Use Sales Strategies to Drive the Value of Services

One of the biggest complaints professional detailers have is how uninformed customers are and that they do not know the difference between a good detail and one from a back-alley operator.

If that is the case, then what convinces a customer to commit to purchasing your detail services? Ask many detailers and they will say “price.” However, it is a huge mistake to equate price with the number of sales you make.

More to Price

A truly smart customer knows that price is a far-reaching issue that includes more than just what you want to charge. A common belief subscribed to by smart customers is the notion that “the cheapest product usually is the most expensive.” The reasoning is that poor quality work, re-do’s, damage and theft often go along with cheap prices.

The following are a few tips to help you create smart customers. They are listed in their order of priority.

Smart Steps

Be a smart salesperson. I had a detailer tell me that the reason he needed to provide lower pricing was because his customers were going to take their vehicles to another shop. This is an admission of an ineffective presentation. The bottom line is that you don’t need to think that your best means to close a sale is by having the lowest price.

You need to know your business and the vehicles you work on. Know the customer and have the ability to achieve partnerships through excellence in meeting their personal needs.

Provide a winning environment. The greatest cause of business failure is management not providing the environment for employees to succeed. As an owner, you can achieve a winning environment by providing the required time, resources and support for employees. The more accomplished you are under these three provisions, the more you can expect in return.

Don’t pitch customers; consult with them! Truly, no one has ever sold anyone anything. Customers make buying decisions based on their attitudes and beliefs. The best way to shape customer attitudes and beliefs is to cause them to think through and analyze the big picture before making the decision to buy.

My favorite way of doing this is to ask a customer, right upfront, “Which do you view as being the most important in your decision, lowest price or best bottom line?” Another direct way to say it is: “Are you looking for price or quality?”

If the customer chooses lowest price, I choose not to do the work because you can’t participate from a position like that and make money. Most often this type of customer brings along a lot of unwelcome baggage anyway. And they are not loyal.

Most customers will provide you some hope by claiming that bottom line is most important in making their buying decisions. Asking good questions at this point is key, along with listening carefully and taking note of the customer’s responses. The aim in asking good questions is getting the customer to assign values to each response.

Be equipped with a number of relative categories of considerations to explore with your customers that causes them to draw down to the bottom-line impact — “final cost” versus invoice pricing or “initial cost.” Ultimately, using good questioning skills enables customers to discover answers instead of you trying to sell them on answers, which is far less effective. Customers believe themselves long before they will ever believe you.

Be reliable in your support of smart customers. If you are making smart customers, be sure your detail operation can support these smart customers with detail services that truly are worth more to their bottom line. Not only does your detail service need to deliver more to the bottom line to justify a higher price, your business must be good at leveraging such value with customers on a regular basis.

Leveraging means conducting evaluation meetings with customers and using the previously outlined style of questions to make sure your customers continue in their belief and attitude that your products and services remain in their best interest to purchase.

Keith Duplessie is technical services manager for Portland, Ore.-based Detail Plus Car Appearance Systems, in charge of all installations, training and technical services. He can be reached at keith@detailplus.com.