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Stop Writing Tickets: How to Turn Service Advisors into Sales Pros [E227]

Stop Writing Tickets: How to Turn Service Advisors into Sales Pros [E227]

Chris Cotton Weekly Blitz Sep 22, 2025 12 min
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About this episode

Transforming service advisors from order takers to sales professionals is crucial for maximizing profits in auto repair shops. Coach Chris Cotton emphasizes the importance of education, trust-building, and effective communication in this episode. He provides practical strategies for improving advisor performance, such as active listening, using Digital Vehicle Inspections (DVI) as storytelling tools, and role-playing scenarios. By focusing on these areas, shops can significantly increase their closing ratios and customer satisfaction, ultimately driving revenue growth.

Topics: service advisors sales techniques customer trust active listening digital vehicle inspections role playing communication skills closing ratios training strategies
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This is the Aftermarket Radio Network.
It's your weekly Blitz with Chris keeping you in the game.
Are you ready to supercharge your auto repair business?
This is Coach Chris Cotton from Autofix Auto Shop Coaching.
The weekly Blitz is where industry expertise and business innovation collide, revving
your engines for the week ahead.
Every episode is game changing insights, up to the minute industry updates and practical
tips to shift your business into high gear.
We're talking about stuff you didn't even know you didn't know folks.
This episode is brought to you by Shop Marketing Pros, the experts in marketing for top tier
auto repair shops.
If you're running a successful shop and want to take you to the next level, Shop Marketing
Pros is without a doubt your best option.
From websites and SEO to social media and digital ads, Shop Marketing Pros helps shop owners
just like you and me fill our bays, grow our revenue and build the life we've been
working for.
If you're ready to take the guesswork out of your marketing, I want you to visit ShopMarketingPros.com
forward slash Chris and get a free digital marketing inspection and start building the
shop of your dreams today.
Today I'm tackling what I think is the single biggest choke point in your business, your
service advisors.
Let me be blunt.
If your advisors are acting like order takers, your shop is bleeding money.
Order takers just write down what the customer says, they hand it to the tech and hope the
sale closes itself.
But sales professionals, they're educators, they're guides and they're trust builders.
They don't just close sales, they create lifelong customers and today I'm going to give you
the playbook to transform order takers into sales pros.
So when we think about the problem, I want you to think about this.
Advisors control 70 to 80% of your shop's gross profit, yet most owners put their least
trained people in that role.
Order takers kill sales by failing to mirror the customer's concern, quoting without educating
and leaving the decision entirely on the customer instead of guiding them through the process.
This isn't about being pushy, it's about responsibility.
Your advisor's job is to help the customer make safe, smart decisions about their vehicles.
Let me give you an example.
A customer comes in with a break noise and the order taker would say, yeah, you need
breaks, it's going to be 600 bucks.
I hate the word bucks.
Do you want to do it today?
Half the time the customer is going to say no, why?
Because there's no urgency, there's no education, there's no trust built.
So let's picture a sales pro in that same situation.
They show the customer the DVI photos, pads at two millimeters, rotors grooved.
They say, hey, Chris, your breaks are dangerously thin.
At two millimeters, your stopping distance is much longer than it should be.
We have the parts in stock and we can have you safely back on the road by 430.
I recommend we get this done today.
Can I go ahead and authorize that for you?
You know, that difference, that's the gap between order takers and pros.
One just quotes the other guides and customers feel it.
All right, the only other thing that I would say about the script that I just
read that I forgot is instead of saying 600 bucks, say it's $597 and 23 cents,
like down to the penny.
That's how awesome we are.
In the last episode, we talked about attention to detail.
We don't guesstimate and we don't say bucks.
We're professionals for crying out loud.
If we're talking about the mind shift, order takers equals note takers
and sales pros equal decision coaches.
Say that again.
Order takers equals note takers and sales pros or sales professionals.
They equal decision coaches.
Advisors have to understand they're not selling repairs.
They're selling peace of mind.
I need just to put this in their head.
I need everybody to reframe it.
I'm not here to get money from the customer.
I'm here to make sure they drive a safe, reliable car.
That's what I'm doing.
That is our purpose.
That's in our job description.
So the next teaching point we have is confidence and communication.
Customers buy confidence.
If your advisor sounds hesitant, the sale dies.
There are simple shifts in language that you need to consider.
That's why you need to be listening to phone calls, coaching your people
on the phone calls instead of saying it needs, say I recommend.
Again, it's 600 bucks.
It's five hundred ninety seven dollars and forty two cents.
Parts and labor included.
You can even say sales tax if you want to.
We'll also torque and road test everything before you pick it up.
Advisors have to practice tone, calm, direct, reassuring.
These things need to be role played, maybe in morning huddles,
maybe a sales staff huddle.
How do you do that?
You bring in your service advisors and actively coach them
on what they should be doing 20, 30 minutes a week.
OK, the next teaching point, the DVI is an amazing thing.
The DVI is a storytelling tool.
DVI's aren't checklists.
They're like Pinterest for auto repair shops.
What DVI's are is their storyboards.
Each photo is a chapter.
Here's your brake pad.
Here's what a good one looks like.
Here's why this matters.
Visuals cut through all confusion.
Customers don't buy words.
They buy what they can see.
Sales professionals narrate DVI's.
Don't just email them out and wait for the customer to go through and pick them.
I have a pet peeve in my shop now.
My guys are doing good at taking pictures and videos.
But the videos last 12 seconds and you can barely get the video in focus
and see what you're looking at, let alone identify and understand what we're doing.
So your videos should be no less than 30 seconds.
Put it up there, look at it, narrate it and then get it down.
But these videos and DVI should probably be 30 seconds.
All right, we kind of talked about the problem.
We talked about, you know, coaching and things like that.
So what are some solutions?
How do we create sales professionals?
Number one, active listening and mirroring at check in.
Repeat back the concern word for word.
Build trust, make sure the customer feels heard.
Everybody, I say everybody, I've yet to find
somebody that does this really, really well and I'm guilty of this.
If you're out there and you do this really well,
then I would love to see a video of you doing it.
When we're checking in people, people get in such a hurry
that they're like, yes, done, keys go, get out of my shop.
We have to make sure we slow down and listen.
OK, we do not listen well and we do not slow down at all.
Next, we have the one minute Auro read back before the customer leaves.
Confirm concern, the promised time and the update cadence.
If you don't know what that is, we talked about it in the last episode.
These things remove guesswork and they set expectations.
All right, script for updates.
Customer, you're going to hear from me by 10 30 with the findings.
Then again, by two with parts timing.
If anything changes, I'll call sooner so there are no surprises.
Consistency builds trust. OK, I want you to track this if you're not.
And if your shop management system doesn't track this,
you're going to have to get creative and figure out how to make this work.
I want you to track the closing ratio.
Car count and average repair order don't matter at all if closing ratio sucks.
Our benchmark on general repair is 60 to 70 percent
and our maintenance is 80 percent.
And I don't know of anybody that's getting that close
unless you're deleting some of your recommended work and cherry picking those.
Oh, I'm going to leave these in here.
A lot of times what we see with shop owners, they're like, I need more cars.
I need to hire average repair order.
My marketing sucks, et cetera.
But when you look at it, their service advisors have a 100 percent
close rate because they're deleting everything else.
And if they were able to close on what they were not selling,
chances are they don't need anything in marketing.
Their marketing is fine.
They just need to suck less. OK.
If we think about what our leader's playbook is, I need you to role play daily.
Five minutes each morning is better than nothing.
Pick a scenario, breaks, tires, check engine light and practice it.
I think we need to have an advisor scoreboard
that's posted for the advisors to see.
We don't want to beat people down with it.
We want to find and amplify things that are going well in the advisor scoreboard.
You should show your closing percentage, your average repair order car count.
I think that visibility drives performance.
OK. And then share it with the service advisors.
A lot of shop management systems, tech metric it has.
We can go in and pull a report, shows what the each service advisors
average repair order is, what their written estimate is,
what closing percentage amount is and their car count.
Ongoing training, don't wait for a conference.
Train monthly, coach weekly, review daily.
We work so hard to pull you out of being in the business,
to working on the business, to not be doing this.
It's your time and it's your turn to coach your employees.
This thing, we're just talking about service advisors.
All right. Again, I'm repeating this again.
Don't wait for a conference.
Train monthly, coach weekly, review daily.
Next, we're going to audit DVIs.
I have in my notes, randomly review three DVIs per week.
You should be at least doing three to five DVIs per service advisor.
Did the advisor tell a story or did they just send pictures?
When you're looking at that, how good your technician doing?
Now, your service advisors, when we're talking about accountability,
your service advisors better be holding your technicians accountable
for picture quality and everything else.
And then you follow up on your service advisor quality.
You may need to do both, but you need to set up an accountability
chain in order to get those things moving along.
Okay. Here's the challenge.
This week, I want you to pick one advisor and track their closing ratio
for five straight days.
Don't judge them, just measure.
And then I want you to sit down and role play one scenario
and improve that by five percent.
That small improvement compounds fast.
An advisor who sells five thousand dollars a week and raises their closing
by five percent is suddenly adding $250 more in sales every week.
That's 12 grand a year.
If you have four service advisors and they're all doing that,
then that's another $5,000 or excuse me, that math doesn't even work out.
I don't even know a service advisor who sells only $5,000 a week.
If you have each service advisor and you have four that sell $10,000 a week,
then those numbers are 500 per each and that's $2,000 a week in sales.
That over 52 weeks makes a huge difference.
What if you can increase it by 10 percent, 15 percent, 20 percent?
A lot of places I see they're struggling in the 40 to 50 percent range.
If you're less than 40 percent, you got big problems.
If you're in the 40 to 50 percent range and can get your closing ratio to 65, 70
percent, that's a huge increase and it's just by training better.
Okay.
Those are the differences between order takers and sales professionals.
One writes tickets, the other drives profit, builds trust and creates loyal customers.
I want to give another shout out to our sponsor, Shop Marketing Pros.
They are the only marketing company I recommend and they handle all of the
marketing for my own shops as well.
If you're serious about growth, you need strategies to actually work better websites,
hire Google rankings and ads that bring real customers through your doors.
I want you to go visit shopmarketingpros.com forward slash Chris and partner
with a team that understands your business because every great shop deserves
marketing that's just a great thanks for tuning into the weekly Blitz.
Remember, it's time to rise, grind and keep your mindset positive.
Until next time, this is Coach Chris Cotton signing off.
Have a great day, everybody.
You've been listening to the weekly Blitz with Coach Chris Cotton on the
aftermarketradiotnetwork.com.
Follow Chris on your favorite podcast listening out.
Let him know what you'd like him to cover.
His email is in the show notes.
Chris is all for advancing the aftermarket.

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