Picture this: you’re one car away from meeting your monthly sales goal, which comes with a nice incentive from the manufacturer. Your salesperson sits down with a customer who wants to drive off the lot today — great news for the dealership!

You start preparing for the negotiation process. The customer wants to trade-in their current vehicle and has a couple thousand dollars to put down, but they’re not completely sold on whether they want to finance or lease.

Before the salesperson leaves the customer to come over to your desk for a first pencil, you place an internal bet on how many times you’ll have to go back and forth on this deal. Will it be three pencils before closing today? Six?

Each time the deal is reworked and presented again, the price goes down. So does the salesperson’s commission and your dealership’s credibility.

Customers are more likely to leave in the middle of the deal (and less likely to return) if there’s too much back-and-forth. If you gamble on what options to include in the deal, you can bet on your customers buying from another dealership who ensures they’re getting the best rate and every rebate they qualify for on the first pencil. Presenting the customer with different payment options makes them feel in control of their decision-making, and therefore more likely to say “yes”. Customers walk into your dealership armed with information they have collected on the internet. The closer you can come to confirming what they’ve already researched the easier it is to earn their trust.

What can you do to save the deal and empower your customers to say yes faster?

Offer your customers more than a four-square they’re likely to send back to you. Invest in a desking tool that allows you to present multiple payment options at once that factor in:

• Finance and/or lease rates.
• Residual values.
• Different term options.
• Finance reserve.
• Gross profit.
• Cash incentives for which the customer, vehicle, and the deal qualify for.

Eliminate guesswork, reduce bottlenecks, and increase your close ratio by accommodating customers’ needs. Because desking a deal doesn’t have to be a manual, unsatisfying, or tedious process and it should never cost you a sale.

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