Concentrate on value to perfect your finance deals
Every sales executive works hard to qualify the customer’s metal needs, but we should all be working just as hard towards their paper needs too
20 August 2021
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Every sales executive works hard to qualify the customer’s metal needs, but we should all be working just as hard towards their paper needs too. This is important to us, because we need to know what motivates a customer to buy paper which enables us to provide the customer with the truly informed choice of the facts, and not simply just the cost per month.
Getting customers to commit
Spend time with the customer explaining how your paper product helps, supports, defends and protects them – and they will be committed to buying from you. So here’s a few tips to keep you going:
Cost: Ask the customer how likely it is that they may settle early – and if so, consider the extra few pounds a month now that may be totally overwritten by a huge early settlement rebate that they will definitely get with your funders when they settle.
Confidentiality: If privacy is important to the customer, ask them where they think most of their junk mail comes from. Give them a minute and watch the penny drop when it comes to ‘annual banking reviews’ and then assure them that you would never sell their information to anyone.
Risk: Teach your customers the importance of managing their credit files, then bring to their attention the last two or three loans that have been consolidated by the nice man at the bank, and ask them how that might look to any other lender. Be ready to make them a coffee at this point, they might just need a strong one.
Repossession: Is your customer stressing or worried that if they fail to make repayments you’ll take the car away? Great. Agree with them – but remind them that this is ALL we will take, the banks do have a proven track record of taking everything, that is after all where their wealth comes from.
Safety: Customers live in the here and now, sometimes it really is our job to slow them down and show them that by funding with us, we protect them in all the ways detailed above, and ensure that if they needed funding in an emergency, the banking line is still there, ‘just in case’.
Be honest, earn respect
We owe it to our customers to provide them with all the facts to make an informed choice, not just price, but features, benefits, the key differences that justify the cost and the arguments why.
By Andy Tong, managing director, Profit Training
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