To help him and me understand that we undervalue and undersell ourselves, I built a calculator that raised labor rates by 3% each year starting with a shop that was at $70 per hour in 1980, which was our labor rate at the time. It shows that if we had raised our rates by 3% each year—roughly the average rate of inflation—that we would not have a shop in our industry that was less than $270 per hour today. (See sidebar.)

We don’t believe in the value of what we do, and that undermines our confidence in our pricing.

I had an experience with a family member whose husband is a very successful artist.  Their car needed a serpentine belt and the estimate she got from the shop seemed to be too high for her liking. She asked me if I thought it was a fair price and I told her if I did it in my shop it would have been a higher price than she was quoted. She just couldn’t believe that a shop could charge $180 for the replacement of the serpentine belt and was visibly upset. I told her that what I didn’t understand was not the value of a $180 serpentine belt, but how anyone would pay $20,000 for a painting. We have not talked much since.  

She didn’t value what the belt did, why it was important, or what went into having someone diagnose the problem and perform the repair properly. This is probably because the person from her shop who was trying to sell the job didn’t help her understand or build value into the job. They might not have been confident in their value or what they bring to the table, or they may not have understood how to communicate that value to their client. They were likely untrained and didn’t understand the value themselves.

Perhaps if the shop had trained their staff to build and communicate value, she and I would never have had that conversation and might still be talking.  

Build Confidence Through Systems

Training yourself and your staff on the business as a financial model and determining what you believe to be a fair profit, then creating estimating and pricing processes that are managed and followed will improve your confidence in your pricing. Listening to those few people who do not understand your value and believe that they should get your product cheap will reduce your confidence. Unfortunately, we often listen only to the few people who criticize and devalue us instead of the clients and people in our lives who understand our value.  

Picking and choosing what information to keep in your brain can make a big difference in your confidence: the few vehicles that fought us, the times when we struggled to deliver a vehicle repaired and on time, the few people who tried to get their work for less and didn’t value our product, the times when our technicians didn’t deliver a proper diagnosis or repair versus the great clients we have who value what we do for them, the many times we fixed vehicles properly and delivered them on time, and the thousands of vehicles we keep on the road operating properly. You choose what you think about and what you believe.

Creating realistic expectations for ourselves, our staff, and our clients and understanding why we need to have the pricing we do and what it does for us will strengthen our confidence and, in turn, increase sales and satisfaction.
It is difficult to have confidence in your people and your product when you cannot rely on the team to do their jobs properly in a timely fashion. Missed deadlines, vehicles that are not inspected or diagnosed properly the first time, poor communication and a lack of effective systems lead to inconsistent results and erode trust.

The service advisor position is a difficult position on the best day, and an impossible one on the worst days, but I have always found it to be challenging and rewarding. 

Training Creates Confidence

What creates confidence is training, knowledge, and positive experiences. What destroys confidence is ignorance and bad experiences, and there are a lot of confidence-destroying experiences in the life of a service advisor. If you do a good job creating and selling value for your clients, they will buy about 60% of what you offer them, which means that you will hear “no” about 40% of the time. If you bring in the wrong clients with discounts and bait-and-switch tactics, your decline rates will go up and you will be disappointed more often, giving you even more reasons to doubt your product, pricing, and processes. If you have untrained people who cannot or will not do their jobs properly or do not understand what their jobs are, your team’s performance will suffer. 

Having written, tested, and successful processes around sales, scheduling, vehicle inspections and diagnostics, estimating (properly communicating information between the tech, service advisor, and client) and verifying the work is done correctly (quality control) will increase confidence and improve sales. Processes deliver a more consistent product, profit, and client experience.

Creating a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) that helps the client understand what you do, why you do it, and how they benefit from it, and using it in your sales process answers customers’ questions before they have them and increases sales and customer satisfaction. Being knowledgeable and prepared will lead to better experiences, which reinforces confidence.

Service advisors in the automotive service industry must deal with objections daily. Making a list of the most common objections and thoughtfully applying your USP to them to create great answers before the questions are asked again, then practicing those answers so that you can use them effectively will increase your confidence and your sales.

Put Confidence First

Several years ago, I wanted to create an exceptional sales training program for service advisors and invited three of the most successful and knowledgeable sales trainers in the industry to determine what we should teach and how we should teach it. We spent the first day discussing topics that we felt were necessary for a service advisor to learn to be the most successful. At the end of a long day of arguments and discussions, we had a list of more than 100 concepts such as: 

•    Building value
•    Handling angry clients
•    Understanding profit and margins
•    The psychology behind selling
•    Stinking thinking
•    Answering and owning the phones
•    Stacking the deck
•    Becoming the professional walk-around management
•    Controlling workflow and productivity
•    Selling diagnostics
•    Building your USP
•    Creating confidence

We spent the next two days arguing about what needed to be taught first, and that kept changing. Ultimately, we decided that those things that improved the service advisor’s confidence in product, people, and price would make the most difference and should be taught first.

Most people cannot sell what they do not believe in. That belief comes from knowledge, training, and experience—and it shows in every customer interaction.