How the old way of training F&I is costing you
F&I TAKES LONGER THAN A WEEK TO LEARN:
The first way is that in F&I it takes longer than a week to learn. The traditional way of training F&I is you send your staff to an offsite training for a week, they show a recording on a video doing the traditional “T.O” or “Turn Over Process”, and after that week, they give them some basic concepts of F&I, they give them a great overall overview, which is not a bad basic training for F&I. Now the problem with that is, F&I takes much longer than a week to master. As a matter of fact, there’s an art and a skill that takes months if not years to master, it takes a lot of practice, the demos, and the details when it comes to F&I, If you ever had a health contract, you know what I’m talking about. That takes time to learn and most importantly it takes somebody working for hand and hand with the person so they can develop those skills over time.
SENDING SOMEBODY OFFSITE FOR A WEEK:
Another way that the traditional training of F&I is leaving a lot of money on the table is that same motto of sending somebody off-site for a week, you’re wasting a lot of money by doing so. First of all, you generally have to pay for the training, if the training’s included, you have to pay for a hotel, you have to pay for gas or sending the person away, but also you’re losing money by not having that person on your floor. See, you’re paying them a salary for that week and they’re not producing anything for the store. So it’s really a lot of wasted money because they’re also wasting time, and the reality is that people learn in chunks, how much learning are they going to get in twelve hours, especially us here in the car business. I don’t know about you, but the reality is I have the attention span of a goldfish and I have to learn things in little chunks. Which is actually the third way.
SCRIPTS REALLY DON’T WORK:
The fourth way would be is that scripts really don’t work, concepts do. I see a lot of business managers get hung up on “I got to learn that verbatim, I got to learn what you just said there”. They’re looking for that magic spell or that magic potion or that “Yes” dust that they’re going to sprinkle on that customer that are immediately going to turn them into buyers. Your staff needs to stop believing in that magic potion or magic pill, there is nothing that is going to beat hard work and dedication when it comes to mastering this skill. So what we encourage and what your F&I manager should do is focus on understanding concepts and not scripts. Scripts don’t work, and the reason why they don’t work is that there’s no personality behind them. However, when you understand the concept behind the script and the concept of why, let’s use a famous close per say, but the stapler close or the triple-A close. When you’re using any of those “Closes”, really when you understand the concepts behind them, only do they actually work, and by then you can utilize your own concepts because you’re understanding the buying psychology of customers and why they make those decisions, which is really what you should be focusing on.
F&I IS FOREVER CHANGING:
The fifth thing is that we have a short attention span as I mentioned. The last but not the least is F&I is a forever changing.and it is something that you can’t pin down in a week or in a month and you really need to constantly be improving, constantly be training. That is why we believe here at F&I Direct in continuous training as a way of continuing to improve ourselves, and being able to become our best version of ourselves as business managers. I encourage you to bring this to your F&I managers, make sure you share with them the continuous training mentality.