How Preloaded Bundles Can Revolutionize Your F&I Department

How Preloaded Bundles Can Revolutionize Your F&I Department

How Can Your F&I Staff Save Time AND Make More Per Deal? It’s All About the Bundle.

Time is money…or so they say, right? In the dealership, time is everything. Your staff needs time to sell the car, appraise the trade, and work the deal.

F&I needs time, too. Probably more than any other position at your store. They carry the burden of driving the highest profit (behind Service) while trying to keep the attention of car buyers who don’t want to sit there and listen to a sales pitch for products they don’t think they need.

During COVID-19, F&I managers have less time than ever to get the deal done. Many are still doing remote presentations in a digital retail environment since so many buyers are still not comfortable coming into the store. It’s all about efficiency and respecting your customers time.

When F&I managers have a huge menu of products to present, customers get frustrated and both PRU and CSI suffer. Pitch too much and nothing gets bought. But find a way to pare it down to a few high margin products and suddenly the numbers start increasing.

How can you sell MORE when you have little time to present and as a dealer STILL maintain a solid Line 1 profit? Preloaded ancillaries.

What? That Has Never Worked Before

No, ancillaries like appearance protection used to be a big ‘no-no’ back in the day when lenders would not allow it as a Line 1 add and they were priced entirely too high. Dealers eventually gave up on them and just threw it in with the menu for F&I to push.

Dealers also had this notion that every customer would look at a preloaded product as some shady tactic to force them to take a product that they did not want. So yeah, it was a tougher sale than it needed to be.

Focus on the Big Money in F&I

By preloading a bundle (think interior/exterior, key replacement, tire & wheel, PDR, windshield and 24/7 roadside) into Line 1, you free up the F&I managers to focus exclusively on the high margin products that really require a more in-depth presentation like VSC and GAP. Those products involve asking customers the right questions about their driving habits and financial  resources to help illustrate their benefits. That takes time.

Both of those products yield a higher commission for F&I and are the biggest sources of aftermarket profits. Let’s be honest…no F&I manager ever got rich selling tire & wheel.

Happy Customers = Higher Profits

Car buyers want an easy experience when buying a car, especially now. For the last few months, it seems like everyone has worried about their job, finances, and health and if someone is coming in to buy a car right now, they must really need it (or they just want the great deals the OEM’s are offering!). If F&I managers are able to streamline their presentations by focusing on just a few products instead of bulldozing their way through a giant menu, customers will appreciate that minimalist approach.

By moving appearance protection to a bundle with other low-margin ancillaries, your dealership sends the message that you respect their time. It’s all about the experience and when your customers fill out the surveys after they take the car home, you want those to reflect the easy and straightforward F&I approach taken with them by keeping it simple.

It’s Can’t Be THAT Easy..Can It?

So how does this look for your store to adopt this approach? Let’s walk through how easy it is to offer this program today…

Every car gets a remote-added appearance bundle preloaded through an addendum under the Monroney. It’s branded to your store as an exclusive ‘protection package’ that clearly sets up the ‘why buy here’ value proposition. Your local market knows that your store values this protection so much so that you want EVERY customer to benefit from that peace of mind.

You price it as a Line 1 add of $199…a third of the cost of other bundles and for a full five year term. Since the typical loan term is five years, it’s a win-win for your customer. And with a ‘dry’ package, there is no chemical applied and no labor cost to provide the protection. Nearly pure profit. 200 cars on the lot ALL with this preloaded bundle? Your store just made $40,000. Not too bad, huh?

F&I can upsell on that bundle and still have the time they need to sell bigger products. It’s a non-cancellable product, too. Makes life much easier.

Change is Good…Especially Now

F&I departments are having to evolve at a rapid pace during this pandemic. Some stores are already seeing a higher PRU even though there are fewer shoppers in the showroom. Why? They have more time to narrow their focus and be more efficient with the time they DO have even in a digital/remote environment.

Change is necessary and dealerships should be looking at anything they can to make their F&I staff’s job easier while squeezing as much profit as possible.

Preloading bundled ancillaries is the most cost effective way to achieve that. It’s easy, hands-off, and provides extreme value to the customer. And if you are lucky enough to connect with an administrator that offers a full suite of extra tools to optimize your entire F&I menu of products, you can’t afford NOT to try this approach.

Reach out to us at ExoGloss today to see for yourself how easy it would be to add preloaded bundles to your inventory (and make your F&I managers smile a little bigger!).

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