Mike Esposito of Auto/Mate

I have always felt that government regulations within our industry can be used as a sales advantage. "How so" do you ask? Take the issue of full disclosure in the F&I office. What GSM hasn’t pulled his or her hair out when looking at penetration rates for their F&I products. You ask your F&I manager what’s happening only to find out that they are not showing all of the products to the buyer. How do you as a GSM handle this (after they unscrew you from the ceiling)? The first thing I would do is to make sure my F&I office had the tools that they need to correctly sell the products and this starts with an F&I Menu. Not something such as a spreadsheet or a piece of paper with products on it but a system that will allow the F&I Manager to smoothly move from the deal to additional products on the deal and back to payment. So where do the regulations come in? Well I would have a statement on the wall in the F&I office that this dealership is a full disclosure dealership and in following in that spirit we ask that our F&I Manager disclose all of the products that are available for the Buyer to purchase with their new / used vehicle. Remember we want to show all the people, all the products all the time. Using the menu the F&I manager can quickly add products to the deal along with showing the features and benefits of the products. In addition the F&I Manger can print disclosure statements that the buyer needs to sign saying that they were presented all of the products and understand the payments. Now you might say "Mike, is that bending the regulation to your benefit?" Well not really. It is really using it to protect the store. I have had experience where in the dealership I ran, my F&I Manger did not tell a buyer about life insurance we offered. The buyer had a heart attack and his wife came after us saying that we should have told them about the life insurance. The long and short of it is we went to court. We lost (we’re in NY of course).

Anyone not using an F&I Menu is leaving gross on the table and is opening their store up for possible litigation.  Simple as that.

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