Are you seeing the results you want from your dealership’s F&I department? Many owners aren’t. Fortunately, the solution can be as simple as making some adjustments to your auto finance training regimen.
3 Auto Finance Training Practices Every Dealership Should Follow
The future of dealership profits relies heavily on their finance departments.
In fact, their contribution to revenue will only continue to grow as time goes on.
Is your current auto finance training sufficient to support this kind of growth?
If it leaves a lot to be desired, now’s the time to make some changes. Specifically, implement the following three best practices ASAP and your F&I department will be on its way to quickly achieving its full potential.
1. Emphasize Compliance and Ethics as Major KPIs
F&I professionals can feel a lot of pressure to pad their employers’ profit margins after the initial sale. Obviously, every automobile salesperson wants to post big numbers, but it falls to F&I professionals to make the most of those sales.
This is why training must stress the importance of not just compliance but ethics, too. Emphasizing the former will keep your dealership out of legal trouble. Emphasizing the latter will ensure that F&I profits don’t cost your dealership its reputation.
2. Stress Listening Over Talking
Everyone who works at dealerships knows all about the stigma of car salespeople who have the “gift of gab,” able to talk incessantly until customers give in and buy. This cliché often affects F&I departments, as well. Customers enter them with the expectation that a salesperson is about to tell them what they need to purchase for their new vehicle.
Despite this reputation, your F&I team will do best if members are taught that listening is a vital part of sales. By all means, give them a script to learn from or certain points that they must touch on during their presentation.
Just be sure that you also make it abundantly clear that, if they’re not listening, they’re always leaving money on the table.
3. Turn Training into an Ongoing Priority
If you want your F&I department to become a reliable source of profits for your dealership, you can’t afford to take a “set-it-and-forget-it” approach to training.
Far too many dealerships do this, though.
They cover their products.
They cover compliance.
And then they assume that’s all there is to it.
They treat their F&I department as a static feature of their dealership and trust that their employees will refine their skills on their own time.
Instead, training should be for new salespeople and your veterans. Go over the products that aren’t selling as well as you’d like. Let your top performers take the floor and share some tips.
If training becomes a one-time practice, your F&I department will never meet their full potential.
Don’t Settle for Unremarkable Auto Finance Training
Many dealerships have learned to accept subpar performances from their F&I department, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
The three auto finance training practices we just discussed don’t represent any radical changes. Yet, they’ve been proven to drive incredible results for dealerships that invest in them.
Of course, if you’d like help applying them to your team, contact us today.