Selling on the Drive — More than Just Inspections!
Selling on the drive is a hot topic in retail dealerships right now. Many dealerships have been more dependent and aware of service sales contribution to dealership profitability and everyone is scrambling to increase the numbers. The hottest topics right now are walk-around inspections by the service advisors and courtesy vehicle inspections by technicians. These are great tools and their consistent use should definitely help closing rates on parts and labor sales. The question is: Isn’t selling on the drive more than just inspections?
Trust and Value
Selling depends on developing customer trust and ensuring they see value in buying from the dealership or more specifically, from the service advisor. This means the talent and interpersonal skills must exist in each service advisor to develop relationships with each customer. Developing trust is not just being friendly — it means making commitments to the customers and keeping them. Being consistent and following up is vital to keep the customers trust, once it is earned!
Make it about the customer
The time they spend with each customer and the process steps they take must also demonstrate that the customer is important to them. In other words, they must make it about the customer, not about them! There are three things that will help service advisors to make it about the customer: 1) ask the right questions — ones that ask the customer’s permission and expectations; 2) involve them in the process — ask them to look at their car with the service advisor and help make decisions to take care of it; 3) don’t oversell — layout a plan for recommended services now and in the future — don’t include a laundry list of things that are not necessary at this time.
Give Choices
Customers want to be involved in their purchase decisions, so let them. Service advisors should always offer choices. These could include cost choices, levels of parts or services, and now or later options. The benefit (and ramifications) of each choice should be fully explained so the customer can make an intelligent choice without pressure. Also be fully prepared to address customer concerns. Customers often times object to the price of a part or service because they don’t know why it is needed and how it will benefit them. Create some “selling scripts” that can be used to relate this information clearly for each customer. Try to personalize it to their situation, such as how they use their car and if they transport children or clients.
Sell in a Circle
Selling should happen at each step in the service process—not just in the service drive. A big killer of customer satisfaction is to treat customers like each visit is a single occurrence or event. In other words, each service visit should reference the last visit and the next visit. And each step in the service process should reference the previous step and the next step. For example, during an appointment call, reference should be made to services received at the previous visit and include declined recommendations; consultation should mention what was discussed during the appointment call; progress checking should reference the walk-around and discussions during consultation, and so on right through delivery and follow-up should always invite the customer back!
Accountability
All of the things discussed above require accountability to the customer. That accountability should start with the service management. Service advisors work long hours under somewhat stressful and busy conditions and are usually pretty good at multitasking. They sometimes don’t realize that their behavior with customers doesn’t always contribute to customer satisfaction and/or sales generation. It is the managers’ responsibility to observe and coach them. Managers cannot just impose process or behavior changes and then “walk away” and expect that they will be successfully implemented. Coaching is a daily task and when combined with positive reinforcement, can be the key to the service advisor’s success along with providing accountability to the customers making it a win-win situation.