Is up-selling bad? No, every business up-sells. In fact, every good waiter or waitress up-sells. A friend of mine is a waiter at a 10-table restaurant in Los Angeles. If he doesn’t up-sell his tables, that small restaurant might struggle to stay in business. Or at the very least, they’d quickly replace him.
The problem with some dealers is many of their up-sell methods don’t feel much like an option to customers. Pre-installed accessories, alarms, theft recovery systems, or even window tint don’t feel like choices. People may want these things, but pre-installing them with an addendum next to the window sticker forces salesmen to tell customers, “Don’t worry, we’ll work that out.” In my observations, many customers don’t walk into the dealership to “work it out.” They thank the salesman for his time, get his card, go home, and get online.
Imagine for a moment that the restaurant hires a dealer’s GM to manage them. He meets with the staff and tells them they’re order-takers and sends them home. Being a former GM, he quickly places an ad on Criagslist and floods the floor with former car salesmen, establishes an up-calling system, and hires a Desk Manager.
One month in, here’s a conversation you might hear in that restaurant:
Thank you for dining with us tonight. If you order the chicken Parmesan, it comes with our mozzarella sticks appetizer for an additional $13.95. No, sorry, I can’t take the mozzarella sticks off the order because it comes with it. Oh, I should clarify, if you switch to the ravioli, that price is only available when you buy two ravioli dinners. Hmmm, I’m sorry you feel that way. We’ve got to keep our lights on, you know. Let me go see what I can do… Okay, I talked to my manager. He said if you order the chicken Parmesan for our special price, he’ll only charge you $10.95 for the mozzarella sticks and he’ll throw in a free order of mozzarella sticks when you come back next time. That’s a heck of a deal. I’ve never seen him do that before. What if I do the mozzarella sticks for $8.95? …Fine, I’ll present him with your offer of $4.95, but let me have your credit card to show him how serious you are.
This would never work, which is why it never happens in restaurants. So, is it working in the car business? Dealers may look around and say, “Yes, of course it is. We’re still here. We’re making some money. I’m #3 in the district. My CSI is above national.” But is it, really? Are referrals or word of mouth a top-ranking sold lead source, or are we paying someone to “manage” our reputation? Are we spending an insane amount of money just to continue working the same sales processes we’ve had for decades?
Our own debacle may be harder to realize and less obvious without my restaurant illustration, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there or that it’s not having a long-term impact on our stores’ performance. It doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t drive up our advertising budgets, especially in terms of “reputation management.” It doesn’t even mean we can’t pre-install accessories if that’s what we want to do. What it does show us is that we need to create a customer-friendly sales process. And we need talented people to help deliver it.
With that, I’d like to introduce you to Dealer Plus – a new approach to the sales process. As for salesmen, you’ll need to find that talent on your own.
