, you want to be involved in it. You want to be part of it as a head coach. So as a fan of football and leadership, it can be very insightful. Adam: I want to watch it. The clip you played for the running backs coach has got me intrigued. If there was a commercial, they should just play pieces of that. Chris: Thomas Hammock is the running backs coach. In pre-production I was playing it for Adam because it's so good and so funny. Adam: He's from Illinois, right? He's from NIU, and he took them to a bowl game where Notre Dame — that was their only regular season loss. That's a huge deal for NIU, the Huskies. He reminds me of one of my football line coaches, and I won't repeat what he said, but it was very similar. You put your beep into the dirt and you just keep fighting. I keep envisioning the lineman drills with the chutes. I'm having a little bit of trauma flashbacks, but I'm going to try to somehow get a recording of that and make it my ringtone in the morning. I just want him to yell at me. I want to wake up to him yelling at me about "don't wait for the hole to open up." Chris: It would be great if we could do something with our coaches where we break that down, like how we do book reports. Hogi: When you're listening to it from a leadership standpoint, try to unpack what he's building. He's calling out the obvious right away. He's firing up their emotions right away. He's immediately coming with how their brand — which is really the Seahawks brand — is to be physical. No part of what he was saying was just emotion. It all had functionality and purpose with it. He didn't write down that speech five minutes before he walked into that room. He was prepared. It had a pathway and an intention. He'd been waiting to give that speech for a minute. Chris: There's a lot of pent-up energy there. Adam: It gets me excited for November 2nd. Chris: For anybody listening, Adam wants me to go to Seattle to watch the Seahawks beat the Bears at home on November 2nd. I won't go — because I'm not going to sit there with somebody in a Bears jersey in Seattle. All my fellow Seahawks fans going, "You brought this guy?" Adam, we should be able to talk about someone else's team without you bringing up the Bears. Adam: It's worse than Cowboys, because I wasn't alive when we went to the Super Bowl. Chris: Do we have a Cowboys fan on our team right now? Is this the best team of coaches we've ever had? Best coaching team we've ever had, and we don't have one Cowboys fan. Adam: I just want to be part of the championship club, guys. I connect dots. That's what I do. Chris: There's one other one-on-one in there that Coach Mike does with number three — our phenom safety-linebacker who's hurt. He just had surgery on his foot. The kid's kind of depressed, going through rehab, wants to be out on the field, and then Coach is talking about all these things people are saying about him in the media, and he takes that and turns it around. It's a pretty cool intimate one-on-one that we get to see into. Adam: That's what I like about that show. It really brings the human element to leadership. Chris: They've said in press conferences that after two days they forget the camera is there and they're just functioning normally. Which is the best. That's what I want to see. Housekeeping: Academy and Top Dog Chris: Today on SDR Academy, Hogi is going to be teaching the secret weapon of systems, and coming out of that we're going to go into specific systems. Just about every one of these systems we're going to teach you is worth $50,000 a month in additional sales. You could directly tie a number to each one. If you're not in Service Drive Academy, go to chriscollinsinc.com , sign up for OnDemand, and you'll get a link. Every other week we're going through and teaching you how to be the best leader in the service drive. Have we ever told the audience that we have Jefferson Fischer coming to Top Dog this year as a speaker? Hogi: No, I don't believe so. Chris: Adam and I had the honor of seeing him. I actually got to have dinner with him at an event last year. If you're not familiar with him, go to YouTube and type in Jefferson Fischer. He's an attorney from Texas who really digs into how you can word things, how you can overcome objections, how you can neutralize a bully or a negotiation. He's really smart and has a great way of nicely changing somebody's perspective in a way that doesn't create resistance but still makes your point. Adam: What helps in digesting that is his facial expressions as well, along with the message. He's grown up on a lot of different platforms, and I don't know many people now who haven't heard of him. Chris: He's a good get. He'll be at Top Dog this year, and we're working on some other fun stuff for Top Dog. Follow-Up: The Fake Forum Post Chris: We talked last week about this fake-news service advisor forum on Facebook that had a critique of us — of me, but of us basically — that is totally fake. It's some sort of plant. It's a Jeff Cowan forum, so the forum is run by Jeff Cowan. I don't believe Jeff Cowan would be doing that on purpose, but it's so fake and odd that it's hard not to think that maybe he is. I don't know. Adam went into the forum and looked around. Do you think it's a plant from Jeff Cowan, or a random person making up the post? Adam: I think it's a random person. But when you read it, there are a couple hundred different postings back and forth. Honestly, I love the back and forth of all the other various people. There are more people telling them, "Please stay away from my operations — if you're like this, I don't want you working for me." So we don't have to do much. There's a little bit of a realization, of looking in the mirror. With change, there's always going to be some sort of resistance. I don't know if it's him or one of the folks who work with him. It could be. Is there any truth to "any publicity is good publicity"? The truth is going to come out in the fact of people going back and forth. It's actually kind of an interesting community that has the discussions, because there are a lot of people with common sense. Nobody goes in there and starts raising everything just for the fact of not having a value behind it. And there are people going to bat for us as well, ironing out the truth. Chris: How many comments are on it? Adam: There are like a couple hundred. Back and forth. It's a series. I've been out of the Facebook game for a while, so it's just like — oh, man. A lot of thumbs up, a lot of thumbs down, smiley faces, the little emojis, people laughing. There are a lot of anonymous posts that go in there. How can you be anonymous on Facebook? I don't understand that. I got out of that whole thing a long time ago, so to see this just makes me shake my head. Sometimes people just want to be heard in silos. I keep thinking of the angry kid in mommy and daddy's basement who wants to drum up some sort of drama. But then again, there are some cool discussions on there of people actually trying to help people. That's what should be happening in those types of forums — not just a complaining fest. Chris: Jeff should just moderate it. If Jeff isn't the one doing it, he should moderate. If we had one of those, we would moderate it for sure. If you can be anonymous online, you can be very opinionated and make up all kinds of stories. What do they call that — trolling? Main Topic: Selling Vehicles From the Service Drive Chris: Let's talk about the subject we wanted to highlight today, and that is how you sell vehicles from the service drive. One thing we need to do in fixed ops is run a really good department that's consistent month in and month out — and we need to help the other departments. We need to transcend our department and help other departments prosper in these times, because a lot of dealerships are struggling with sales on the front end, and there's a lot of opportunity in the service drive. At Top Dog this year I was thinking about asking somebody we know whose dealerships convert about 4% of their RO count into car sales in the drive. Four to five per
