When we firehose customers with features, we don’t add value, we average it down.
In this short solo episode, I break down the Dilution Effect (hat-tip to Cialdini) and show how “less but better” wins car deals.
I unpack real-world examples, from the broken dinner-set paradox to why listing every safety acronym backfires, and turn them into practical word-tracks you can use today.
You’ll hear how to find a buyer’s 3-4 hot buttons, present to value (not volume), and stop feature-dumping on walk-arounds, videos, and emails.
If you sell cars, manage a team, or record product videos, I really recommend giving this a listen before your next presentation.
About Symco Training:
Symco Training was founded in 2000 by Simon Bowkett and it was his belief that the business had to offer its clients something different. That difference was clear to Simon from his days in the dealership when he experienced many sales trainers who had all the answers, but were unable, unwilling or both to actually show the delegate how they could be implemented. It remains the ethos of the business today. You see, Symco only employ trainers that are committed to delivering not only in spiring and insightful training, but are equally as happy to demonstrate these skills and techniques with real customers in your own showroom. We believe in order for sales training to be effective and in Simon’s words ‘real world’, it needs to be tried and tested in the only place it matters the showroom floor. There is no room for theory when your goals are for your team to sell more cars, hours or parts and retain more profit. In dealerships around the world the focus applied by many of the sales executives is to try and sell a deal. Symco specialise in getting your teams to focus on selling themselves, the product and then supporting this with the deal.
To find out more visitwww.symcotraining.co.uk
Time, welcome to the Selling and the Motor Trade podcast in Association of Car Without. The online car-changing destination. Together we share tips and ideas on how to sell more cars, improve your service department, and generally put more profit into your department, dealership or dealer group. I'm your host, Simon Bowkett, or some of you might already know me as Skippy. First thing, I just want to say thank you for taking the time to listen to this podcast. Hi, and welcome to another episode of Selling and the Motor Trade. You've heard the phrase you've thought, less is often more. And you know what, that is so true when it comes to the sales process and presenting a car.
I think it's so true when it comes to the videos that we send through to customs. It's so true when we're presenting a car. So often, and you know the phrase, it's called a feature dump, and we just go on and go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang at the customer. It sounds logical. If we tell the customer more and more things about the car, we're going to build up that value. In fact, we say that sometimes. Every pound of discount is a bit of value that you haven't built. Okay? I fundamentally buy that and I get that. We need to make sure we do build value, but actually the right type of value. Because actually, if you do too much, it'll definitely detract from it.
Let me give you an example from some people are a lot smarter than me. Let's say you're going to go and buy a high-end dinner set. You know, on the potteries, they have these beautiful bone china, porcelain dinner sets. And you see advertised at John Lewis, Harvey Norman, somewhere, some sort of shop there that you've got this 24-piece dinner set for sale. That's the one I want to go and have a look at it. So you turn up and you have a look in those eight dinner plates, there's eight bowls, and there's eight dessert plates. I just want to think now, what would you pay for that? Just think about the number in your head.
Okay? You got the number? Now, of course, that number is going to be completely different for every different person, because we all see different value in what that dinner set is worth. I asked my boys, what's the, would you pay for that? It's not a lot because they normally eat things wrapped in paper from the drive-through. Okay? Now, my wife, she quite likes bone china, stuff like that. She might have said a lot more. Okay? But it doesn't matter. You got your number. You know what it is? Think about that number. But then when you turn up to that shop, and you've got that 24-piece set and you can pay for what you said you're going to pay for it.
But also, there's another 40-piece set there. Now, what it has is it's got eight plates, it's got the eight bowls, it's got the eight dessert plates. But it's also got eight cups, but two of them are broken. You can only use the six of them. It's got eight sauces, but seven of the sauces are broken. What would you pay for that dinner set? I don't know if you're like me, but actually lots of people say they'd probably pay less. In fact, you know, on average, that high-end dinner set, when we ask that question, what's people say about 300 pounds for the high-end set? When it comes to the one that's broken, actually it comes right back down to all 170, 180, or no, I'd only pay 100 for it.
And of course, there's lots of good arguments. If seven of them are broken, what else is broken that's clearly been broken and all that. But you know, if they're all perfect in every way, still people will often pay more for the set, they're actually getting the same amount of stuff anyway. The smart people say this is called the dilution effect. And the same thing happens when we're selling stuff. You've got all the good arguments there. But if you throw in some weaker arguments, the weaker arguments start diluting your strong points. It doesn't add the averages. Well, here's another example. Let's say you've got Peter. So Peter is at university and he studies, I don't know, 30 hours a week outside of class.
Okay. You then got Paul, he does his normal class, and he studies 30 hours a week outside of class. But Paul also has a girlfriend. He actually plays golf twice a week. Okay. He actually goes to the bar once a week, just have a drink, just unwind. Okay. Between the two, who do most people say are probably going to get a higher grades at university? You know, when studies again and again, they often say it's the first guy. We only have the same information. They're studying both 30 hours a week outside of class. But all that extra information, it's almost too much information. And we start thinking, well, if he goes and has a drink once a week, he plays golf.
If you want to dedicate on golf, it's got a girlfriend. Well, they take up lots of time. I'm not sure. The extra information hasn't added to our thought process on what's who's going to have the highest result. It actually, it averages. So this is what I want you to think. And the people have been on our sales training programs. We talk about the four fundamentals of how wide people buy things. We have comparison, value, scarcity, and urgency. And value, we say there's a set of scales where one side, we've got the product or the service. And the other side, we've got the amount of money someone would be happy to spend on it. Okay. So we'll take a watch, a diamond, a car, a service, contract, whatever it is.
Okay. That was selling a paint and fabric protection. Once I have the product, the other side, we've got the amount of money people are willing to spend on it. That one's very simple. All we need to do is make sure the product or the service outweighs the money. Otherwise, people aren't going to buy. So actually with that, you might think, well, actually, let's just throw lots more on the way to the product side. And it sounds logical. But when you think about this, if we have that same set of scales, okay, and one side, you've got all the strong arguments for buying it. And I'm just going to take the mobile phone industry. You want to buy a new phone.
You've got the latest iPhone or the Samsung. And you've got the strong reasons for buying that phone. Let's take an iPhone. I'm one of those iPhone users. Don't hate me or use Samsung Android people. Okay. Buy my phone a new phone. Strong arguments are, I now how to use the iPhone on day one. Don't have to learn a new operating system. Okay. It's got bigger storage. We do lots of video, as you can imagine. And my phone is full all the time there. So got high storage there. So that's really good. It's got the best camera front and back because sometimes we do recording and dealerships and the camera on those iPhone is better than sometimes the studio cameras we started off with all those years ago.
There's three or four hot buttons why I'd go for that iPhone. You've got that as your strong arguments on one side of those scales. If you're driving, I want you to imagine the scales, those strong arguments have gone down. But then on the other side, we've got all the same strong arguments. Okay. Strong arguments for me operating system. I know how to use great camera and storage. But then we add into it, or also you've got this measuring device where you can actually put it on a desk at one place, then the other place, I'll measure how far it is. Okay. Oh, it's also got something else where it's going to vibrate. Okay. It's also got, I don't know, lots of different weaker arguments that I don't care about.
Okay. It actually has last on the front and the back. Okay. It actually has a camera on the front as well as the back. So I can do selfies, which I never ever do. Okay. What happens is you would think that the strong arguments and the weaker arguments are added together. They're not the average out. I'll send that again. The stronger arguments and the weaker arguments for going ahead with a specific product or a proposal, average out. So now if you've got those scales I was talking about, one side you just got the strong arguments. It carries more weight. It carries more influence than the other side where you've got those strong arguments and all the weak arguments.
Because it just dilutes. It's called the dilution effects. That's why we should not overkill. That's why we shouldn't be talking about Mr. Boyracer, who's not thinking about an accident, that this got an NCAP5 safety rating. And it's got the isofex child seats. That's why we shouldn't be talking about the lovely lady who's buying a Tesla, how you can put the fireplace on in the middle of the screen. And he comes out and you have a romantic evening on the side of the road where she'll never want to do that. It actually dilutes the argument. And the way it was explained to me, some very, very smart people. And by the way, please, this is all in the book called Influence by Professor Robert Chaldini.
There's a great book there. He talks about the power of this, the dilution effect. Now this one here, if you look in America at buying any sort of drug, and if you've been out there, you know, late night TV, you're jet lag, there's nothing you can watch on TV. I find a sports channel or something like that, something I can understand. Reminds me of a razor light song. There's nothing on the TV I can understand. That's on. Anyway, back to the story. And I'll turn around and say, okay, you've got this issue. And there's some sort of scene as this man has this issue, all his life. Okay, it's back pain, it's headaches, it's the sore elbow, it's the tenor's elbow that can't sleep at night, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
And then because of FDA, the regulations out there, they have to go through all of the possible symptoms, heart attack and stroke and death and blah, blah, blah. And they often end up with something minor and itchy feet. A couple of things happen. Once they go through all of those things that might happen, all the symptoms, and they have to go through every symptom by law. If they finished on, or by the way, you might have a heart attack and death, you know what, that sore elbow, I think I'll put up with it. You know where I actually got an ache in my back? I think I'll put up with it, okay? Because the last thing left in the customer's subconscious mind, heart attack, stroke, death.
But what they do is, I want you to listen next time. You hear what I think. They'll go through, symptoms might go heart attack, stroke, death, itchy feet, sweating in the night, okay? Uncomfortable. They add all of those possible side effects in. And they end up with sweating at night, itchy feet, okay? You know what, I might put up with those things because they're dilutes, absolutely everything out there. So guys, I want you to think about this. When you present the car, think about a great salesperson in a phone shop. They don't go through every single thing they can do. This is so important because the amount of technology that's in a modern car, okay?
And if you're harping on about the heads up display, because you love it, and by the way, I personally love a heads up display. For my work car, I wouldn't buy a car without heads up display. But actually, if you harped on to my wife about the advantage of the heads up display, not only is it going to fall on death ears, but you know what, it's going to have a reverse effect. It's the dilution effect of what that's going to do. And I want you to remember, quality wins over quantity every time when you're trying to build value. Let's get it into our world. That's why when a customer comes in and looks at a car, they've done so much research before they've walked in, phoned in, and emailed.
Guys, we need to be going back into it saying, hey, Mr. and Mrs. customer, there's three or four different models that Q4, which one you've been researching online? Ah, it's the bling bling model. Great. What's about the bling bling model that put it on your shopping list? And when people tell you whatever it is, the Paneract roof on it, okay, the full leather interior, the heated and cooling seats on it, the heated steering wheel, that's their hot buttons, that's something they see value in. And that's something that they see value in. That's the quality of the argument. Stick to and focus on those. Now, we're not saying don't add something else in that might wow them, but you better make sure it does.
Because if it's trivial, if it's something that they don't really care about, it's going to weaken the value proposed for your building. Guys, that about does it for now. I just want you to think about it. This is why we don't feature dumped. This is why we need to qualify what the customer's looking for, so we can present the right feature to the right customer at the right time. That just leaves me to say that all details of this episode and other episodes on the selling in the Motor Trade can be found on our website, simcotraining.co.uk. Go there to get a copy of our book, Words That Sell Cars. Go there to sign up to a free trial of our sales fitness online sales training program.
Easiest way to get hold of me is Simon Bowkett, through LinkedIn. Thank you.
