Prepaid vehicle maintenance plans: sales tips for your team

Selling Automotive Prepaid Maintenance Programs to Customers

When you get new team members at your dealership, a key focus becomes their training. Here are some tips to share to help them sell prepaid vehicle maintenance plans.

Prepaid Maintenance versus Extended Warranties

First, make sure your new employees clearly understand the differences between a prepaid maintenance program and an extended warranty. Prepaid maintenance is appropriate for used cars sold by your dealership – or new cars that don’t come with a maintenance plan from the manufacturer.

Ensure that your new employees know exactly how long a maintenance plan will be in effect. Is it based on a specific number of months or years? Or mileage? And, as anyone studying to be a teacher knows, it’s one thing to understand something – and another thing altogether to clearly and concisely communicate that information to someone else. How can you help your new staff to appropriately sell these plans?

Role Playing as Sales Training

One of the best ways to teach new salespeople how to explain prepaid vehicle maintenance plans is through role playing. You could have an experienced salesperson play the role of a customer, or you could have someone else play the customer role with the experienced salesperson observing so that he or she can offer tips for even more effective communication.

For more specifics, we turn to the Harvard Business Review, and here is a tip we love: “Challenge the salespeople by encouraging the individuals portraying the customers to be at least somewhat demanding, standoffish, or resistant to making a purchase. As your salespeople develop greater competence, the ‘customers’ should raise the challenge level.”

It’s important to then tell the new employees what they have done especially well, along with tips for improvement, with the latter presented in a positive way. And, here is another outstanding tip:

“Do not try to teach a single way to respond to a circumstance on the selling floor. Generally, there is no one way. Role playing encourages participants to use their imaginations and their instincts in responding to the myriad situations that confront them. Our company once hired a professional trainer who used the role-playing approach to show how he would handle a given situation. Then he role-played and re-role-played the salespeople until he had them robotized to act just like him. The result was stilted salespeople who were reluctant to act like themselves or treat customers as individuals.”

Choosing the Right Automotive Prepaid Maintenance Programs

The best thing you can do for your customers is to provide a prepaid vehicle maintenance plan that fits their needs, and provides value at a fair price. For your sales staff, the best thing is to provide a prepaid vehicle maintenance plan that’s clear to understand and that provides value to customers so they can be proud of and confident in what they’re selling.

We’re asking you to consider Auto Awards’ program, OwnerZONE. This program puts your dealership in the driver’s seat, allowing you to create a fully customizable program that makes sense for:

• Your store (not OEM specific)
• Your brand demographics
• Your cost structure
• Your geographic marketplace
• Your customers
• Your sales team

Other benefits include:

• No high administrative fees
• No pre-authorization required
• No third-party interaction
• Suitable with any new or pre-owned vehicle, regardless of actual mileage

Here’s our promise to you: OwnerZONE provides you with the flexibility to build the most profitable plans that are designed specifically for your store, your brand demographics, your cost structure and your geographic marketplace.

Discover more about OwnerZONE, our automotive prepaid maintenance program, today.