You have customers that come through your service drive every day with cars that have seen better years. Vehicles with hundreds of thousands of miles even though they are just a few years old, low-mileage cars that have been through two or three decades, or mistreated vehicles that didn’t stand a chance against their owner’s ambivalence.

You do your best to provide the best service possible for each of your customers through your repair recommendations, your maintenance suggestions, and your urging for more consistent visits to prevent the laundry-list effect of concerns. If you’re human, you’ve even dealt with customers to whom you’ve felt bad selling service and repairs because the vehicle isn’t worth the investment.

At times, it’s a tough situation to be in. Do you swing for the fences and try to sell all the repairs to recondition the worn vehicle? Do you tell your faithful, trusting customer that the vehicle simply isn’t worth the money they’re ready to spend? Or do you help them limp by with minimal repairs, until the next time they stop in for a problem?

The catch often is that your pay is tied to your 'customer service'. You’d like to realize the benefits of your actions immediately so the tendency is to sell the repairs and maintenance, putting blinders on so you don’t make an attachment to your customer’s position.

Is that truly serving your customer’s needs the best?

There’s always another option – the sales referral. With those words, silent screams are going up across the continent from service advisors, service managers, and fixed operations directors. It isn’t a new concept by any means although its use is far less common than it should be.

Sales referrals from the service department should be a process every staff member is familiar with. It’s meant to be a way of retaining a customer that may otherwise defect to the competition without the input of your service staff. Here’s how it should operate:

• A service staff member recognizes that a customer may benefit from a new vehicle instead of conducting repairs on their current model.
• That employee suggests to the customer that there may be a better way opposed to repairs.
• The customer entertains the idea and agrees to consider their options with a sales team member.
• The service staff makes the introduction with a trusted sales colleague, then leaves the process.
• The customer decides whether to buy or lease a new vehicle or to continue with repairs on their current vehicle.

Unfortunately, service employees don’t always see the benefit of the sales referral. Most service positions are commission or productivity-based, and the sales referral is a potential reduction in their income. This obviously weighs heavily in their decision whether to approach the service-to-sales handoff or to continue with the service sale 'obliviously'.

Make the Process Beneficial

The primary problem in the sales referral process is monetary. If you’re asking your service team member to forego their chance of a sale so a salesperson can reap the reward, your request will fall on deaf ears.

Every member of your staff should know that service-to-sales handoffs are a respected and productive decision in your eyes, and each one should be rewarded whether the new vehicle purchase happens or not. You might consider compensation by way of gift cards or a small amount cash for each sales referral they provide, then a greater sum should the transaction take place. It could be $25 for the initial referral plus $100 should the customer take delivery of a new vehicle, or even provide a scaled amount based on the number of referrals in a quarter or year.

In addition to financial compensation for the sales referral, you can help encourage the action by publicly recognizing employees who give referrals to their coworkers.

Sales and Service Employee Relationships

A blind eye cannot be turned to the all-too-common poor interdepartmental relationships. This plays as big a role as any in an employee’s unwillingness to refer service clients to the sales department. Service and sales departments often operate as two different worlds, as if children of the same parents who are in constant disagreement. Whether you choose to acknowledge the spats or not, your customers view the uncomfortable altercations when they happen.

As a veteran of six dealerships and, having interacted with dozens more, I haven’t seen a dealership with cohesive service and sales departments. This “in-fighting” is perhaps one of the most detrimental problems facing dealerships. It produces ill intents, bad attitudes, and a black cloud that prevents the involved staff members from performing their duties fully – providing exceptional customer service.

While the issue runs deep, it can become a stumbling block or barrier that gets in the way of the service-to-sales handoff. To overcome these ‘sibling rivalries’, team-building exercises involving every department can be encouraged and employed. Provide safe social situations for service and sales staff to mingle, such as free tickets to major league sporting events, concerts, and celebrations of milestones and target achievements as a whole instead of as individual departments.

The process of encouraging sales referrals from your staff is the same as the vehicle sales process. Demonstrate the benefits, eliminate the negatives, and ask for the sale (or referrals).

When we can focus our efforts on providing exceptional customer service – the kind that truly takes our customer’s best interests to heart – we all win.

Feel free to share your dealership’s sales referral success stories as well as any other challenges you face in receiving sales referrals from your staff.