Ask the Experts | Being More Competitive with Financing

Question: Can you suggest how I should use financing to help me be more competitive?

Drew Cameron; EGIA faculty member and HVAC Sellutions Founder:

Lead with financing!

I was out on a coaching ride-along with a client. I had worked with this salesperson quite a bit on getting them very comfortable with financing and leading with financing.

Regardless of the house we’re in, regardless of the car in the driveway, and regardless of what are perception of the customer is, we always lead with monthly payments

The sales call sounded something like this:

The salesperson said, “Have you given any though as to how you’d be paying for this? Before you answer, let me tell you all the ways that you can pay. Certainly, we accept cash or check, about 10% of our customers pay that way. About 15% pay by credit card because they like to get the points, the mileage, or the cash back.”

“Other people take advantage of our 0%. Maybe they have the cash but don’t want to spend it all at once. We could spread those payments out over three years with no pre-payment penalty. You could pay it off at any time in those three years and the nice thing about it is, you don’t have to put up all the cash up front. About 25% of our people chose that.”

“Or, are you going to be like the majority of our customers who take advantage of our low, convenient, flexible monthly payment? That’s about 50% of our customers.”

The sales person that I was riding with that day did that on all three of the calls we went on that day and sold all three. Two of the customers hadn’t even thought of financing with they initially contacted the company.

It made us not just competitive but made us completely eliminate the competition.

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