F&I Products – Virag Consulting

Agent Support for Menu Selling

As a software guy, I am always surprised to find F&I trainers doing generic menu training without attention to the specific menu system used in the dealership. There is some generic advice, which I covered in Best Practices for Menu Selling, but then your client’s next question is going to be: “How do I do that on Darwin?” Or Maxim. Or Tekion.

Controlling the menu means you control what products are on it, and how they’re presented.

Familiarity with the given menu system is even more important when you represent a provider or agent. Now, you’re not only training how to sell product, but to sell your product. As I told my boss at Safe-Guard, “you can put a gun to the guy’s head but if your product isn’t on the menu, he’s not selling it.”

And we have seen exactly this. “We don’t sell your coverage because it’s a lease deal.” Because it’s preowned. Because it’s highline. By “we,” I mean Safe-Guard’s ace menu trainer, Michele McMinn, and the menu support team we put together. Double your penetration with this one weird trick…

The easiest way to do this is to pay for the dealer’s menu system. Then, your trainers only have to be experts in one system, and you have a hotline to their tech support department.

Controlling the menu means you control what products are on it, and how they’re presented. If your dealer base is too diverse for that, then you will have to develop F&I trainers who are expert in all of them.

Setting Up the Menu Support Team

You also have to make sure your products are compatible with certain standards used by PEN and the menu-system community. If this is news to you, you’re not alone. Even in the year 2025, I still find providers and agents who think their product is a piece of paper.

Just because the art department added a checkbox for “Rebate” or “Sagittarius,” doesn’t mean that checkbox is going anywhere unless you know a little something about the PEN interface standards. Here’s what a good menu support team looks like:

Trainers who are rated on more than one menu system, in addition to generic F&I training.
Dedicated support, so the trainers can reach someone while they’re in the dealership. This is key. The menu support desk also looks for recurring issues and develops a knowledge base.
Tech people who can run tools like Postman and XML Spy and, ideally, get involved with coding on your menu-system API (the interface that PEN uses).

At Safe-Guard, I went so far as to hire a Product Manager to own the API and to liaise with PEN and the menu-system community.

Designing menu-friendly products starts at the very beginning, when the coverage product manager meets with my product manager. Let’s say you want to offer Tire, Key, and Dent on the same form. Do you want all seven possible combinations? What about the “cosmetic” upcharge?

It’s not enough to have the right boxes on the form. You need to think about how the product will flow through PEN, and how it will look on Darwin. And Maxim. And Tekion.

It’s not enough to have the right boxes on the form. You need to think about how it will look on Darwin.

You can see how this is a team effort. If your product is making the menu choke, support needs to run that issue back to the programmers. If your trainer isn’t rated on that menu, she shouldn’t be in that store.

By the way, you should keep track of which DMS, which menu, and which sales process is used in each store. Keep track of those, along with the training sessions, after-action reports, and your (rapidly improving) penetration scores.

When Michele and I started playing this game at a high level, we discovered we were competing with JM&A. That was it. Everyone else was unarmed.

Biweekly Payment Magic

A while back, I did some foundational work for a leading biweekly payment service. That is, the math part, which I will reprise here. Biweekly works best in a climate of high interest rates and, unfortunately, soon after this project, the Federal Reserve dropped their reference rate to zero. The Fed has not been persistently above 2% until recently, and biweekly is once again looking good.

The featured chart shows a scenario first constructed by my erstwhile partner Phil Battista. I call it the “magic trick” because the customer in this scenario has financed an extra $3,250 with no change to the term, APR, or payment. Before presenting the trick, here are some basics about biweekly.

Biweekly Payment Plan Basics

In Canada, the banks offer loans with native biweekly payment schedules, and dealers feature them in their advertising. Here in the States, you have to use a service. The service collects payments biweekly via direct debit and manages the lender to accelerate the amortization.

Here is an example. According to recent Cox data, the average price of a new car is now above $49,500 with an APR of 7.0% and a 72-month term. By the way, this survey does not include luxury brands, and some people are financing up to 84 months.

Below, I have modeled this “average” loan showing monthly versus biweekly payment schedules. This is showing the amortization only, omitting whatever fees the biweekly service may charge. You can see that the loan is paid off seven months early.

If you’re using longer terms to fit customers into payments, biweekly will shorten the trade cycle a bit. Also, credit-challenged buyers may be better off with direct debit synched to their paychecks.

Nostalgia Alert: coding for the U.S. Equity project was originally done in C# by my son, Paul, who would have been around fourteen at the time. We were making an OO model to include all loan and lease instruments as subclasses. Coding for this article was done by me, in Python, which is 10X easier.

The Magic Trick

If you compare the two charts above, you can see graphically how Phil’s trick works. Instead of starting your biweekly loan at the same amount and having it end earlier, you start it higher and aim to end on the same date.

The trick works because half the monthly payment is higher than a native biweekly payment would be – by $33 in this example. The customer makes the equivalent of thirteen monthly payments per year, and the bank loses a little bit of interest income. Here are the steps:

Increase the amount financed, which will increase the monthly payment.
Increase the term until the monthly payment comes back down to where it was.
Use the biweekly program to bring the term back down to where it was.

Congratulations, you can now finance more product with the same monthly payment. I covered the concept for menu systems in Six Month Term Bump. To do goal seeking, as I’ve shown here, you will need some Python (or a precocious teenager).

Taxonomy of D2C Providers

PayLink was the finance source we chose for Safe-Guard’s D2C program, and now they have launched their own D2C program, Olive. This looks like a strong program, and I’m flattered they’ve kept many features from my blueprint. I especially like name, which is a play on “all of” coverage.

“We estimate the market size of the ‘sweet spot’ for post-OEM warranty VSC sales will continue to grow to 109 million vehicles by 2024”

This is a $260 billion market. Colonnade estimates that the “sweet spot” of vehicles less than 11 years old but past their OEM warranty is 87 million units, and growing. That’s not to mention the 40 million sold each year without a service contract, at franchise and independent dealers. I wrote about the different segments and how to value them in The Case for D2C.

Olive is positioned to address both segments, by partnering with automakers. They claim two of the global top five. I have reason to believe these are Volkswagen and Nissan, but I couldn’t find a source. Like the original, Olive uses digital marketing and online origination through a consumer facing mobile-responsive (but not mobile-first) platform.

Not one to believe in coincidence, I reckoned that maybe there is only one winning formula, and this is it. That would be bad news for APC, US Direct, Dialog Direct, Endurance, Infinite, Forever, Car Shield, Car Chex, Delta, Omega, and Concord.

If you are a data-science inclined tech strategy consultant, you might think of this as a seven-dimensional feature space

I taxonomized a bit in my first post on the topic, Direct to Consumer VSC Sales, and today we will work out a generalized framework. This means mixing apples and oranges. Many of the competitors I studied are “pure play” B2C.

Business to consumer (B2C) is everyday marketing, with branding, advertising, and SEO. Direct to consumer (D2C) means that you were marketing through a channel, and now you’re going direct. It also means that you have a channel conflict to manage. Think of an auto finance company that does both direct and indirect lending.

My research found seven features that characterize a consumer-facing VSC vendor. You can think of these as design choices for a new entrant:

1. Administrator
2. Payment plan
3. Touch points
4. Lead source
5. Marketing
6. Branding
7. Eligibility

Contract administrator – At Safe-Guard, obviously, we were the admin, although we branded the contract for various OEM clients. Endurance administers their own contract, and Forever Car has an exclusive partner. Most B2C vendors offer multiple contracts, with a variety of coverage choices. Tec Assured works for the dealer, offering whichever contract is sold in the dealership.

Payment plan – No one pays cash for a service contract. APC has its own finance arm, and Dialog Direct is part of Budco. The challenge here is the credit-card security (PCI) standards. See My Shift in the Call Center. Admins recognize the need for a subscription-based VSC but none has yet cracked the code (maybe JM&A). Bundling the contract with a payment plan achieves the same effect.

Touch points – In the earlier post, I described three points in the lifecycle which a vendor could target. This dovetails with the lead source, below. If the vendor is working with an OEM or a dealer, they can focus on new customers who didn’t buy in the dealership. They also have access to service dates. The pure B2C vendors generally aim for the warranty’s end, or they don’t choose a touchpoint at all.

Lead source – If the vendor is working with an OEM or a dealer (or any affinity group) then that’s a source of leads. This may also qualify as a “relationship” for spam-law purposes. Then, there are the usual sources, like vehicle registration lists. This brings us to marketing.

Marketing – The pure B2C vendors use pure pull marketing, developing a brand through SEO, social, and advertising. Who could forget the Car Shield ads featuring Ice-T? Old-school telemarketing and direct mail are still in use – love those postcards! As in the earlier post, my favorite approach is digital marketing, from a lead list, with call-center backup, driven by a CRM like Salesforce or Nutshell.

Branding – Branding is complicated in this space. The pure B2C vendors must develop an online brand, even though they sell multiple admins’ contracts. On the other hand, the affinity vendors may develop the client’s brand, or they may create a separate brand as a way of mitigating channel conflict.

Eligibility – Depending on the touch point, the easiest way to deal with pre-existing conditions is to sell while there’s still OEM warranty remaining, or enforce a thirty-day waiting period. Servicecontract.com uses an inspection at Pep Boys, and there are also mobile inspection services. Dealers using Tec Assured, obviously, have their own inspection capability.

Let’s demonstrate the framework with some worked examples:If you are a data-science inclined tech strategy consultant, you might think of this as a “feature space,” with each of the competitors staking out their territory on a seven-dimensional Go board. You might also want to boil it down to three dimensions so your client can understand the diagram.

In the earlier post, I cited two broad categories: those that work with the dealer as a partner and lead source, and those that are pure B2C consumer-facing. Here, I have shown a little more of the complexity. Affinity marketing doesn’t stop with dealers, and some D2C vendors are hybrids.

If you’re a new entrant, this framework can help you structure your go-to market strategy. If you’re an incumbent, you can play seven-D Go and outflank the competition.

My Shift in the Call Centre

A User Story

I enter the PCI compliant cleanroom at eleven o’clock with only a quinoa bowl from Freshie’s, and log in to Salesforce on my locked down computer. No cell phone, no scratch paper – and there are cameras. I wave to Peter on Camera #1 and start to dial. I do not have high hopes of reaching anyone in the middle of the workday. Amid all the DNRs, I may catch an inbound call off of our direct mail campaign, or someone out on the floor may catch it while I am dialing.

I log in to the dialer and it presents my first call. To save time, I hit “dial” and the phone rings while I paste the number into Salesforce and search for the Opportunity. Our Cisco dialer has a predictive mode, but I am not using it. For low volumes, preview dialing is supposed to be a better experience. The Ministry of Commerce prefers it, too. This number is guaranteed to be in Salesforce, with a prospect status, because the dialer file is generated nightly from the Opportunity table in Salesforce.

Bonjour et félicitations pour votre achat d’un véhicule Nissan

My first call goes to voicemail, which is par for the course. I recite the voicemail script, which I know by heart, and log the status in Salesforce. I really wish the dialer could leave that damned message on its own. I must recite it a hundred times a day. I will dial this number three times before dropping it from the file, spread over a two-week period, in case my prospect is away on vacation. Salesforce applies this business logic when it generates the dialer file.

For the next few hours, I get voicemail, no answer, not interested, and never call me again, which I duly note in Salesforce. This last category will be added to the phone number filtering logic, along with the Do Not Call list we purchased from the Ministry. I recognize the next number. Merde! It’s Dave Duncan. I try to cancel the call, but too late.

Dave proceeds to grill me about my affiliation with Nissan. No, I do not work for your local dealer. If I did, we would have an “existing business relationship” and we wouldn’t have to honor the DNC list. No, I do not work for the factory, its captive, nor the captive’s department of protection products – but we are the one and only factory authorized direct marketer of said products. That’s why it’s their number on your Caller ID.

By six o’clock, I have a live prospect. I alt-tab to my SPP system, which allows me to quote rates as well as set up a payment plan. I also have a custom Product object in Salesforce which connects to the rating API, but I find it easier to work in SPP because most customers will want a payment plan anyway. SPP calls the same API.

Things are going well until my prospect insists upon seeing the contract. I recite the talk track about cancellation and full refund within thirty days, but to no avail. I can also email a specimen contract and we can review it right now while he’s on the line (better odds of closing). I end up emailing a custom link, or PURL, from SPP that will open right to the rates and contract we discussed.

I flag this one for callback in a few days. It’s possible he will self-close on the SPP site, and then Salesforce will close the Opportunity automatically when it receives the file from SPP. In any case, I now have an email address we can use for the next digital marketing campaign. Speaking of digital marketing, whenever a voicemail greeting begins, “the Rogers mobile customer you’ve dialed,” I flag those as numbers to which the digital team can send text.

My next prospect, I actually close on the call. I am sitting in this fakakta cleanroom just in case I have to handle credit card information which, at last, I do. My guy buys a 72-month plan, which I set up for 24 monthly payments on SPP. Then, I download both contracts – the protection plan and the payment plan – and attach them to the Opportunity.

Salesforce won’t close the Opportunity, though, for another day until it receives confirmation from SPP that all is well with the credit card. If not, it will indicate that status, send an email, and I will have to call him back. Once the Opportunity does close, as a win, Salesforce Connector will pick it up and Marketing Cloud will include both contracts in a direct mail welcome package, ending the Customer Journey.

So, to summarize my workflow, I am manually pasting phone numbers into Salesforce and VINs into SPP. Salesforce and SPP are each capable of rating and contracting via API, and the customer can check out with or without my assistance. These tasks could be improved with some Computer Telephony Integration and an SPP interface. Instead of sending data directly to SPP, all I really need is the logic to generate that PURL and then Salesforce could either launch it for me or send it to the customer as needed.

At eight o’clock, the end of my shift, I doff my headset and run the job to generate tomorrow’s dialer file. This is basically a query against the Opportunity table, applying the “next date to call” rules. Without CTI, the best time to call is not supported. Jeanette will have to pick those out of the comments manually. Tomorrow is my day off.