I wonder how many of you pondered the challenge of promoting and selling Preventive Maintenance to your customers. Its quite amazing when you think about it, the way your customers can really dig their heels in. They just stubbornly resist your every good intention to part them from their money

Oops! Did I say that out loud?

I meant to say, your every good intention to protect their vehicle and help them avoid that nasty of nastiest like the 3 AM rain-soaked, dark and lonely, solo roadside picnic while awaiting the tow truck driver.

Because thats the reality of it. Preventive Maintenance is all about avoiding the inconvenience of waiting around. Of being stranded somewhere when youre on your way to somewhere else. Of losing time. Of missing something important. Of heavens forbid being late!

And thats the problem, they (the general public) dont quite get it well, to be fair, some do. But on the whole, the majority simply think youre out to part them from their hard earned money.

They dont seem to understand regularly inspecting a vehicle helps identify problems before they become serious, and to be fair, most of them dont really understand the true cost of vehicle ownership.

For example, most people are either paying a loan or a lease payment, and of course theyre paying insurance and gas. So the thought of paying an additional unnecessary preventive maintenance expense is somewhat irritating to them. They take the position If it aint broke, dont fix it!

I bet if you were to ask a dozen of your customers how much they should budget annually for vehicle maintenance repair theyd have no solid idea. The more confident ones might guess, but Im betting they dont really know what the industry standard amount is.

As you know, a suitable budget is about $100 a month. Usually consumed annually in two, maybe three visits to the shop. Thats an extra $1,200 to $1,500 your customer probably didnt bargain on so you can see why some are irritated at the idea.

Now I imagine some of you already have loyal customers who trust you implicitly thats fantastic. You may even have a stable customer base so that you seldom lose a customer, again thats great.

However, remember approximately 10% of the local population moves yearly. This is according to the post office, they know because of the change of address requests. So this means most of you face the real possibility that 1 in 10 of your customers will leave every year or so.

So new customers have to be acquired and then retrained to trust you all over again. They might have had bad experiences with lesser shops and on the whole youll need to carefully show them that you and your business are a solid, reputable and trustworthy place to take their vehicle.

Youll have to gauge the right time to promote the concept of preventive maintenance too. Youll need to educate and inform them about the true cost of vehicle ownership - if youre brave enough you can take this article, make copies, and mail it to all your new customers. (You have my permission to reprint this article)

Include your business card and a hand written note. The hand writing part is important because it shows you care enough about your customer to personally take the time. Tell them you thought theyd appreciate the enclosed article because its an unbiased 3rd party opinion on this subject. And ask them to call you if they have any questions.

If nothing else, you would have established a unique relationship with this new client because you would have let them see behind the curtain and this earns trust. Theyll read about the real costs and see the challenges you face and the reasons you try so hard to help them.

After all, Resistance Is Futile Their Vehicle Will Be Maintained