Customer Control
(Continued)

The truth is that you will never, ever achieve the high level of consistent success with your presentations to customers unless you accept the belief that all successes or failures of any presentation are totally the result of the technician, and never the result of the customer. Technicians make presentations work and, likewise, technicians cause presentations to fail. Customers really have very little to do with it.

You may be thinking: “How can you say that customers have little to do with a successful presentation,” assuming that what I mean by a successful presentation is that you made the sale.

A successful presentation and “making a sale” may go hand in hand, but they are two completely different things.

By my definition, all successful presentations do not necessarily lead to making a sale, and of course we have all seen terrible presentations that actually do result in a sale.

But, as in all things involving customers, it’s a numbers game, and your performance averaged out over a large number of customer interactions is where the most effective learning is going to come from. This will tell you overall what you should continue to do, and what you should stop doing if you want to be successful.

One of the subtle things about any presentation is that it must make good financial sense to the customer, or it can never result in success for you or your shop. By making sense, I mean that the customer must clearly understand that there is a logical reason why he may want to consider following your advice to purchase whatever you are offering him.

As an example, let’s consider a common extra service almost all of us offer in our shops, an automatic transmission fluid flush/exchange service. Let’s say the customer’s vehicle has 58,000 miles on it, has never had a transmission service and the manufacturer’s recommendations are that the ATF be exchanged at 50,000 mile intervals. Telling the customer that his vehicle is due for a transmission service based on these figures, and offering him your transmission service at your normal price (we’ll say $100 in this example) will not typically result in consistent success. Why is that? It all has to do with the lack of control of subtle motivation on the customer’s part.

There simply is not anything in that presentation to motivate him to want to spend an additional $100. When he drove the vehicle into your bay, his transmission was probably working just fine — and probably has been ever since he’s owned the vehicle. You’re telling him that his manufacturer recommends changing the fluid may sound right to him, and he will probably believe you, but his understanding is that if he indeed does what you are asking him to do (spend $100 on the transmission service) he will leave your shop with nothing more than what he came in with: An automatic transmission that is working correctly, just as it did when he arrived.

The customer’s logic is therefore, “Why spend $100 to get something I already have?” From the customer’s understanding of this situation, based on information you supplied, it makes no financial sense, so he will probably never agree to your recommendation.

However, if you were to exercise some subtle, yet very effective “control” of just exactly what your customer is thinking about, he will more likely understand why it is indeed a benefit to have you perform the ATF flush.

Continued
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