Tag: PEN

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.

Why I Freelance

Recently, Linked-In reminded me that I have been an independent consultant for fifteen years.  Thanks to all who called and wrote with congratulations.  In fact, I have been either consulting, at a startup (or consulting for a startup) since business school.

I used “freelance” in the title because this word is in need of some rehabilitation.  There was a bitter post on Linked-In about how “freelance photographer” means “unemployed guy with a camera.”  I get that all the time.  I spoke with a recruiter recently who was startled to learn this is really what I do, and not just a placeholder on my resume.

According to McKinsey, there are 49 million of us “free agents,” equal in number to those who do it out of necessity.

I started consulting for a Big Six firm, back when there were six, and I noticed that our projects were always a big deal for the client staff.  They felt lucky to be on the client’s once-in-a-lifetime project.  We consultants, meanwhile, were continuously assigned to the good projects, client after client.  It becomes addictive.

If I were recruiting here, I would recount some groovy projects and then pitch the glamour and excitement – but I have a much more practical argument.  When you work for a long time at one company, you accrue specific knowledge about its organization, procedures, and history.  If you ever leave that company, the value of this knowledge falls to zero.

I was engaged by GMAC just before the crash.  Suddenly, my entire department was shuttered – desks empty, lights out.  It was a disaster for the faithful, lifetime employees.  Some were out of work for a year.  The consultants, however, rapidly found new jobs.

Job security no longer exists, and the good wages, generous benefits and secure retirement that used to be guaranteed with full-time employment are in decline or have disappeared – Tom Peters

It is a little scary not knowing where I’ll be working next year.  I won’t deny that.  My point about GMAC is that the people who thought they had job security were mistaken.  They were the ones most at risk.

Tom Peters writes that job security does not come from allegiance to your company.  It comes from having skills and accomplishments, plus a network of people who know about your skills and accomplishments.  This is where the exciting projects come in.  When I call around looking for work, I want people to recognize me as “the guy who created Provider Exchange Network,” or something like that.

Changing jobs enhances your value by exposing you to new people, technology, and business models.  This has certainly been true for me.  F&I is a small community, but it includes dealer groups, software companies, and finance sources.  This is great because it allows me to move around without violating any non-competes.

This article in Harvard Business Review echoes Peters’ observation about job security.  The author is a B-school prof, who writes that the gig economy is the future.  Focus on finding work, she says, not a job. I am lucky that this attitude (and related skills) were drilled into me at Coopers.   In case you’re inspired to quit your day job, I’ll follow up with a “how to” article.

Stop Using Combo Products

I have had a hand in designing a few menu systems over the years, and I have always disliked combo products.  You know what I mean: the VSC form, plus maintenance and PDR, on which Marketing has found an extra square inch to offer road hazard.

Menu people hate combo products because the whole point of menu selling is for the F&I Manager to combine products into packages, not the combinations defined by the provider’s form.  What if she wants to sell the factory’s VSC, but her own choice of ancillary products?

One cavil I sometimes hear is the definition of “a product,” but this is straightforward.  If it can be sold separately, like key protection, then it’s a product.  If it always rides on another contract, like car rental, then it’s not.

What I try to tell my menu clients (and reinforce with my API clients) is this:

  • The unit of work for presentation is the product
  • The unit of work for contracting is the form

The correct data structure thus has discrete products at the top level, then coverages with their rates, and form codes at the bottom.  Obviously, you can have different forms based on coverage, and you can have the same form for multiple products.  Then, in the contracting phase, you collect the products onto the forms as indicated.

Combo Products

Combo products persist because providers legitimately want to reduce the number of forms they manage.  The two-phase approach solves this.  Also, there are old-timers who design products based on the form.  I have even seen F&I shops where the completed contract form is used as a selling tool.

The package discount is the only serious challenge to the menu system.  A workaround here is to include a phantom product with no display and a negative price – although that may be as much work as developing an explicit feature.  Of course, if the manager chooses to discount a package other than one subsidized by a provider, then that discount is her responsibility.

I’ll close with an exception to the rule or, rather, a refinement.  Menu systems are compromised when we mistake forms for products.  On the other hand, there is a practical limit (six) to the number of products offered on a menu.  So, I can see the logic in a product that combines dent, coatings, windshield, and road hazard – especially PDR and windshield, if you think about how the services are delivered.

In this case, we are not merely combining products based on a form.  These products hang together in the same semantic class, appearance protection, and may indeed use separate forms.

Farewell to PEN

Clients are often surprised when I say, “my work here is finished.”  The consultant’s handbook says you should hang around until they’re sick and tired of you.  I feel it is better, when retained for a specific task – like a startup – to do the job in good style and then move on.

So it is with Provider Exchange Network.  The business model is established, the software is up and patented, and the staff are fluent in their new roles.  It has been my pleasure to work with the talented people at PEN, and I wish them all the best.