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."