Le Mans Toyota’s National Achiever Award for Sales Siddharth Sheth and Business Manager of the Year for the Southern Region Yogesh Arora reveal the secret of their success
Record breaker
‘If you look after your people, your people will look after you,’ says Siddharth Sheth
Four years ago, Siddharth Sheth went to buy a car for his wife and wound up walking away not only with a shiny new Toyota Yaris but also a job.
The salesman was able to spot something of an unrealised sales talent in Sheth – who at the time was working as a machine operator in Melbourne, having studied mechanical engineering and completed an MBA in India.
“They offered me a job because they found something good in me,” Sheth told the Indian Sun.
But looking at Sheth’s sales record over the years, describing him as ‘good’ probably doesn’t quite go far enough.
It was only a matter of months after Sheth joined the Le Mans Toyota dealership in Melbourne’s south-western suburbs that he started winning its sales man of the month awards, beating the 16 other sales representatives he worked alongside; consecutively, from 2012 to 2014, he took home sales man of the year.
Just last month, Sheth picked up Le Mans Toyota’s prestigious National Achiever Award for Sales at a ceremony in Queenstown, New Zealand.
“It’s a big achievement for me,” Sheth said. “It’s a great honour to represent myself in a big company, and in a big country like Australia.”
“It’s all thanks to my friends, my family and the people who bought cars from me – who all supported me a lot to make this happen,” he added.
So what’s Sheth’s secret to selling? According to him, it’s all about making customers happy from start to finish – do that, and they practically become salespeople for you.
“My main focus area is to retain the customers’ business,” Sheth explained. “So once you buy a car, you keep coming back.”
It’s this attitude that sees Sheth getting 60 per cent of his business from satisfied customers referring their friends and family to him.
“I can’t reach everywhere, so I do the best for them and then they reach more people, by telling their friends about the service they received,” Sheth said.
Now a sales manager, Sheth oversees a team of about four salespeople, making sure they hit monthly and yearly sales targets. On top of this, he juggles walk in sales and liaises with related departments like accounts and spare parts.
To get it all running smoothly he believes it’s simply a matter of: “If you look after your people, your people will look after you.”
And despite being around new cars all day, Sheth and his wife have no plans to trade in that first Yaris they bought any time soon.
“We don’t want to sell that car,” he said with a laugh. “It’s lucky for me.”
Right on target
At Le Mans Toyota, Yogesh Arora is the man who doesn’t make mistakes
A commitment to professionalism and unwavering support from his wife is what helped Yogesh Arora scale the ladder at Le Mans Toyota to score one of the car company’s top employee prizes.
Arora received the Business Manager of the Year title for the Southern Region – beating some 200 other business managers from dealerships across Victoria and Tasmania – at a glitzy ceremony held at Melbourne’s Crown Casino recently.
“The credit goes to my wife Monica,” Arora told the Indian Sun after the event. “She takes care of all the home things… so it gives me enough time to spend [concentrating] on the quality of my work. If that corner is not strong, you cannot concentrate on this corner, you cannot perform.”
Arora started working at Le Mans Toyota in Melbourne’s south-western suburbs not long after he moved to Australia in 2006. Prior to that he worked as the finance manager of a company in Musquat, Oman, and before that he was employed as an operations manager in India.
He chose to move to Australia after hearing about the easy-going culture and employment opportunities. “In Oman you don’t get permanent residency,” he explained. “When I came to Australia I found it absolutely fantastic,” Arora said. “I like the people here, their work style, they’re very professional.”
Arora first started working at Le Mans Toyota in March 2007 as a stock controller, which he describes as “a very basic job”. But it wasn’t long before he caught the attention of his bosses and was promoted. “In a couple of years I got a couple of promotions, and since 2010 I’ve been working as a business manager,” he said.
To excel his career along the way, Arora studied part-time to become a Certified Practising Accountant. “I finished the course in 2010, along with working my full time job,” he said. It was this commitment to his professional development that Arora said helped impress his bosses and won him further promotion.
It helped too that he seemed incapable of slipping up. When my boss promoted me he said I was “very professional, always up to date and made no mistakes,” Arora recalled. “Actually it was my employer’s statement one time that he tried to find mistakes in my work but he couldn’t find any,” he laughed.
Now acting as Business Manager, Arora is responsible for the financial side of the dealership, including: financing for the vehicles sold, insurance, and warranties. “I’m a finance professional so this is the area I like,” he said. “Meeting with a lot of people, trying to get your targets, you’re hungry [for success] – this is my passion.”
Having won the title of Business Manager of the Year for the Southern Region, Arora is now getting ready to pack his bags to compete for the national title taking place in New Zealand in October.
“I’ve been there before, but this will be exciting” Arora said of New Zealand – and not only because the trip could see him coming home with another award. It’s “the first time I’ve been away from my kids – only me and my wife,” he said with a smile. “So it will be like a honeymoon.”
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