This article was written by Steve Hall and was originally published on the NCM Institute Up to Speed blog. 

Do you ever consider how many chances you get to sell to a service customer? What I’m talking about isn’t tactics, but rather the opportunities to gain a sale, or additional sale every time a customer reaches out to your service department. The way that I see it, you have three opportunities with each customer – and if you are effective in all three you are probably doing very well in your hours per repair order category. If you aren’t effectively using all three opportunities, that could be part of your struggles.

Here are the three opportunities that I am referring to:

The first one is the prime item sale.

This is why the customer contacted you and wants to come in for service. If we don’t mess this one up, meaning forget to ask for the appointment, let the phone go unanswered, or turn away a drop in, you should have a 100% close rate on this item. It seems as if most dealerships aren’t great at accomplishing even this most basic sale opportunity. The other two selling opportunities can only happen if we first succeed in this category. If you are lucky enough not to shoot yourself in the foot during this customer request, you get to move in to the second round of selling. Congratulations.

Next you need to decide if you are a selling organization or a “fix it and smile” organization. Let me explain: “Fix it and smile” organizations manage to get the customer in for their prime item (customer request) but that is all that they do. They never present any additional items to the customer, they just “fix it and smile.”

If you want to become a selling organization, you get to move into the second and third selling opportunities:

The second one is the service drive selling opportunity.

Once you have greeted the customer and reviewed the prime item, do you perform a walk around on the vehicle and present a maintenance menu to the customer using sound benefit selling techniques? Another question that you must answer is: do you even have current and relevant maintenance menus for your advisors to sell with? If you do, and they use them – congratulations, you now have two of the three selling opportunities in place.

The third and final selling opportunity is the additional service request.

These are the needed repair items that are found by the technician during the multi-point inspection process. The ASR can provide the most profitable selling to a service department, but you must have a great process in place that is able to track the sales effectiveness of this opportunity.

Think about this, the prime item has 100% closing rate – it just can’t get better than that. The additional service request has the most upside sales potential and parts and labor dollars to be gained. While the menu process is icing on the cake adding additional sales that are highly desired jobs by any technician.

If you perform all three of them effectively, your hours per repair order should be in good shape. If you are struggling, look into each category and find the hidden gold that you are missing.

If you would like to learn more about the three selling opportunities in service and how to capitalize on them, contact the NCM Institute and enroll in our Principles of Service Management classes and see how much profit you can unlock.