Gospel according to Angus

Throw out brochures and anything else that looks like a sales tool.

Don't sell customers on product benefits, and skip the presale interview. It's a waste of time.

If you upsell customers, you create sales resistance. But if customers are in control, they buy more. Customers will choose more products than you could ever upsell them.

This is the gospel according to George Angus, a Scottsdale, Ariz., finance and insurance trainer who has been defying convention since he launched his training career in 1994.

Some in the business have called Angus the father of menu selling because he helped popularize the concept in F&I offices around the country. He estimates that over the years he has trained more than 7,000 finance managers to sell products from a menu.

He says his menu doesn't look like a sales tool, by the way. It has the straightforward, plain-Jane look of a legal disclosure document.

The industry initially balked at menu selling. But now that it's widely accepted, Angus has refined his system, sometimes contradicting other trainers.

"Many experts try to apply the old 1970s-style value presentation theory to the menu process," Angus says. "The result is a complicated and time-consuming sales pitch."

A plaque in his office says, "Never marry an idea -- the divorce is too painful for your ego." That could be his motto. He says there are too many F&I people stuck on doing business the old way. He likes to rattle them and shake up their view of the industry.

Angus also uses humor to get people to laugh at themselves and to accept change. For example, he advises trainees to remove sales trophies and award plaques from their offices.

"People already think they're going to get ripped off at the dealership, and when they see those plaques they think, "This guy is the champion at it,'" he says.

His students all laugh. They also take the plaques down.

Angus says he can afford to be a maverick because he has produced many top performers.

"His methods are very effective," says Loe Hornbuckle, finance director at Holmes Automotive Group in Shreveport, La.

Hornbuckle says that the training helped increase monthly finance gross profit to $133,000, from $63,000 last year. The company has seen a year-to-date increase of $213,000.

Angus says his Saturday e-mail messages go to 9,400 subscribers, most of them F&I managers. The message is posted faithfully each week on a Facebook discussion group for F&I managers, where it is eagerly received.

But his training career is a detour from his original plan. Angus, now 60, always dreamed of becoming a Chevrolet dealer.

He joined training firm Summit Systems in 1994 to pass time while waiting for a dealership to be available. Summit is now Team One Research and Training.

He is a native of Grand Rapids, Mich., and spent three years in the Army during the Vietnam War. At 21, he went to college on the GI Bill and earned money from gigs playing the drums in bars along Chicago's Rush Street.

Angus has studied at Davenport University in Grand Rapids, the University of Michigan and several industry trade schools over the years.

Initially, though, he aimed at becoming a Chevy dealer through General Motors' dealer development program. He already had a GM connection: His dad had worked as a welding engineer at GM's plant in Grand Rapids.

But college put constraints on Angus' budget, forcing him at times to take night classes while he worked at a Grand Rapids refrigerator plant. In his junior year in 1975, he left college and took up selling cars to earn more money. By the time he could afford to go back to school, he was making more money in the car business than his classmates who had graduated.

Angus held a variety of management positions at dealerships before he started as a trainer in 1994.

"I did F&I for three or four years and went through the training," says Angus. "What we called techniques back then are now called felonies."

He's not joking. He says finance managers routinely packed the payments with products customers never agreed to buy. Or they would "hammer" customers until they bought products.

"We used to laugh that if the wife wasn't crying when a couple left your office, you hadn't done your job," he says. "Customers won't put up with that today. The biggest change I have seen in 30 years has been the customers."

His first menu was four columns and offered four product packages: preferred, standard, budget and economy. He later separated the intangible insurance products such as service contracts from the tangible items such as paint sealant and fabric protection.

His latest menu is closer to four squares rather than columns. It also includes a disclosure box at the top summarizing the price of the car, trade-in, down payment and sales tax.

Angus preaches simplicity, speed and honesty. The menu presentation should take no longer than seven minutes. Any longer than that, he says, and the propensity to buy plummets.

Of course, there are top F&I performers who believe seven minutes is too short. And others say the presale interview Angus has dispensed with allows them to customize their menu presentation and make more sales.

Angus says he has tried different approaches and he recommends only what works.

Many dealerships, for example, are automating the menu presentation to speed the transaction and appeal to computer-savvy customers.

Angus discourages online sales of F&I products and self-serve F&I menus that let customers choose products using a touch screen. His company has experimented with similar technology, he says, and the results were disappointing.

"The on-screen presentation doesn't work," Angus says. "People are used to buying and seeing things on a computer, but they're also used to clicking no."

Some dealerships have had success selling F&I products with video -- which gets another thumbs-down from Angus.

"They're beautiful DVDs," he says. "But when customers view them, it creates sales resistance."

Angus recognizes there is room for other menu sales methods. He doesn't squabble over differences with other trainers.

He simply points to his huge following and the performance of his trainees.

"Years later, I'm still at it," Angus says. "Somewhere along the way, I gave up on becoming a dealer. I liked doing this."