Top 10 Retail Exhaust Tips

As many in the industry are aware, the performance exhaust market is an ever-evolving one, going from the fast and furious tuner market, to modern domestic muscle, to trucks and SUVs–seemingly at the drop of a hat. Here are a few brand new retail tips provided by some of the industry’s front-line players to help you get the most out of every retail sales opportunity.

1. Use POS

Performance exhaust manufacturers are among the most active product suppliers out there when it comes to building customer knowledge. With that in mind, most of them are chomping at the bit to give you and your counterpeople all the necessary POS material they can, in order for you to both attract and educate walk-in customers. POS material also has the added bonus of identifying your store with recognizable brands and respected manufacturers, allowing you to take advantage of their marketing dollars and public image.

2. Be the Place to Go

Establish your shop as the premier place to go for the performance enthusiast. Manufacturers are eager to provide your shop with signage material and display pieces that will clearly identify your store as a serious provider of specialized performance parts. Such material can provide a competitive advantage particularly in terms of retail sales, as the right image can place your shop in the top-of-mind category among potential customers.

3. Identify the Customer

Identifying the target customer doesn’t take as much intuition as you might think, as there are some clear telltale signs for those who bother to look for them. Training your counter staff to pick up on these cues is the key to improving your sales figures in this exceptionally profitable segment. The process starts with examining the kind of vehicle the customer drives. In the old days, it was usually just the lowered, tricked-out Honda kid that was looking for a performance exhaust system to annoy his parents, but today’s performance market has shifted so dramatically that anyone from the contractor with a tonneau on his pick-up to the empty nester with a new Detroit muscle car–and yes, the kid with the Honda–is a likely candidate. Aftermarket parts (like that contractor’s truck cover) demonstrate an initial interest in customization that your counter staff should pick up on. At the very least, it’s a way to begin engaging the customer in a conversation on the benefits of a performance exhaust system.

4. Customize your approach

According to some industry experts, jobbers and their staff need to start customizing their sales approach when it comes to the sale of performance parts. Customers are interested in any given performance muffler for dramatically different reasons, and the counterperson needs to be astute enough to approach each sales opportunity from any number of different angles. Horsepower, fuel efficiency for a dollar savings, or improving fuel efficiency out of environmental concerns, are all reasons why someone may want to upgrade his OE system. So, it is vitally important that the counterperson identify why the individual client is interested, and sell him based on that area of interest.

5. Need vs. Want Selling

It is far easier to sell people something if they need it, than if they simply want it. As a result, if your customer comes in and absolutely must have a new muffler because the one he has is sending sparks flying, you have a very motivated buyer on your hands. The flipside is the customer who has just purchased a new car, but is looking into a performance system for it. This customer demands your attention, and deserves your time. He may ask a lot of questions (maybe even an annoying number of them), but you owe him that time. Treat this customer well, and you’ll likely have him as a customer for all of his customizing whims.

6. Can the Shop Talk

Years ago, most people doing custom performance work on their cars were themselves mechanical experts. This aspect of the business has certainly changed dramatically, with the proliferation of performance exhaust systems for everything from SUVs to minivans. Today, counterpeople have to be prepared to sell performance parts to a wide range of customers, using an even wider range of selling points. Given the nature of this shift, and the kinds of people that are into performance exhaust systems today, an overly mechanical sales approach will lose a potential customer in a sea of jargon. By selling based on factors the customer can understand and appreciate, like increased horsepower or fuel efficiency, you’ll be more likely to keep him on the hook.

7. Up the Tech Talk

According to many top manufacturers, today’s performance exhaust customer may not be extraordinarily savvy in terms of installation or mechanical processes involved in his potential purchase, but he is a technology-savvy consumer. With that in mind, counterpeople should be ready to direct a consumer to various manufacturers’ websites, as well as provide them with other high-tech data involved in the process. While it may be still important to shy away from the shop talk, your customer will likely appreciate some of the more technical data, and if it can be presented online or in some other multimedia format, so much the better.

8. Use Manufacturer Programs for Online ID

Some manufacturers have taken the partnerships they establish with their jobbers to a whole new level when it comes to promoting their product and its availability. So many potential performance buyers research their purchase online prior to a shop visit that some manufactures have offered to actually provide the contact details for jobbers in the region of the customer doing the initial search, so as to lead them to the right places. Normally some sort of membership with the manufacturer is required, but for a small fee, customers from your local area who are looking into a particular part can be led from the massive corporate manufacturers’ sites right to your door.

9. Stainless Steel Should Be Stainless

No matter how obvious this point may seem, it is shocking the number of times this simple retail rule is forgotten in the hustle and bustle of a busy jobber store. The bottom line here is that people looking to get into customized exhaust parts often do it for both the performance and the appearance qualities. As such, if you are displaying what should be a fantastic-looking high performance stainless steel system, make sure it sparkles the way it ought to. There are few things more unappealing to a retail customer than dirty, dusty merchandise.

10. Establish an Installation Partner

A key attribute of the performance exhaust market is the installation itself. By virtue of your place in the parts food chain, you are inexorably linked in the memories of retail customers to whomever eventually installs the part. Should they ask, you should have an established relationship with a specialty performance installer to whom they can be referred. The overall name of the game is a positive all-round customer experience, and so if everything runs smoothly, from online research to retail purchase to installation, then you will have yourself a solid customer for life