The PCP Timebomb in Chinese Brands: Former CAP HPI Director on What Is Coming for Used Car Values
Release Date: 04/16/2026
The £9,999 Screwdriver: Why Dealers Keep Underselling Their Own Technicians
Selling In The Motor Trade
Simon Bowkett is joined by Colin McAllister of John Clark Motor Group and Darren Bedford of Symco Training for a proper after sales conversation. They get into service plans and retention, the golden hour, how quickly a VHC video needs to reach the customer, and what happens to the job when authorisation lands three hours too late. Colin shares the real auto authorisation figures across the group, and there are two cracking stories in here about the value of a good technician, one involving a coffee machine and one involving a screwdriver and a very large invoice. • Service plans,...
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Stop Saying 94% Worn. Say This Instead...
Selling In The Motor Trade
Do you actually want to be in the tyre business? It sounds like a simple question, and most dealers answer it with a quick look at the margin. Simon Bowkett reckons that's the wrong test. In this episode he explains why tyres are worth doing even close to break even, because of what they protect. Keep the tyre work and you keep the customer. Lose it and you hand a fast fit the chance to sell them servicing, wipers, batteries and a winter check. He also covers the practical side. How to quote, how to explain tread depth so it actually registers, how to get tyres checked early enough to sell...
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The Quickest Win in Your Service Department
Selling In The Motor Trade
Here's the upsell that costs you nothing in workshop grief. No cars pulled back off the ramps at ten to four. No service advisor watching their CSI score go out the window. Air conditioning servicing runs itself. The technician sets the machine going and gets on with the rest of the job. Yet most departments barely offer it. In this episode, Simon Bowkett lays out why that's a missed opportunity and how to fix it. He starts with belief, because a service advisor who thinks air con doesn't really need doing will pitch it exactly that way. Then he works through the whole process and the word...
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Dial Your Own Dealership. You Won't Like What Happens
Selling In The Motor Trade
If a customer walked onto your forecourt, got ignored for three minutes, then was told to hang on while nobody came back, heads would roll. You'd call it a process failure and fix it that day. So why is exactly that happening on your phone every single day? Roughly one in three callers never gets through to someone who can help. They're not cold leads. They want to buy or book. And when they can't reach you, they don't wait around. They phone the independent down the road who picks up. Phone leads convert at nearly double the rate of internet leads, yet they're the ones we let slip through....
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I Sold Four Cars to Motorway and We Buy Any Car. Here Is What Dealers Need to Know
Selling In The Motor Trade
Here is the trade-off nobody on the sales floor wants to admit. Every time your salesperson says just sell it to We Buy Any Car to kill a part-exchange objection, they are handing your best stock to someone else. Quick for them. Expensive for you. Simon sold four of his own cars through Motorway, Carwow and We Buy Any Car to see the process from the customer's side, and it was worse than he expected. Late outsourced drivers. An app arguing about a tyre inflation kit on run-flat tyres. A finance settlement that nearly left a black mark over £60. But the sharp end is this. Your used car...
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Why Are Your VHC’s Not Converting?
Selling In The Motor Trade
Here is the uncomfortable bit. Your VHC videos probably aren't broken. Your technicians' script is. In this episode, Simon Bowkett, Skippy to most of the trade, explains why so many vehicle health check videos get filmed, sent, and then convert nothing. The camera was meant to fix a strange problem in the motor trade, the expert who inspects the car never actually speaks to the customer. But most technicians narrate like mechanics reading a chart. Amber, red, green, borderline, two millimetres. The customer hears noise, not risk. Skippy breaks down the SWOP process Symco teaches, shows how to...
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Are You Losing Money on Every Part Exchange?
Selling In The Motor Trade
Most used car managers still price off the auction book. Cazana wants to flip that on its head. In this panel episode, Simon Bowkett sits down with Ian, Mark and Darren from Cazana, the retail valuations platform built on more data than anyone else in the UK, with around 900,000 unique cars tracked every day. The conversation stays practical and commercial throughout: how to value a car retail-down rather than trade-up, why days to sell matters more than gut feel, and why the used EV market has turned hot again. If you buy used cars, run a sales desk or want tighter stock turn, this one is...
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Why Trust Is Measurable in the Blood and What That Means for Your Dealership
Selling In The Motor Trade
Here is something most sales managers know but cannot prove: the mood on the floor matters more than the morning meeting. Dr. Tharaka is back to put the science behind it. Emotions are contagious. Your team members are copying each other's states right now, not by choice, but because that is how human brains are wired. There is a measurable return on your team's emotional climate. There is also a measurable return on trust, down to the hormone level in the blood. And there are practical tools you can put in place on Monday morning that shift both. This episode covers the mechanisms, the...
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Dr. Tharaka on Mindset, Expectation and Why Sales Performance Starts Between the Ears
Selling In The Motor Trade
What happens between the ears drives what happens on the forecourt. That is not motivational filler. That is the core argument from Dr. Tharaka, a consultant psychiatrist and TEDx speaker who has spent 15 years studying how the mind affects performance, and now brings that science into the working world. In this episode, he and Simon Bowkett dig into the real psychology of why salespeople go from the Midas touch one week to the SADIMS the next, what manager expectations actually do to the people they lead, and why visualisation is not hocus pocus. If you have ever watched a salesperson fall...
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The General Manager Who Could Not Find His Own Parts Department
Selling In The Motor Trade
Here is a question worth sitting with. When you walk into your own business, does everyone know who you are? Graeme from Eden Motor Group once acquired a large Ford dealership and asked the general manager to take him on a tour. The GM opened a broom cupboard looking for the stairs to his own parts department. He had never been down there. When Graeme finally got into the parts office, the young woman behind the desk asked which one of you is the new guy. She had never spoken to the GM in her life. That is not an operations problem. That is a culture problem. And Graeme has spent a career...
info_outlineThere is a number that should get every used car manager's attention.
The OMODA J5 7 was the biggest selling car in March. The deal was around £299 down, £299 a month. That is an extraordinary amount of car for that payment, and it is working. The problem is that car becomes a used car in three years, and the used car market for Chinese brands does not really exist yet. Derren Martin ran the entire forecast and valuation portfolio at CAP HPI for several years. He knows better than most what happens when new car volumes are not matched by a credible used car strategy. He is not predicting disaster. But he is clear that the residual value risk is already being built in, and most people in the trade are not thinking about it yet.
What's covered:
• How CAP HPI valuations are built and why human editors, not algorithms, are still making the calls
• Why Chinese brands have grown at a speed the legacy manufacturers genuinely did not expect
• What happens to residual values when PCP deals are driven by interest rates rather than real demand
• The channel management decisions, daily rental, Motability, fleet, that either protect or destroy used car values
• Why Stellantis carrying too many brands in the same market segment is a long-term structural problem
• Which smaller Japanese brands face the biggest risk of losing UK relevance
• What a dealer should be doing right now to think ahead on used Chinese brand stock
• Darren's prostate cancer diagnosis at 48, how a locum nearly turned him away, and why men in the trade should
ask for the test rather than wait
Darren Martin spent 12 years at CAP HPI, eventually directing the full valuations and forecasts operation across all vehicle types. Before that, 17 years at Vauxhall across fleet, van sales and residual value management. He now consults independently through Black and Gold Consulting, with clients including Chinese brands, legacy OEMs and large retail groups.
If you are responsible for used car buying, stock policy or forecasting in any form, Darren's view on where the market is heading is the kind of context that is hard to get anywhere else.
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon’s words ‘real world’, it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visit: www.symcotraining.co.uk