For Sym-Tech Dealer Services, training F&I managers to boost performance means “walking in their shoes” and closing real deals with real customers — right at the dealership.
There’s no doubt — Derek Sloan, the newly-named President of Sym-Tech Dealer Services, is passionate about training.
His face lights up when he talks about it, because he knows it works, and that it can make the people working in F&I offices more successful. That’s good for their careers, for their dealerships, and ultimately for Sloan’s business too.
“Your F&I managers should really only be making the money that makes sense for the dealership when they’re hitting their targets and they’re maximizing the goals. Our job is to go in and help them do that,” said Sloan.
Sloan has worked in the auto industry for decades; he was a Dealer Principal and led a dealership group, and until recently was Sym-Tech’s Vice-President of Sales and Training. Under his leadership, Sloan said, he plans to continue to grow the company by building upon its successful model of investing time, energy, and resources to better train the people that sell his company’s F&I products directly to car buyers. The company Canadianized a successful U.S. training program for F&I managers, and then built and refined its approach over the past decade for Canadian dealers.
“Margins on new cars are smaller than they’ve ever been, their service cycles are longer than they’ve ever been. F&I is an incredibly important office to them with very profitable, high margin products. Without it, many of them aren’t even profitable at all,” said Sloan in an interview at the company’s Thornhill, Ont. headquarters, and the home of one of three Learning and Development Centres — with the others located in Calgary and Montreal.
Although the company offers a wide range of products typically sold in an F&I office, like vehicle appearance and rust protection, and warranties and insurance, Sloan said the company’s main product offering is something much different. “Of course we get paid through our products, and we have fantastic products, we compete very well in the marketplace with them. But our value proposition is F&I performance,” said Sloan. “We help dealers get better performance in their F&I offices by providing them a more customer-centric process that is more about how customers want to buy — and less about how we want to sell.”
Sloan has so much faith in the company’s ability to boost sales in F&I offices that the company offered a “20 per cent Performance Guarantee”* as part of a recent advertising campaign. If his team can’t help a dealership’s F&I team increase performance by at least that amount in 90 days, then the company will make up the difference.
“Very aggressive, right?” said Sloan. He said some dealers are skeptical and say: “Okay, so let me get this straight. You’re going to guarantee me a 20 per cent increase. And if we don’t get 20, let’s say it’s only 15, you’re going to pay the 5 per cent difference? Yes, we will. So we’re willing to back up what we say because we walk the talk.”
He said the company takes a “white glove” approach and supports dealerships with highly-trained field staff who are fully-qualified and licensed to close deals. “If you really want to know our differentiator, we train by showing, not by telling,” he said. “Our special sauce is our ability to sit in the chair, take the deal in a customer-centric way, and move the needle for the dealer to increase profitability.”
For dealership customers who embrace the company’s full F&I solution, Sym-Tech’s field staff can even sub-in while F&I managers are away taking training courses, and are sometimes even called in as an extra set of hands to help close deals during busy stretches. But their main value is in spending days in the dealerships watching current F&I personnel manage real deals with customers. The trainers then provide feedback and critiques to help them better manage the process, and provide the talking tracks to connect with buyers about the value of the various F&I products.
“We’re literally sitting in the chair with an F&I manager taking deals with them. As we’re watching them, we’re watching how they’re doing it and then we’ll say, ‘okay, I’ll take the next customer, watch how I do it and I’m going to tweak it.’ And then we actually score them and then we train them. So that’s how we train.”
Sloan said he’s probably the only president of an F&I provider that has an OMVIC number, which authorizes him to sell cars and insurance products in Ontario. “I can sit in the chair too,” he said. “So why is that important? Because it’s the difference between being able to tell you what you should do, or show you how we can do it. And that’s important to dealers.”
F&I managers can also take intensive five-day courses at Sym-Tech’s training centres. There, they take part in courses that includes video-based performance training, where they practice real transactions, and are scored on their performance. “I’ll tell you some managers don’t like that. They don’t like going on video. They don’t want to get scored. But when they do it a few times, they start to realize they are getting better and are retaining the material better,” said Sloan.
Even though a lot of people are uncomfortable seeing themselves on video, they pick up on bad habits, like not making eye-contact and keeping the customers engaged, saying, “uhhm” all the time, or just not effectively following the steps of the process that has been proven to work effectively. “They go, ‘wow, I never even knew that. Never, never even thought of it.’”
When the managers return to the dealership, the company can also continue to do coaching remotely. “Our technology tool allows us to monitor performance from a distance. Our field team, with our DAVE technology (Dealer Automated & Verified E-Solutions), is able to see how many deals every F&I manager in every store does at any time,” said Sloan.
The tool also gives the dealership’s management teams the ability to review performance and assess which F&I team member is selling which products, and how much gross they are generating.
In terms of innovation in the industry, Sloan said more dealers are experimenting with a hybrid F&I process, where the salesperson takes the customer all the way through the car transaction and paperwork. “In our experience, it’s been very positive, for a couple of reasons. One is the customer has one person through the whole transaction. They’ve already built a lot of rapport and that sales representative is influential. So there’s a trust factor there.”
The other aspect is speed. Using the company’s automated F&I software tool — DAVE — a salesperson can quickly customize and tailor a menu of recommended F&I products based on conversations with the buyer about their vehicle usage and profile. “One of the challenges with the current sales process is it’s in two pieces. So as you’re qualifying the needs of the customer on the vehicle, you’re not necessarily qualifying their needs on how to protect the vehicle,” said Sloan. “I think you’re gonna see more and more of that. We’re getting higher and higher demand for it.”
The hybrid model isn’t for everyone, and Sloan said the company supports dealerships for whichever business model they embrace. “Dealers are entrepreneurs, dynamic and they’re the ones who have built their businesses. We’re not going to be the ones to walk in and tell them that this is how you should run your business,” said Sloan.
In terms of technology, Sloan said the company is working with OEMs and other partners to ensure that information about Sym-Tech products can be integrated directly into other websites and other build-to-order tools.
He said the company sees itself as “process engineers” for F&I products, and as more information migrates to digital platforms, they want to ensure research that online buyers do on F&I products transitions into a good dealership experience.
The company is also now offering a new training course to help dealerships better navigate the world of subprime and non-prime vehicle financing.
Sloan said the company recognizes dealerships are selling a high-margin product that often delivers a low-level of customer satisfaction, but that’s not a trade-off that dealerships need to make. By embracing more consistent and customer-friendly sales processes, and using better technology, the F&I experience doesn’t have to be painful for car buyers. “It has to be about what the customer wants — and customers want options and choices. They want things that are custom fit to them.”
In 2019, Sym-Tech Dealer Services was acquired by The Amynta Group’s North American automotive warranty business. For more info visit: www.sym-tech.ca.
* Sym-Tech says its Performance Guarantee is based on a Per Vehicle Average (PVA) profitability increase of 20 per cent achieved in the 90 days following launch compared to the prior 12 months’ average, or the company pays the difference. Certain terms and conditions apply.
