3 fallbacks that coax customers to buy

If you want to boost product sales, it's always good to have a fallback position.

Instead of discounting the price, you remove products from packages. Or you give away a lesser product to sell a more profitable one.

Top F&I professionals share three favorite fallbacks:

Separate the service contract from the paint sealant. Trainer George Angus, in Scottsdale, Ariz., separates the intangibles such as service contracts from the tangibles such as paint sealant and fabric care when he presents products on a menu.

"What we found is some people who won't buy intangibles will buy the tangibles. So if you put them together they will reject the whole package," Angus says. "Some people buy both, but if you separate them, you get less resistance."

Offer a four-year service plan as backup. Some F&I professionals ask customers how long they intend to keep the car or how many miles they typically drive in a year. Angus skips asking that because it eliminates his fallback position.

"We have a 4-year/48,000-mile contract that we offer as a fallback to drop the price $10 to $12 a month," he explains. "About a third of the people buy the contract when we fall back from the longer term. We start with the longest and most expensive contract so that we have a fallback position."

Beef up the service contract with a maintenance plan. Kurt Hornung, vice president of F&I operations at AutoNation Inc., the nation's largest dealership group, offers a moderate price on service contracts. To avoid dickering over price, he offers a maintenance policy to go with the service plan. The maintenance plans are less expensive and help increase customer loyalty.

"They'll be driving right back into the service department," Hornung says. "We want to see customers as much as possible."