In a tightening economy, it’s more important than ever for collision repair shops to capture as much work as possible, and to make that work as profitable as possible. For that to happen, estimators and shop managers have to improve both their sales skills and negotiating abilities.
During his Friday afternoon presentation, “Salesmanship Skills for the Estimator,” Bernie Blickenstaff, principal at Collision Management Services Inc., a Baltimore-based collision industry consulting firm, outlined how shops can boost their business and improve negotiations with insurance companies.
A key challenge, he said, is that the collision industry as a whole doesn’t consider itself a sales-centric business. According to Blickenstaff, estimators should sell first and estimate second — and build a more profitable business in the process.
“The good news is, we’re in the sales business,” Blickenstaff says. “The bad news is, most of us haven’t figured it out yet. “We are a negotiation-intensive industry. We have to get better at selling and getting the keys and commitment from the customer. We have to be more effective in negotiating with the adjusters. Every line is negotiable to one degree or another.”
There are three steps in the sales process:
• qualify the customer’s needs;
• present a solution; and
• close the sale and ask for the keys.
“We tend to think that everybody’s needs are the same,” he says. “And in a lot of cases we fail to ask for that commitment from the customer. We feel like we’re pushing people, but we won’t know what their decision is unless we ask them.”
Blickenstaff also discussed upselling, a process that repairers can use to help boost profitability, particularly during periods of economic slow down. “Once I get the commitment from the customer, it’s my job to upsell them during drop-off as far as any services I provide like mechanical repair or pin striping, or fixing any old damage on the vehicle.”
The final step is overcoming the customer’s objections, which can either be personal (they have to talk the decision over with their spouse) or insurance related.
“You have to be able to empathize with the customer,” Blickenstaff says. “That doesn’t mean you agree with their objection, but you have to listen to what they are saying and truly understand it. Then you educate them and provide a solution.”
Insurer negotiations can be the most frustrating step in the process for repairers, because they often feel powerless during the process.
Blickenstaff advised attendees at the session to take the personal angst out of the negotiation process. Many repairers feel that insurance companies are out to “pick their pockets,” but Blickenstaff reminded his audience that everybody’s sale is somebody else’s cost.
“If you take that personal angst out of it, you can be a better negotiator and feel less drained at the end of the day,” he says.
“Right now, because we have more capacity than workload, the insurers do have more influence than they have had in the past, but the repairer is not powerless,” he says. “An insurer doesn’t pay the exact same price regardless of where the car goes, and if you look at collision centers that have multiple writers, there’s always one that consistently gets paid a little bit more than the others.”
Blickenstaff says estimators have to do a better job of negotiating, and work hard to get those extra dollars. “We have to work harder than ever in negotiating for the eight bucks here and there that they’d be paying if we just negotiated effectively,” Blickenstaff says. “They are paying those things somewhere else. There are little things that we’ve got to get on those estimates, and they’re out there to be had every day.”
