In a time of declining vehicle sales where there’s a growing need to identify new profit centers in the dealership, it’s worth taking a fresh look at your operation to see if you’re maximizing customer wallet share on every single transaction.

Cost-saving with automation and streamlined, digitized processes is great and increasingly necessary, but there are actual sales opportunities attached to every customer that are, sadly, usually overlooked.

I’m talking, of course, about accessories.

Leading automotive retailers are using accessories to get to the top and stay there. Indeed, I’ve repeatedly found that many of the top-performing dealers have a firm commitment to seeing accessories sales done right.

But, what does that mean?

The State of the Accessories Market

Dealers’ slice of the accessories pie is embarrassingly minuscule – a mere 10 percent of a $41 billion market. It’s become the industry’s best-kept secret that one of the most significant untapped profit centers in the dealership is accessories.

Now, when it comes to dealers putting a greater emphasis on accessories, there are widespread negative perceptions that discourage dealers from taking on this challenge. Here are a few I’ve run across again and again:

• There’s no margin in original equipment manufacturer (OEM) sales.
• Selling accessories for every vehicle is too difficult, especially when pre-loading seems to work for me.
• Accessories sales take away from parts sales – or from F&I profit.

Each of these perceptions is based on an outdated view of accessories sales. When dealers get accessories sales right, profit margins routinely approach 50 percent.

Getting there takes the right technique and technology for selling accessories, with the technology driving a sales presentation technique that engages customers and elicits an emotional response.

Plus, it takes a commitment to streamline the process, make the most of technology and remove many of the complications dealers faced before.

Even with the right technology and commitment to success in place, there’s one additional element of accessories selling that’s critical to driving the whole process: the presence of an “accessories manager.”

The Manager

What dealers are missing when trying to sell accessories is what I refer to as the accessories manager: an individual in your dealership whom you and your management team handpick to head up the management and execution of your accessories sales strategy.

This person is able and willing to take the lead on accessories selling technology, treating training in that technology as equally essential to training in vehicle sales, achieved through regular engagement with both the sales staff and senior management.

The accessories manager is, ideally, someone who’s already a go-getter in the dealership – someone who has successfully implemented an initiative the dealer took to bring about a change. Such a manager can drive additional revenue and profits by incorporating accessories into your existing staff’s daily work.

Identifying and empowering a manager is critical to accessories selling success for a few reasons:

• It eliminates the overall disruption and cost that can come when a process is added without proper logistical planning.
• It precisely defines what resources are devoted to running your accessories technology so the dealership can better measure return on investment (ROI).
• It gives the dealer’s accessories selling efforts the efficiency and attention they need to be fully effective.
• It helps generate buy-in from the dealership personnel in all departments, and your outside vendors.

Dive into Accessories Selling

Accepting a status quo of 10 percent of the overall accessories market is not a sustainable path forward for dealers. As vehicle sales flatten, dealers are on the lookout for new or underperforming profit centers in the dealership, and accessories might be the single most underutilized of them all.

Don’t settle for just being the dealer where you buy and service a car; but, also the dealer where you customize the car, keep it unique, and accommodate all of your customers’ needs!

It’s time to make the investment in accessories technology that engages the customer and streamlines the sales process. It’s time to get serious about following through on such investments six, 12, 36, and even 60 months down the road.

Find the right accessories technology. Next, identify and empower a go-getter as the accessories manager in your dealership. Once you do, you’ll see what a fully realized accessories strategy can do for you, your customers, and your dealership’s bottom line.

About the Author

Joe Witt is the Vendor Relations Business Manager for AddOnAuto at Reynolds and Reynolds. He started working in dealership sales in 2005 as an accessories specialist before moving into various management roles. Joe started as an implementation consultant with the AddOnAuto team in 2011. He spends much of his time building relationships with suppliers, restylers, and manufacturers to better the processes and products offered to dealerships through AddOnAuto and Reynolds and Reynolds.