Financing training photo

Hi everybody, thanks for joining us for this month for the Real Talk webinar. Today's topic is "How to train your team to sell effectively with financing. This is part of the monthly series of webinars that coincide with some videos and other tools we've made available for you online from the GE Money Real Talk website. And these are designed to help you get more value out of your financing program and build your business. So the format for today's webinar is gonna about 10 minutes of presentation from our hosts. I'll introduce them in a minute. And then we'll gonna leave about 10 minutes of Q and A time. So we can take questions from the audience and have our experts provide you some tips and insights from their perspective.

OK. Let's get started. Let me tell you about our hosts. We have Jon Pershing and Lisa Glander from GE Money with us today. Jon is a Strategic Account Manager. He has 13 years of retail credit experience and he has experience in operations, marketing and sales for the music, sporting goods and furniture industries. And Lisa is a Client Services Manager with 15 years of retail experience covering operations, collections and sales for the automotive, sporting goods and music industries. So I'm gonna hand over to Jon to get started.

Great! Thank You very much Percy. And so just to give you guys a little bit of overview of what we'll gonna be discussing today. Basically it's all about you know "How to train your team to sell effectively with financing". I'll be reviewing with you "Buy-in and commitment" and "Preparing talking points". Then I'll hand over to Lisa and she'll be reviewing with the group "Practice and role-play" and "Ongoing skills improvements".

So let's go ahead and we can get started. So the first thing that we'd like to cover today is "determine why you're offering financing". This is really really an important part about when you're going through and you wanna make sure your team is doing a great job. You know its the reason that you have financing in your store just to kind of close that one large sale or why you're doing it. Cause you have to have everybody on the same page.

I think that a lot of times financing can be great tool for certainly closing that large sale but in other times you know it's really about building a bigger baskets. If you got or somebody comes in and they buy a mattress in your store and they have bought anything else. Using financing having that dedicated line of credit can help throw in a couple of lamps, maybe a rug and a knight stand. And all of a sudden, instead of walking out with a thousand dollars purchase, you're looking of 14 hundred.

So making sure that you and you're entire team really understand why you're offering financing is critical to make them sure that you've got commitment from everyone. And so that really means setting goals. And making through as tracking those goals on a monthly or weekly basis. And that's how to get your team to commit into it.

But I think probably the most important thing that you'll see is really trying to get support from the top down and challenging your team. I think one of the things I remember most clearly was speaking with a music dealer whose really great at the program and I asked him. I said you know, "why are you folks so engaged? how do you this?". And he said that his main throw when he spoke to his team was to offer financing to every customer every time. And I think that lives through him and went down to all the folks working for his store. So literally when anybody came in that was part of what they did. That was part of their goals. That was part of what they track on a weekly basis. They offered financing to every customer everytime. They didn't try to make decisions about if this person was gonna give if they weren't. They just knew that this was a great benefit to their program and to what they're selling and they took advantage of it.

Now, I also say that "incentives" can be a really a big help. And certainly money will get people involved everytime whether its a dollar for an application or something like that. We have a lot of really great examples from our partners who is fond things that go around too.

I spoke to one furniture dealer and what he did was the person that have the most apps (applications), at the end of the month got a half a day a vacation. They knew that whoever have the most apps was taken of early on the last friday of the month and they'll gonna go have a great vacation. They were gonna do something big for the weekend. And the net will really kind do the move the dial for them to get people involve and using it.

Next thing I'm gonna do is move to "preparing your talking points in advance". And I think that this is really important because its all about confidence. It's about how comfortable you are. And I think selling anything is really about confidence and how confident that you feel. So I was thinking about the example of one of the sporting goods dealers that I worked with and they were bike shop. They brought in a new line of bikes that happened to be specialized bikes. What I told them was, "If you think about all the different things you have to know about that new bike line when you bring it in. If you bring in specialized bikes and you've got all new lines of bikes in and you don't know what benefits of that bike are, what that bike is, you don't know how much that bike cost, who would that bikes fits, then you'll not gonna sell those bikes. In specialized, you'll not gonna sell those bikes very much longer but absolutely everybody in that store knew up and down, everything about the new bike line and the key men. And you really treat financing the same way. You treated it's just like a product line and have your folks very comfortable about it. The more that they know, the easier its going to be for them to engage the customer in conversation and not feeling nervous about it.

And so how do you do that? You get there by practice. In Lisa, we'll gonna talk about that in the next couple of slides. So I won't touch that. So that's really keys. You have to get in there. You have to practice.

I think more than anything else what you want your folks to able to do is "not sell the financing but have a conversation about financing" with the customers when they come in. So once they feel comfortable and they really start to understand the program and they understand the benefits of the program, it's a free-flowing conversation with the customer. They're not answering off the card they've seen. And answering specific questions about financing. They will be able to say, "No, this is great. I just had somebody come in last week. And they really able to get exactly they wanted here. Just take a couple of moments and just go ahead and get you set-up." And that type of free-flowing and engaging conversation is a lot different than somebody trying to sell. You know walking down to a bullet point list of what they think the benefits of the program are. So if you can get to that conversation point, you are really heading it off and you'll be doing the right things.

So, one thing that I've seen in the stores that really helps is that they are able to use their point of purchase materials as a point of reference. And so the first few times that your employees are out there, and they're talking about financing, it's a scary thing. You know they're worried about if somebody's not gonna be approved, if the person doesn't talk about financing. And so being able to use whether it's an application or a hang tag or something like that in your hand as point of reference that you can point to. Kinda takes the point off of the representative or associate, puts it on to that piece of material that can kinda diffuse the situation. You know you can get there and you got that in your hand, the customers are looking at that. And if there focus is on that piece of material and it's not on the employee, then you can feel a little bit more comfortable talking about that.

I think those are kind of my key points when talking about making sure you prepare and feeling comfortable. And I'm gonna hand over to Lisa whose gonna go through somebody's next pieces.

Okay. Thank's Jon. Other overcome objections. Let's face it. The name of the game is offer customers more reasons to choose your business over other businesses. One way is to make sure that your customers know they are preferred by offering them, giving them access to different promotions with your store card, not only build a strong relationship but you can also turn one-time sales to repeat sales.

As long as I've been doing this, a lot of the objections that I've heard has simply been I don't need a credit card. Make sure to let them know that it's not another credit card. And don't sell it as a credit card. Let them know that they are preferred customer and this is a preferred store card. And they can use it purchase any of the merchandising products of your store. Lot of times I hear that I don't have enough time to apply for credit card. Make sure to let them know that it only takes, in a matter of minutes to get approved and they can make a purchase right then and there.

And know your promotions. Be sure that you feel comfortable explaining promotions as well as the monthly payments required.

Not last resort financing. Make sure to offer early to your customers. A lot of successful dealers told me that they carry around applications in their pockets. So as soon as the customer walks in to the location, they walk right up to the customer and greet them, let them know they offer special financing, hand them an application and let them know that it only takes minutes to apply. Don't wait for the customers to come up and ask for the financing. So offer early and often to everyone.

Ongoing skills improvements. Incorporate in weekly sales meetings. Make sure that your salespeople feel comfortable discussing financing. The last meeting that I had with the vertical chain allocation. They share with me a lot of their best practices. Some of the locations had the credit centers right as soon as you walk into the door. Had all their POP displayed, applications, etc. So as soon as people enter to their store, right there was all the information of the program. The next one was placement of POP materials. Make sure to keep your all POP materials up to date. The point of sales materials are free to you. You can order those at any time. Keep those on eye level. As Jon stated, they do a lot of talking for you. So make sure you have that all up to date, hang tags, etc. Make sure that you're approachable. Routinely discussed financing options with everyone of your customers that you serve. Differentiate your level of customer service. Offering customers easy and affordable ways to pay gives you a competitive edge against your competitors.