Service Advisors: Order Takers or Order Makers?

Face the facts: Cars are built better and warranty work is down resulting in less warranty visits. Customer pay visits are also reduced because the factory keeps stretching maintenance intervals and meanwhile, the competition for existing customer pay service work is growing stronger every day. Like it or not, if you want to succeed or even survive today, you have got to work harder to keep your existing customers, work harder to attract new ones and work harder to sell every legitimate service at every opportunity. You have to change the way you think about your service department, your service manager and your service advisors –  and you have to be willing to do what ever it takes to “sell” every service that is needed.

The problem is all too often I find service managers and advisors that really have no idea how to actually sell service. They are good people, they care, but they think of themselves as order takers instead of order “makers”. In your vehicle sales department you sell cars with aggressive, motivated vehicle sales people. You have to do the same in your service department. You need service sales people and a service sales manager. You have to get serious about customer pay and customer retention and you have to focus on being competitive and convenient. Your service department staff needs to open their mind a little bit and be willing to negotiate and work some deals to save the jobs – just like your vehicle sales department does. They have to work hard to overcome objections to close more deals and they need a “nobody walks” attitude. I have to say it again, they need to be service sales people that are focused, trained and aggressive.

Sometimes when I talk about the need to convert advisors into salespeople, I get some understandable pushback. Personally, I never thought of myself as a salesperson either, (it has some negative connotations when you work in the service department), but I heard something the other day that really hit home with me. I had asked a printer sales person a question and after her response, I told her that I expected her to say that – you are a salesperson, right? But she quickly stopped me and pointed out that she had never felt like a salesperson in the 13 years she had been selling these printers. She rather felt like she was a “persuader of what she believed in.” Wow! I really liked the way that sounds. That is how I feel and have always felt.

I wrote that little quote down – “a persuader of what I believe in” and when I think about it I feel much more confident that what I am doing is right.  I guess you could say it puts me in a much better frame of mind when I am selling – er – persuading a customer to buy something from me. Maybe you could share this with your service manager and advisors and let them know that you understand how they feel about “selling service”, but the fact is that in order to survive, we have all got to become good service salespeople, good persuaders. By persuading customers to buy what we believe in we are doing the right thing, the customer is getting what they need at the best place in town to have the work done – and a neat and important side effect is that your service sales and profits will skyrocket.