I often begin our Collections training class by asking the students what the most important collection tool is at their dealerships. I get answers ranging from the telephone to the tow truck but I have never had a student give me the right answer. The correct answer is the application. That’s right, if you want to successfully collect the loans or leases you make to your dealer controlled financing customers,
Collections during the upcoming holiday season always become just a little tougher. We know our Buy Here – Pay Here customers live paycheck to paycheck and, during this time of the year, there are more demands on those paychecks than ever. The cost of holiday meals at Thanksgiving and Christmas or Hanukkah plus Christmas presents and even preparations for New Year require extra money when our customers have very little
Charging late fees is a practice some Buy Here – Pay Here dealers choose to do but an approximately equal number consider to be a bad practice. Those who charge fees when their customers pay late typically look at it as another source of revenue. Those who believe that it is a poor practice will, more often than not, site one or more of the following reasons. 1. Your customers
In my last article, we discussed the importance of having the right collectors for your DCF dealership. Once the sale or lease is completed, no one will have more contact with your customers than your collectors. If you fail to hire, manage and train the right collectors, it will be very difficult for you to actually realize the profits you generated during the sale or lease of the vehicle. Without
Effective collections is the lifeblood for any dealer engaged in dealer controlled financing. You’ve sold or leased the vehicles but you won’t realize the profits you made or produce the cash necessary to replenish the inventory or pay the bills until you collect on what is owed you. Your sales people will talk with the customer regularly for a couple of days or maybe even weeks until the sale is
A month or so ago, I wrote a blog about accepting credit and debit cards for payments at BHPH dealerships. The response to that blog has been overwhelming. I am grateful for the comments, calls and emails I have received. The questions I have been asked have been very good ones and, since I’m sure there are other readers who share those questions, I have decided to respond to them here. The
I got a call from one of our clients who we provide consulting for. “Al”, she said, “I’ve got a problem”. She continued, “I just had a payment rejected for a customer we have set up on an automatic payment plan. I tried to call his cell phone and now the number is no good. We did a field call to the residence address we have on file and the
I wrote a blog post about a week ago on the growing use of alternative payment methods in Buy Here – Pay Here. My good friend Ken Shilson, president and founder of the National Alliance of Buy Here Pay Here Dealers, just wrote an article on the subject, as well. He has granted me permission to republish it here. It Should Be Called, “Buy Here, Pay There”! by Kenneth B. Shilson,
Managing a Buy Here – Pay Here dealership can be like walking a tightrope. A manager needs to balance creating a friendly atmosphere against the need to maintain a business relationship. Potential customers should feel welcome when they come in to purchase a new vehicle and current customers should feel like the dealership cares out about them and what is going on in their lives as they make their payments.
For many years the prevailing philosophy in the Buy Here – Pay Here industry was to sell only to customers near your dealership who could come in every time they got paid and pay you in cash. That philosophy was based on a couple of facts and/or beliefs: If a customer lived more than a 30 minute drive from the dealership, they were more likely to mail in their payments
