Training at Hotel Hell - Transmission Digest

Training at Hotel Hell

Training at Hotel Hell A Little Help Author: Art Little Subject Matter: Management Issue: Sales Training

Training at Hotel Hell

A Little Help

Author: Art Little
Subject Matter: Management
Issue: Sales Training

A. Little Help

  • Author: Art Little
  • Subject Matter: Management
  • Issue: Sales Training

I wrote an article years ago, when the Internet was just getting started, about training. And, what I predicted has happened. Here we sit in 2015 and a variety of training is available online. Training is not something we want to do but rather, something we all need to do to. I have been on both sides as a student and a trainer and believe me when I say that online training makes things easier for everybody.

In 1985 I remember packing up a suitcase, driving to Houston, Texas and staying in Hotel Hell for a week to go to center manager school when I first got in the business. Many of you old timers out there will remember the week of pure torture we were put through back then.

I was selling home improvement at night up until 1985. My daughter was starting school and I wanted to work days, so I picked up the newspaper and looked in the want ads under “sales”. There it was – an ad for a salesman in automotive. I thought I would be selling parts or oil when I called, but to my surprise, they wanted me to sell transmissions. I had no idea that the manager of a transmission shop was a salesman. I told the owner, “That would be a great job if I knew what a transmission was.”

And – I will never forget it – the owner told me, “You don’t have to know anything about transmissions.”

Yes sir, that is what he told me. I said, “Let me get this straight. This is an inside sales job. Customers come to me, I don’t have to know anything about transmissions and the customer does not know I am a salesman?”

He said, “That’s correct.” That was the first lie a transmission shop owner told me and how I got in the transmission business.

On my first day the guy that told me I did not have to know anything about transmissions took me into a meeting with three other new hires and told us he was sending us all to school. We would be leaving our families and driving down to Houston to attend transmission school. There would be about 50 salesmen from all over the country there. The four of us would all share two rooms. The classes would last a week and we would be tested on the final day. If we passed, we had a job. I raised my hand.

I said, “I thought you said I did not have to know anything about transmissions. Why are you sending me to school?”

He said, “You don’t, but you do need to learn how to answer the phone and sell an inspection service.”

Inspection service? He told me not to worry about it. It’s just a week. I wanted to believe him and I really wanted to work days and have customers come to me and not know I am a salesman, so I went.

The four of us drove six hours together in the same car and became pretty good friends by the time we got there. When we arrived we all went to the bar and got the ball rolling. At the time I felt like they could not teach me anything that I didn’t already know about selling.

I had been a professional salesman for 10 years. Home improvement sales is a brutal straight commission sales job. It is a one-call close. If you don’t sell it, you don’t get paid. I was selling a product that sold for $5,000 to $15,000, so, to me, selling a transmission for $400 to $1000, was like shooting low-flying mallards. I was not expecting what happened next.

The trainers came into the bar and told us to go to our rooms and start studying. They were like the Gestapo. They were not kidding around, these guys, so we went to our rooms. They came in a few minutes later and told us where the classroom was and when we needed to be there. We were instructed to start studying and not leave the room. I realized then that the trainers were going to be a real problem as time went on.

It began to feel like I was in jail. My cellmate kept me up most of the night with his talking. This guy talked too much when he was awake and he did not stop talking when he was asleep. I had to listen to him day and night for seven days. It was miserable.

There were about 50 students in a room that had a chalkboard with everybody’s name on it. We were told to write the inspection paragraph word-for-word. The test will be graded and the grades will be posted on the chalkboard. Get the picture? I don’t need to tell you I failed and not by just a little bit.

From that point on I was on the Gestapo radar. They came into my room every night three or four times to make sure I was studying and even woke me up when I was sleeping and told me to get up and study. I am one of those guys that needs a full eight hours of sleep to function. The harassment, sleep interruptions, various distractions and the fast-paced training schedule made it hard for me to grasp the material.

This was Hotel Hell. I was away from my wife and daughter, surrounded by the Gestapo, sharing a room with someone I wanted to murder and not sleeping or eating right. I got a call from the owner checking in on me about the third day in and I asked him, “If I fail the final test would I still have a job?”

He had the right answer or my career in the transmission industry would have ended on that phone call. So, to make a long story short, I finished school and learned how to answer the phone and get an inspection service. I passed their test and received my completion certificate to hang on the wall in my office at my new shop. I could not wait to get to it.

I needed to sell something and start making some money. I was only paid $200 for my week at Hotel Hell. I will tell you, that is the hardest I have worked for $200 in my life. It worked out to about 27 cents an hour as I recall. So I got my first customer in and sold him an inspection service. I called the owner and asked him, “What do I do next?”

He said, “Don’t worry about it and go get you another one.”

I said, “No, I am worried about it because you told me this morning that I don’t get paid until the vehicle gets picked up.”

He said, “Okay, then go out and write it on the production board out in the shop.” Production board ? I realized right there that I had jumped out of the frying pan of Hotel Hell into the fire of production management. The owner had not lied to me about this critical part of the manager’s job; he just did not bring it up. So I walked out in the shop and put my first sale on the production board and began my work on mastering the art of production management for the rest of my career.

You see, putting it on the production board and controlling the production board were two very different things. I found out early that what the technicians thought needed to be done next was very different from what the manager thought. After going home with a short paycheck a week or two into it I asked the owner if there was any training for this. He said not as far as he knew.

I said, “Well, why would you send me to school to learn how to sell the transmission repair and stop there?”

He obviously did not know how much money this was costing him. In all fairness, I must say that most of the shop owners I worked for after that didn’t either.

I have consulted in many shops over the years and the owner is always complaining about the manager when I get there. I always ask the shop owner how much time and money have been put into training him. I saw managers with 20 years’ experience that did not know how to manage production until I taught them. 20 years is a long time to walk around in a shop and not know what is going on production-wise. For the young managers, the training filled-in what the schools and the owners left out.

A few years ago, I got to thinking about Hotel Hell and how hard it was for me to get a total understanding of what it took to run a transmission specialty shop effectively. I had trained managers that worked for me or my clients for the past 25 years on production management. I had the training already there in my briefcase, but no one else could see it. I still had to go to the shops to expose managers and owners to it, so the task became to take the training out of my briefcase and put it online.

There would be no more Hotel Hells. It would be a four- to six-hour course complete with testing and certification and managers could study and get certified in their free time without leaving their families. I know firsthand that all managers need this training. Even the old pros can use a refresher course and it is a must-have for young managers.

It wasn’t easy to do. It took a while to figure it all out, but at last, my production management training course is online at the TransTeam website. It includes testing and certification. I am going to make my training easy for everyone because I like easy. This month the course is free. Consider it an early birthday present.

Instead of telling your manager to go write his sale on the production board and fight it out with the techs, just call me or go to “Contact Us” at the TransTeam website, enter your name and email address, then select “other” from the drop-down menu. In the notes section, type in “Free manager training /referred by Transmission Digest”.

Let us coach ‘em up online for you. No travel. No hotel bills. No food expenses. No missed work. Managers study at home. No effort on your part. No effort on my part. I told you online training was easier on everyone. The entire online course takes less time than it took me to drive to Houston and attend Hotel Hell.

I have a dream. It is a world where there is no Hotel Hell. Managers have a place online to learn how to manage production efficiently and don’t have to learn it on their own or worse, never learn it at all. It is a world where the shop owners out there stop lying to new managers about not needing to know anything about transmissions and throwing them into the fire of production management with no support. But the best part of the dream is that I don’t have to be there to teach the class. I sleep in my own bed while the managers study and my old roommate is not there talking to me all night long.

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