Back to school: How F&I training is changing at dealerships

With the COVID-19 pandemic pushing consumers to an omnichannel retail and finance experience, and finance and insurance (F&I) training programs, too, are changing their pedagogical approach as dealerships begin to blur the lines between sales and the F&I office and transact with customers digitally to keep up with changing consumer preferences. F&I manager roles are highly sought after at dealerships, largely due to lucrative compensation and the limited number of positions, Arzu Algan , chief financial officer and dean of education at Automotive Dealership Institute (ADI), told Auto Finance News , noting that the average annual salary for F&I managers lands around $150,000, but “can be much more than that.” ADI, founded in 2004, is a licensed post-secondary school in Arizona offering automotive finance manager training through eight to nine, four-week courses per year. In fact, ADI has seen an increase in enrollments in Q1 as F&I profits at dealerships soar amid tight inventory and pent-up demand, Algan said. “During the pandemic, our applications and enrollment stayed steady,” she said. “With that being said, we’re seeing an increase [in enrollments]. A lot of dealerships are now probably looking to hire more people, too, because they did scale back quite a bit [during the pandemic]. Even with some of the inventory challenges, there’s still a need for really qualified, talented sales managers.” ‘One-touch process,’ from sales through finance Yet, there is a growing trend at dealerships for a “one-touch process” that is blurring the lines traditionally found between sales associates and the F&I office, Marie Knight , head of strategic services for direct markets and programs at insurance company Zurich North America , told AFN . Zurich works with “several thousand” dealerships, provides a suite of F&I products, and also insures dealerships for property and casualty. “We've also seen a number of dealerships that are sort of migrating toward a one-touch process where it's an individual sales consultant who works with the customer from vehicle selection all the way through finalizing the paperwork,” Knight said. “We have helped dealers through that conversion, and help to train all of their sales consultants so that they can do the entire process from start to finish.” Ally Financial , which provides F&I training to its more than 14,000 dealer partners, is also seeing more dealerships move away from traditional F&I departments, Bill Stoothoff , senior director of insurance sales and development at the lender, told AFN . “One thing becoming fairly popular is some dealers are getting away from F&I departments and are having their salespeople — like in the old days — handle it,” Stoothoff said. “They’ll have the salesperson meet and greet the customer and take them all the way through [the purchasing] process to delivery with no F&I.” Dealers are requesting more F&I training for their sales associates and the one-touch process, Stoothoff said, noting that those requests are still in the minority. “It’s still in the early stages of a trend, but we’re getting more [requests] than we’ve seen in the past to the point where I have a couple specialists [on the team] that were in the industry who I hired specifically for that skill set,” Stoothoff said. Digital learning for a remote sales process The beginning of the pandemic also spurred digital training options and a shift in curriculum to teach dealers how to sell F&I products to consumers remotely, two trends that are likely to stick around for the long term. ADI, for one, in June returned to in-person classes after two years of virtual instruction, Algan said. “We see a number of students who still would rather learn in class, so we anticipate we will have a hybrid approach,” Algan said. “Some [students] want to do live virtual [training] and will dial into class that way. Some will be here physically. So it’s the best of both worlds, depending on the student’s circumstances.” Zurich also ramped up its digital training options at the onset of the pandemic, with a focus on the “virtual sell,” or selling F&I products to consumers who are not physically present in the F&I office, Knight said. “ Certainly with the pandemic, as there was a shift to doing more virtual training, we escalated our virtual training offerings, and then that also kind of led to the evolution of customers wanting to do more of their shopping online, so we also ramped up our training around virtual sell,” Knight said. “We held training classes specifically for F&I managers to learn how to engage with a customer online and how to still deliver a professional, non-confrontational and complete presentation to them without having that in-person interaction,” she said. Ally Financial, too, is offering more virtual training that harnesses the flexibility of the omnichannel sales and financing experience that consumers now demand, Stoothoff said. “The one thing we did at Ally was we took at all the training that you would normally do in person and moved it to virtual. And we did that within about 60 days,” Stoothoff said. “Everything we could offer, we also offered in a virtual environment. And then to help the dealers learn the virtual world we built a[n] 'adaptable sales process,’” he said. That adaptable sales process educates dealers on how to meet consumers where they are, incorporating both brick-and-mortar and digital channels for F&I product penetration, Stoothoff said. “We looked at [the trend] and we said the brick-and-mortar world is not going away. But the virtual world needs to be embraced more,” he said. “So how do we teach the dealer to be able to let the consumer buy the way they want to buy, because … consumers want to be in control.” Simply put, the adaptable sales process allows the dealership or consumer to shift from digital to brick-and-mortar — or vice versa — throughout the entire purchasing process, offering flexibility in how F&I products are presented to consumers. “We’ve had more requests [from dealers] for the adaptable sales process — even in the last 30 days — than ever before. Dealers are embracing digital and trying to figure it out,” Stoothoff said. --Additional reporting by Amanda Harris and Whitney McDonald Auto Finance Summit, the premier industry event for auto lending and leasing , returns October 26-28 at the Wynn Las Vegas. To learn more about the 2022 event and register, visit www.AutoFinanceSummit.com .

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