Selling Service: The Good Old Days Are Gone

The good old days are gone. Remember when customers filled your service lane each morning with warranty work? Remember when customers got their oil changed every 3 months or 3,000 miles? Or when they needed a tune up every year and mufflers and shocks every 2 years? Ah yes, the good old days when you didn’t have to be nice, you didn’t have to sell and you didn’t have to be competitive.

Well, Bucky, wake up and smell the roses. The good old days are gone and if you don’t get serious about improving your dealership’s owner loyalty and customer pay service business, you will be gone with them. Warranty work continues to fade away and with new stretched out maintenance requirements, oil life monitors, synthetic oils and 100,000 mile tune-ups, dealers everywhere are reporting huge drops in total repair order counts – and in case you forgot – less repair orders means less customers and less income.

So what do you do? Start by changing your service department into a service ‘sales’ department. Teach your advisors how to sell service. Show them how to ask for the business, how to invite customers in on the phone and how to make it easy to say yes and hard to say no, (your vehicle sales department is a great place for sales training, by the way.)

Next, take a good hard look at your prices and service menu packages and make sure they make sense and really are good deals – customers aren’t stupid, you know. And don’t be the best kept secret in town, either. Advertise to get the word out with direct mail and email together. Use a consistent look to build brand equity and get the most for your advertising buck with aggressive offers on well known services. Keep your oil change price low, and remember – the purpose of the oil change is to get the customers in so you can sell them what they need – think of it like this, how much do you make when they go somewhere else?  And be smart – complete an inspection report on every single car and give customers a copy with quotes. And get in the tire business – I mean really get in the tire business – make your service drive look, feel and smell like a tire store to keep your customers from going elsewhere for service.

And last, but not least, put a plan in place to keep your valuable customers by offering some form of an owner loyalty club that builds value, makes your dealership different and entices customers to return for service and car sales over and over. This is not rocket science, and I promise you’ll have more fun than you’ve had in years if you are up to the challenge of converting your service department into a service ‘sales’ department – oh, and I almost forgot – it pays off really well too.