With many manufacturers recently running promotions with low interest rates, many salespeople have encountered customers coming in and mentioning the advertised finance deal.  Unthinking, unprepared salespeople immediately refer the customer to the F&I Manager then wonder why the customer got a lot of info about the finance and then left without buying a car.

In response to requests from numerous clients we put together some strategies for salespeople asking customers about vehicle finance:

1. Focus on Customers’ Needs

Customers’ needs are their greatest motivation to do anything, including buy a car from us.  There are six categories of logical needs and six categories of emotional needs.  We cover these in our sales training.

Because customers’ needs are the greatest motivation that the customer has to do anything, it should be the primary focus of the salesperson to investigate, identify and develop those needs.

When salespeople do not accurately and comprehensively find out the customers’ needs, they have automatically and significantly reduced their chance of helping those customers buy the right car.

One of the easiest traps for salespeople to fall into when there is a promotion is on is for the salesperson to focus on the promotion and automatically make assumptions about the customers’ needs relating to the promotion.

For example, with finance promotions (like an advertised low percentage finance rate), we have heard of salespeople who expect customers to come in fully prepared to buy immediately based on the low finance rate.  Poor salespeople shortcut the sales process and rush to close and scare the customers away.

So even though the low finance rate offer may have got the customer curious to contact your dealership, you should still conduct a full and proper ‘Road to a Sale’ process and properly establish all of the customers major needs before showing the car, test driving, and negotiating.

I recently spoke with a Sales Manager who is doing well with his manufacturer’s low finance rate offer.  I asked what he is doing to get such strong results and he confirmed: “The customer is in the showroom because they want to buy a car, so we are going back and asking about all their vehicles needs first, then talking about the car and then revisiting the finance offer only when we have established the right car for the customer’s needs. The finance is a closing tool, not the entire sale.”

2.  It’s not all about the Finance

As a sales professional, you should have a planned, prepared printed check list of questions and information that you cover with every customer before they start looking at your cars.

When you use a check list with your customer:

1.    You don’t forget to ask any important questions about the customers needs (that may cost you or the customer unnecessary time, money or a deal later on)

2.    The customer can see that you are professional, organised and methodical.

3.    The customer can see that you ask these question to every customer so they are not personally being targeted by questions such as:

a.    How do you normally finance your vehicle?
b.    Who else is involved in the buying decision?
c.    When do you need your new car?

4.    You have a clear set of priorities for your presentation and test drive, based on the customer’s needs.

5.    You have high quality information to follow up with, instead of simply throwing away the dealership’s money to apologise for your poor sales skills and customer service skills.

6.    You have a check list of the customer’s needs to summarise before closing, which is scientifically proven to improve retained gross, sales closing ratios and CSI scores.

7.    You are able to better equip your sales Manager for an effective double-close.  Instead of blindly coming out to the customer and throwing away money, a professional sales manager can revise the customer’s needs and make beneficial suggestions or alternatives that do not necessarily involve sacrificing gross.

8.    You have quality information about the customer’s needs to provide accurate and relevant information, invitations and opportunities to the customer in future marketing.

Initially, your blank check lists should be kept in a clipboard or similar.  After a few months, you should know what, if anything needs to be amended.  Then get your customer needs sheets printed in pads, with pages numbered for greater accountability and follow-up.

Furthermore, as a Sales management tool, if a salesperson has not completed the customer needs sheet, he/she should be refused entry to the Sales Managers’ office to discuss a ‘deal’.  If the salesperson has not done his/her job properly up this point, it is going to cost the dealership a lot of time, effort and money trying to secure a deal that has not established, let alone met, the customer’s needs.

3. Get your Wording Right and Practise

Earlier this year I went to the best restaurant I have ever experienced in my life.  I lost count of how many things they did perfectly with the service, the food and the wine.  It all started when we arrived, they asked: “What name is your reservation in?”  This implies a 100% expectation on their part that they were expecting us and that we were welcome.

Most restaurants ask: “Do you have a reservation?”  This implies at least a 50% expectation that you do not have a reservation.

Along similar lines of thoughtful questioning, I’d recommend asking a customer about finance like this:

1a) “How do you normally pay for your cars?”  OR:  “How do you normally finance your cars?”

<<Customer answers the question>>

1b) “So will you be doing the same this time?”

Asking this way implies that you naturally expect that the customer has bought cars in the past and CAN afford our cars, instead of “How do you intend to pay for THIS car” could be taken to mean “we don’t think you can afford it.”

This can now open the line of relevant questioning to include each of the following shown on the “Customer Requirements Form” about the customers current car.  Practise it with a colleague so it comes out naturally when you are in front of a customer.

Make sure that the customer can see your Customer needs pad clearly so that they can see that this is a question that you ask every customer.

4. Timing (not speed) is Everything   

The question about vehicle payment/financing should be asked in the first ten minutes with the customer in the Needs Investigation. The perfect time to do this is when sitting down with your customers after offering them refreshments.

One of the most common mistakes when completing the customer needs form is that the salesperson starts selling.  This is the investigation stage, not the presentation stage of the sale.

If the customer says “finance” and the salesperson immediately starts pushing finance, most customers will shut down and the salesperson will lose the opportunity to find out all of the customer’s other needs, severely jeopardising their chance to help the customer buy the right car car at the right price.

Find out all the customer’s needs before you start selling.

If the customer says “finance”, make a note of it, acknowledge it and keep going through the other question to establish the customer’s needs.

Once you have a complete summary of the customer’s needs written down,  the car can be presented and test driven focusing on the customer’s needs, and then you can then put the full picture together for the F & I Manager to suit the customer’s situation.

When I was younger I played in a premiership-winning football team.  At three-quarter time in the grand final, we were 30 points down and we scored 42 points to 1 in the last quarter to win by 11.

Late that night as the celebrations were slowing down, I was sitting by myself, reflecting on the day and the game.   Our coach Bob came and sat beside me, congratulated me again and asked me how I was feeling.  I told him that while I was elated to win a premiership, I felt that I hadn’t played as well as I could have today and that I was identifying the things that I could have done better in the game today.  He said “You probably won’t understand this for a long time, but that’s why you won a premiership today.”

It was later that I realised that Bob had never coached us with a focus to win.  He had always coached us with a focus on doing our best.  Which is how we won that premiership.  If we were focused on winning, the task at three quarter time would have seemed too enormous and as a team we would probably have given up.  Because we were so well practised on just doing our best, our winning last quarter of football was almost mechanical, when even our opponents expected that we would give up.

What Bob didn’t tell me (although he obviously knew) was that by consistently focusing on doing your best, you will get better and then win more than if you simply focus on winning.

In sport and in business, I have realised the importance of a best-performance focus over a winning focus.  Here are some of the differences I have learned:

‘Winning’ Puts Too Much Focus on Your Opposition

I have seen, and played in, teams who assessed their opposition as easy and then set their own playing level too low, and ended up getting beaten in an upset.  The focus was on winning against a supposedly weak opponent instead of a focus on playing the best possible football.

When the focus is just on winning, it is natural to assess your opponent and do what you think you need to do to beat them.  Even in cross-country running at school we were coached to never look back to see where your opponent is, because it will slow you down and give him a better opportunity to pass.

In business, I have seen manufacturers who set non-number-specific goals at the start of the year to ‘beat’ a particular competitor in sales results for the year.  As the year progresses, with a bizarre focus on ‘winning’ they engage in behaviour that damages their business and their brand: pre-registering cars, dumping cars onto dealers and the market, false reporting of numbers, non-strategically discounting their cars, reacting in a panic to any unexpected progress by the ‘competitor’.  All this to ‘win’ a competition they invented in their heads (often the nominated ‘competitor’ is oblivious to the ‘competition’).

A Primary Focus on Winning Can Cause Cheating

In recent years, many sportspeople have had their reputations ruined because it was discovered that they had cheated.  It has become evident that those athletes weren’t focused on doing their personal best – they were focused on ‘winning’.

In business, cheating to ‘win’ can ruin your business reputation and brand image.  In extreme cases, you can be breaking the law.

Doing Your Best Puts the Focus on What You Can Control

Focusing on doing your genuine best means you are investing energy in what you can control: your performance.  You don’t waste energy on things you can’t control.

Doing Your Best is Better Management of Your Expectations

If your team is last on the ladder and you are playing the top team and you rev yourself up by focusing on winning, you can be extremely disappointed when you are getting thrashed in the first ten minutes because your expectations are so far from reality.  It is easier to give up at that point because your goal (winning) is highly unlikely.  However if your goal is to play your best, that is possible at every moment in the game, irrespective of the scoreline.

In the years preceding our premiership, our team had struggled to get a full side on the field every week.  Often we would play with only the required minimum of 15 players (out of 18), frequently bolstered with a few reserves from the opposing team.  As we were hopelessly outgunned and outnumbered, it was a landslide victory for the opposing team.  But we could resist.  We could contain them in patches.  We could be more precise with our passing.  We could learn to contain the ball in our tackling and smothering.   We all became better footballers because in those circumstances we had to be.  As the ruckman, from boundary throw-ins I kept thumping the ball out of bounds to our advantage, 20 metres at a time (this was still legal in the 90s).  It gave my team mates a rest, we moved closer to our goals and frustrated our opposition, creating more pressure on them, which meant more mistakes from them.  We learned to reduce a 20-goal thrashing to a ten-goal thrashing.
If we had focus and expectation of winning we would get very frustrated very early in the season but by focusing on playing our best football, we created opportunities where there were none and surprised a few opponents by beating them, and built the skills and more importantly the mindset we needed to win that premiership.

In business, focusing on doing your best builds sustainable results and enhances your reputation, especially with your customers.

Summary: Do Your Best v. Win

Both in sport and business I have found that a focus on doing your best (and consistently pushing the limit of what your best is) creates long term, sustainable success and gives you a better chance of ‘winning’ more often.

I was driving between appointments today and listening to music.  In my playlist was a song called “Hard Act to Follow” by Split Enz.  This song was a favourite of mine in the early 1980s and I started singing along.

As I drove and sang it occurred to me that I was singing some incorrect lyrics.

I stopped at the bank and while I was parked there, I Googled the lyrics on my phone.  I laughed at how much the correct lyrics varied from my version of the lyrics.

When I started singing along to this song back in 1981, a printed confirmation of the lyrics was not easy to obtain so I sang what I interpreted the lyrics to be and I had been singing the incorrect lyrics over and over, every time I heard the song.

Noting how much more sense the correct lyrics made, I resumed driving and resumed singing and I noticed something significant.

It was extremely difficult to stop singing the incorrect lyrics (which have been in my head for over thirty years)!

Even though I knew ‘my’ lyrics were wrong, when the song was playing it was incredibly difficult to sing what I now knew to be the correct lyrics.

I immediately phoned a sales trainer who I have been teaching and shared the story with him.

He had recently been frustrated with some of the sales teams he was working with and how they had been taught and shown the correct way to conduct certain sales behaviours and yet were slow to change.

I pointed out that my experience today with the Split Enz song was a graphic example of how hard it can be to change long-held behaviours, even if you readily admit that they are wrong.  I advised him that he had to remain focused on helping his sales teams change their behaviours without falling into the trap of making them bad and wrong.

I also highlighted that learning the lyrics to a song correctly if you wanted to learn it today was easier because the lyrics are usually available online, so you don’t have to guess the lyrics as I did back in 1981.  Similarly, it is often easier to teach a sales trainee to do the right thing, than to try and have an experienced salesperson ‘unlearn’ bad habits learned over many years.

In sales and song-lyrics, long-held habits are a hard act to follow!