Financing for Small Car Dealerships Is a Big (Often Missed) Opportunity

If you run a small dealership, you know that it often takes a little more work to win over customers than it does for your larger rivals.

This is why financing for small car dealerships is vital to your success. Despite what some small-dealership owners think, you shouldn’t try operating without an F&I department.

3 Financing for Small Car Dealerships

Before you continue running your dealership without a financing and insurance department, consider these three important reasons F&I is essential to your success.

1. Customers Expect It

As a smaller dealership, your business will most likely have to contend with certain assumptions. Among them will be that you don’t offer as many options as your larger competitors.

While that may be true when it comes to how many different types of vehicles you have for sale, it shouldn’t be true when it comes to offering F&I. This is a service that customers have come to expect, even if they don’t always buy. Not having it available may make potential customers think you’re cutting corners.

2. F&I Can Actually Help Close More Sales

Financing for small car dealerships is about more than just adding to your profit margin. What a lot of new and/or small dealership owners miss is that F&I can help close more sales. This is especially true of used cars, which is an even bigger advantage for smaller dealerships that may not offer as many new vehicles.

It’s also a testimony to how valuable customers perceive F&I products to be for used vehicles, even those with high mileage. So, if you want to move more vehicles off your lot – including used cars – focus on what kinds of financing products you’re able to offer.

3. Better F&I Results in Better Customer Satisfaction

Similarly, it should come as no surprise that something that increases sales also makes customers a lot happier. F&I and customer satisfaction are strongly linked, which is one more reason financing for small car dealerships is so important. It’s one of the best opportunities they have to compete against larger dealerships, which often struggle with a reputation for treating people like numbers and not caring much about their level of satisfaction.

In the Internet Age, customer satisfaction stories aren’t just shared via word-of-mouth. This is also an important distinction to understand. Satisfaction is shared on sites like Facebook, Yelp, and even in Google result pages. So, online reviews are vital not only for earning new leads but simply improving your small dealership’s exposure, to begin with.

Financing for Small Car Dealerships Is Essential

No car dealership – regardless of its size – should lack a financing and insurance department. Fortunately, there’s no reason yours needs to. In fact, there’s no reason it can’t have an F&I department that rivals those of your larger competitors.