Customer says they can’t commit to the price until they talk to someone else

You ‘ll get this objection from time to time. The best way to deal with this is to prevent it from happening in the first place.

When talking with a new customer, there’s a key question you need to ask. “Are you authorized to approve work to be done for this vehicle?” People will be able to tell you yes they are, or no, my spouse or my business partner needs to approve this work.

If third party approval is needed, tell your customer that you’re going to put this quote together. When you call back, or when they’re going to come back to the shop, that you’d prefer all decision-makers to be there. Explain the reason for this is that you don’t want them to miss important information between their conversations.

Let’s say you gave the quote, the decision-maker isn’t there, and the customer needs to get back to you on approval. You need to then end the conversation with some urgency. Some examples of urgency can be a limited-time price or limited availability.

You may have a special on the parts today or had a cancellation. Without outright lying, explain a good reason why it’s a better price now vs tomorrow or next week.