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.”

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.

Controlling what the customer thinks is pretty simple: If they like what they are hearing, they will continue to listen. If they do not like what they are hearing, they will stop listening.

So, the formula is pretty simple: Say things that your customers like hearing. In this situation, he would like to hear what benefit he will receive for his $100. Simply tell him the reasons he wants the service: Longer transmission life, continued smooth operation and possibly even helping to maintain whatever warranty he may have left on the transmission.

That last line is far more important in successful presentations than most would imagine. It is a fair statement that if you do not at the very least complete your presentation to the customer, you are probably not going to have any level of success with it. So, following that reasoning, a priority is to finish every presentation.

If the customer is hearing things they don’t like — or at the very least, not hearing things they do like — they will become bored and indifferent with your presentation and stop paying attention. They will typically cut you off with some statement like, “Yeah, don’t worry about that, I’ll get that done at the 30,000 mile checkup.” The result is an unfinished presentation and an unsatisfactory no-sale situation for you.

Again, the priority is to at least finish the presentation. How do you exercise that customer control and get them to willingly let you finish your presentations, all the while actually listening to what you have to say? It’s very simple: Continually tell them things they like to hear, things that pique their interest. In a nutshell, customers will usually continue to listen to you if you always do one or both of the following: 1) make complimentary statements that reflect positively on them, their actions or their vehicle, and 2) clearly explain the benefits to them of everything you are doing or will do for them or their vehicle.

The chain of events that follows is predictable, consistent and has a positive outcome for you as well as your customer:

• You “control” your customers by subtly saying and doing things they like and want to hear.
• They continue to actively listen to you, allowing you to continue with your presentations.
• You are able to easily finish your presentation.
• The customer now makes an informed decision based on the complete information you provided.

This is where the ultimate necessity of having well-prepared presentations for all your products and services comes into play, for their decisions regarding your suggestions will be based largely on your presentation. Well-prepared and thought-out presentations work, and they work well. There is absolutely no doubt about that.

It stands to reason that if you are able to deliver complete and well-prepared presentations to every single customer, you will have a much-improved chance of success than if you are unprepared, or cannot at least finish the presentation. This leads right to one of the key factors that will enable any technician to dramatically improve their success ratio with presentations: Customers purchase extra services because the presentations are well thought out and planned, as long as they get to hear them!

Your goal should never be to “make the sale” — the quality of the presentation takes care of that. Your goal with regards to “making it happen” with your customers should be to do whatever it takes to deliver the complete presentation. You deliver it, and it does all the work.

Master your subtle “customer control” techniques, don’t look back and I’ll see you all next month.

KIT SULLIVAN is a partner in a multi-unit Florida-based quick lube company. A 16-year veteran of the industry, Sullivan has more than 25 years experience in sales and management training. He is a member of the Society of Automotive Engineers and the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers. He can be reached via e-mail: quicklubekit@aol.com