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Motorcycle Dealers: How to Sell Sport Bikes to Superheroes

Posted by Tom Lombardo | Wed, Aug 06, 2014 @ 10:00 AM

Increasing Motorcycle SalesHow many “Top 10 Sport Bike” lists do you think there are on the Internet? If you’re like most successful motorcycle shop owners and managers you sincerely don’t care because you have your own Top 10 list that will blow anyone else’s out of the water. (Only people who think like that succeed in this business.)

Whether you consider an Aprilia, Suzuki, Honda, Ducati, Harley or Triumph a “must have” riding experience you know that across the board 60% of your profits come from the equipment , financing and insurance you sell along with the bike, and since you also know that every “door swing” cost you $26 to $51 in marketing you have every intention of doing a lot better than just recouping that investment when you walk up to a young man drooling over one of your favorite bikes … or when you send a salesperson to walk up to him.

Motorcycle Power Sports News just published its latest figures, and again they confirm the stark reality that the most profitable dealers in the country end up paying their salespeople one third less per bike than the average shop. This means one thing and one thing only: their salespeople know what they’re doing and they close a lot of business, turning inventory over, and over, and over ...

How to Recognize an Immortal Superhero When You See One

With that in mind, let’s start with increasing sales by understanding the psychology of the young man you’re selling to. Five hundred years ago in A Winter’s Tale Shakespeare said that young men have “boiled brains” and are good for nothing but, among other things “wronging the ancientry, stealing and fighting…”

Increasing motorcycle gear salesSadly that’s still mostly true, but since you don’t sell equipment to aid him with any of that you need to look past the words to see what The Bard is saying about a young man’s buying psychology: your customer believes he’s impervious to harm, that he’s immortal, that he has superhero reaction times and that misfortune will never befall him because he’s inevitably headed for glory.

No sense arguing any of these points. Instead, show him body armor. You don’t need to bring this up, but you should know that in the U.S. between 2001 and 2008:

  • 34,000 motorcyclists were killed
  • 1,222,000 were treated for a non-fatal injury
  • Death and injury rates were highest among 20-24 year-olds, and second-highest among 25-29 year-olds

If you’re about to sell him a bike that can go 150 mph or more, he certainly needs the armor no matter what he believes, and since today’s technology comes straight out of a science fiction action movie it should be relatively easy to get his attention. The hard-shell chest plate that absorbs energy from a high-velocity impact into honeycomb aluminum composite competes for “coolest innovation” with flexible padding that turns rock hard the moment it hits something, although back protectors with nearly as many movable plates as there are vertebrae come in a close third.

Selling to Someone Who Is Immortal

Keep in mind that since you’re talking to someone who is immortal, the way the armor looks (more specifically, the way it looks to women) may be more important than its safety features. But if you and your salesperson can discuss products like these with the same passion and conviction you’d bring to defending your Top 10 list, you may be on your way to increasing your per-bike profits.

Motorcycle Body ArmorSegueing from armor to insurance might be good sales psychology, since to an immortal insurance also applies to the same realm of unlikely abstraction as does armor.

But paying for the bike is just as solidly real as the bike itself, so when it comes to payment the sales psychology shifts. First of all, your twenty-something customer is a Millennial, which means, among other things, that the behemoths of credit card industry have not yet figured out how to sell him a credit card. If he has one he probably refuses to carry a balance on it. He might want to talk to you about financing, but since Millennials confronted a Depression-scale Recession in their young adulthood, most of them are as financially conservative as their Depression-era great-grandparents.

How to Show Respect to a Twenty-Something Superhero

Best not to assume he wants financing – doing so might kill the entire sale. The more respectful your assumptions are, the better, so close the deal by assuming he’s in your shop because he saved all he needs to buy the bike he wants.

That’s probably the case, but if you’ve successfully up-sold him on armor and insurance and moved him a little past what he budgeted don’t just reach for his plastic because that might rub him the wrong way. He probably still won’t want to finance anything. Keep in mind that fiscally conservative people like to control their money, and the simple fact is that nearly 1 in 5 people – including Millennials – say they have increased their usage of checks, perhaps because of the control they guarantee.

So if he’s vacillating because he’s a little over budget, don’t let him leave – offer him a Multiple Check or hold check option where you can accept three to four checks and verify them today but deposit them over the course of the next thirty days.

How to Gain the Respect of a Twenty-Something Superhero

And while you’re finishing the insurance and extended warranty paperwork, tell him with that same Top 10 level of conviction that you take care of your business as carefully as he takes care of his money, so you’ll be there to service his bike for the long haul. In the same way his signature on his check guarantees his intent to pay, you make sure to verify every check you receive, and you only work with a processing company that guarantees every check it verifies to protect your cash flow.

And finally, just before you let him go, make sure you give him the bullet points that put the bike he bought into your Top 10 the first time you first laid eyes on it.

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Topics: Auto Dealerships

Written by Tom Lombardo