Categories
Dealership Training

Preparing for a Surge

Dave Gibbs Training Manager EFG Companies
Dave Gibbs
Training Manager
EFG Companies

It’s Spring! Warmer weather coupled with tax day refunds equals the potential for a customer surge. While this is certainly good news, one of the biggest challenges could be servicing that increased traffic. Whether it be prospective customers researching a purchase online or potential showroom floor traffic, responsiveness is critical to closing the sale.

To address this challenge, a knee-jerk reaction would be to extend dealership hours, schedule more employees on the showroom floor for longer hours, and hire more sales and F&I team members. Bulking up might seem like the logical solution. However, longer dealership hours can incur non-productive costs, including hourly wages and higher utility bills. Adding more staff on the floor – with longer hours – might increase your response time but it could also increase burn-out with your employees. Hiring new employees is great but your experienced staff might be too busy training those folks to effectively respond to prospective customers!

Work smarter, not harder

When experiencing a surge, the smart action is to step back and evaluate the dealership’s existing processes and measure their effectiveness. I often hear panicked dealer principals exclaim “But I don’t have time to step back! We’re slammed!” What you don’t have time for are lost sales and damaged reputations because your frazzled sales team was unprofessional, or the F&I department hurriedly left money on the table!

Categories
Training

Selling Cash Down

Hollis Goode Regional Vice President EFG Companies
Contributing Author:
Hollis Goode
Regional Vice President
EFG Companies

How comfortable is your sales team with asking for cash down payments on every transaction?

With the plethora of $0 down advertising, it’s become more commonplace for customers to expect to put $0 down on their vehicles. However, as any F&I manager will tell you, this makes it more difficult to secure a loan that is beneficial to both the dealership and the customer.

Take a look at the deals coming to the F&I office. If more than 20% of those deals are for $0 down, then there is a breakdown between your sales staff and the F&I desk.

Granted, the sales team might find it difficult to broach the subject. After getting a “no” once, they might give up, assuming they can’t negotiate. This mindset needs to be overcome in the same way you train your sales people to ask for the sale and negotiate the sale price. The more training and information you give your sales people, the less anxiety they have when asking for the sale, for a down payment, for a trade-in value, etc.

Remember, it is always better to ask than to assume the answer is no. After all, we all know what assuming makes out of you and me.

Categories
Dealership Training F&I

Overcoming Objections Starts with Sales

Hollis Goode Blog Headshot

 

Contributing Author: Hollis Goode, Regional Vice President, Dealer Services, EFG Companies

Overcoming objections is quite possibly one aspect of the F&I office that is focused on the most. Classes abound on this topic. Dealers, in tune with their teams, provide one-on-one coaching sessions on this alone. After all, the more successful an F&I manager is at overcoming objections, the better their numbers, resulting in increased profit for the dealer.

I’d posit that many training courses/one-on-one sessions start something like this:

“The vehicle service contract is too expensive. Go.”