Customer Control

By Kit Sullivan

Effectively controlling and managing your customers is a must if you want to enjoy any level of continued success in your business. Now, the phrase “controlling and managing” may sound a little heavy-handed with regards to how you interact with your customers, so just remember that in any customer contact situation subtlety is a must.

The subtleness that you employ during your customer interaction is the primary key that enables your presentation to experience the highest levels of possible success. The number one factor in all circumstances that enables you to perform a subtle yet effective presentation is to be totally prepared, well before you are in front of an actual customer.

Prior preparation is where all the dedicated, detailed and hard work is done when it comes to customer control. It goes without saying that poor or little preparation makes it nearly impossible to perform successful presentations consistently, customer after customer.

Even so, I am continually amazed at how often I see typical technicians (and unfortunately, even managers/owners sometimes) place themselves in front of a living, breathing customer and make a halfhearted attempt at a product or service presentation that they are completely and totally unprepared to perform effectively.

These type of non-presentations will typically result in a no-sale situation, and the sad part is that the tech who did the ineffective presentation will then go right to the next customer and repeat the process all over again, wasting yet another opportunity to provide the customer with the best product presentation possible, all the while denying the shop any opportunity to realize a healthy margin of extra service or parts sales.

And then, to compound the bad news for the location, these types of techs will usually make one excuse after another for their less-than-acceptable performance. You’ve heard all the lame excuses that unprepared techs make before, and I have too:

“He didn’t have any money.”

“Doesn’t want it; it’s only his wife’s car.”

“Not necessary, it’s under warranty.”

“The dealer (or “my mechanic”) takes care of all that stuff.”

“Don’t need it, I’m selling it soon.”

“My brother’s a mechanic, he’ll do it for free.”

And there are other typical excuses you hear from them, too, but the one thing they all have in common is that they blame the customer for the failure of the presentation to work effectively.

In reality, all of these customer excuses are really saying the same thing: “The presentation does not make good financial sense to me.”

You will rarely hear any tech say, “That probably would have worked if only my presentation was better.”

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