How To Present Your Product
Step Five The Walk Around
As long as you are on the right vehicle and have all of the information you need to adequately sell someone on the car that will meet all of their needs and desires you are now ready to do a presentation or “walk around.”
During your presentation, many customers may ask about the CarFax and or vehicle history. If you work at any sort of reputable dealership you are probably safe to tell them that with all of the inventory you have and with it constantly changing it is nearly impossible to keep track of all of them. Although, most are one owner or have only had a couple of owners and many are local trade-ins, and you don't sell anything with salvaged or reconstructed titles and you will be sure to get them a CarFax before they leave and then move on.
Your first step without fail should always be to let your customers know you will be right back and then run to get the keys to the vehicle. I suggest not asking someone if they would like you to get the keys to the car because this will result in more no's than needed and we probably only ask out of fear or laziness anyway.
Next, once you have the keys, unlock the vehicle, let your customers know what you are doing, jump in and pull the vehicle out of the spot and face it towards an exit. While you are backing out, I have found it useful to put the radio on something ever so quite so it is background noise on a popular local station that won't offend, move the steering wheel up and the seat all the way back.
Before exiting the vehicle pop the hood, as that is a great place to begin your presentation, from the hood move to the back passenger seat, the trunk, then the driver side and finally ending with your customer sitting inside the vehicle, in the driver seat.
It has been said many times that telling is not selling and it is so true. A proper presentation requires so much more than pointing things out, and when you are explaining a feature of your product an excellent presentation of a feature consists of three things, and they are Feature, Benefit & Advantage.
Feature: What it is.
Benefit: What it does.
Advantage: What it does for your customer.
Think about it like this, say you have a cat, a feature of that cat is it has a tail. A benefit of a cats tail is that it provides the cat better balance, an advantage is that the additional balance that the tail offers is it will make it so your family pet is far less likely to fall when it is walking on the roof of your home, in turn avoiding having a traumatic experience for your children.
You can also tie in qualifying committed questions in your presentation, such as "Is that a feature you would like to have in your next vehicle" or something like that.
The idea here is to paint a pretty picture of the people accomplishing the things they hoped that a new vehicle would allow them to achieve. A thing is just a thing until you enthusiastically show why it is special to them, not everyone, but what makes it special to your customer specifically.
Pay attention to what your customer wants, touch on things that are great and unique about it, awards and competitive comparisons but never drag on about how excellent the safety is if all your customer cares about is how fast it is and how cool they will look.
If your customer is looking at another vehicle from another manufacturer, it is so easy to trash on the other vehicle, but that will only cause them to not buy from you. Can you buy a bad new car today? Probably, but they are far, and few between and almost every manufacturer has something great to offer, it is best to explain what makes your vehicle fit their needs better in a more indirect way.
In addition to the above, we should be mindful to keep our customers interested by keeping them involved with our presentation, have them look at and touch things that you are talking about.
Also, people think in pictures. When someone tells you about a delicious strawberry shake they had, you probably don't think about the letters S T R A W B E R R Y in your head. Most people tend to picture what is being explained — just food for thought.
Under the hood of the vehicle on a used car, if it is a new arrival and you don't know a lot about it, do not fear to open the hood. Also, don't open the hood and just stand there like a jackass, if your cars are not shit you can point out things like that there are no leaks and the belt is not cracked. PS no one cares about the hood bending up and the engine falling down in a crash.
If you work at a dealership with 100's of used cars it is nearly impossible to learn adequate product knowledge on every vehicle on the lot, it may be good practice to have a top 10 or top 20 that are on the lot. Over time you will know a whole lot about many vehicles. It would help if you also walked your inventory every morning.
After you move on from the hood and come to the passenger side rear door and there is nothing fancy back there you could always jump in and ask if it looks like it has enough space for the passengers they will have.
When you get to the trunk, be sure to have played with the vehicles enough that you can very easily fold the seats and take out cargo covers etc. Every newer salesperson tries to tell a body in trunk joke, and since you don't want to sound like the last salesman they spoke to, maybe avoid that one. You could switch it up on hatchbacks and say that it has a handle so you can workout in your spare time. If they told you something about how they planned to use the vehicle like kids in sports you could also say something like, “you said you had (kids or kids that play sports etc.) Does this have enough space for when you do ____ activity?”
Next, hop in inside the driver site and quickly show them how to move the seat, mirrors, steering wheel and pedals and ask them to hop in and get everything where they like it.
Once they get that all dialed in you could run to the back and ask how the visibility is and ask if they can see you.
After that, hop in the back seat and be polite if there are two people, insist that they sit up front unless they tell you that they want to see how the back rides. Once you are inside the vehicle, tell them you want to show them how the radio presets work and ask them what their favorite radio station is and set that to one. You can also do something similar with paring their phone and ask them if they would like to call someone from the blue tooth.
Go over some other important features to them and finally ask if the seat is comfortable and if they have everything where they like it and if the answer is yes you are ready for the next step the test drive.
Keep in mind that your customer probably knows a lot about the vehicle you are currently showing them, especially if you are showing them a new car. Keep on task, and your presentation of the vehicle should not take much time at all, just enough to get them excited enough to want to drive it, have it be a consideration and like you more.
If you can't get to the next step TURN
As with all of our car sales training blog posts, please email or place a comment below if you have any thoughts about changes or additions that you think should be made to this post because the goal is to provide the most value to the readers.