Category: Dealership Training

Here’s the scenario. It’s a busy Saturday. Every F&I manager is working a deal, and there are still two customers waiting to start the finance process. What’s an F&I manager to do? You don’t want to lose customers due to a long wait, but you also want to make the most on each deal. In an effort to speed up the F&I process, it’s all too common for F&I managers to rush certain aspects, like the manufacturer’s warranty review.

However, this could lead to several pitfalls for your dealership, making the F&I process longer and leaving you open to noncompliance. Under the Magnuson Moss Warranty Act, all powersports dealers are required to provide detailed information about warranty coverage before a customer purchases a vehicle for personal, family or household use. This helps ensure that customers know what to expect in the event something goes wrong, and it enables them to compare coverage on vehicles.

So, if a motorcycle comes with a manufacturer’s warranty, or complimentary coverage of any kind, your dealership is required to inform customers of the coverage. Additionally, if an F&I manager rushes the warranty review, they miss the opportunity to identify potential consumer needs or concerns that could be filled with consumer protection products. This could lead to a much longer product presentation and negotiation process, lengthening the F&I process as a whole and potentially reducing product penetration and PRU.

The manufacturer’s warranty review is about much more than identifying what the warranty covers. Effective managers use this review to identify areas of necessary coverage and build value in consumer protection products before the product presentation.

There’s not a dealer in the powersports industry that doesn’t wrestle with the concept of training! Everyone agrees that training is necessary to run a successful, profitable, efficient and ethical dealership operation.  However, the spectrum of dealers’ commitment to training is wide in the retail powersports space. Even the dealer that is committed to training struggles with things like:

• Why pay to train someone who’s just going to leave? 
• It’s difficult taking income-producing team members off the floor, desk, or drive for an extended period of time. 
• I can’t determine if training is actually making a difference to my bottom line.

• I can’t get my managers to see the value. My dealership runs a certain way and they don’t want to have to re-train team members after a training course that is counter-intuitive to the way we operate.

When presenting F&I products, are your F&I managers focusing too much on the product details? How’s that working for you? Are you happy with those product penetration rates?

Think about when you review long lists of information, you start to tune out, right? The same thing happens when F&I managers approach a product presentation from the standpoint of selling what the product does. Tallying off coverage levels, terms, systems, and parts is the fastest way to disengage from the customer and get them watching the clock instead of listening to the presentation.

At EFG, we teach professionals to approach the F&I product presentation from the standpoint of WHY. Why should a customer purchase a certain product? How does it benefit them? You could say that the product benefits customers by listing off everything it covers, but once again, that long list isn’t directly relatable to most customers.

In order to sell WHY, you must understand the customer’s riding habits, as well as their wants and needs for their motorcycle.

• How long do they keep their motorcycles?
• Does the customer live in a city or a rural area?
• How often do they participate in long rides?
• Do they ride across country or stay in their local area?