It has become widely known in the car dealership world as the “Stapler Close,”
a show-and-tell technique to persuade vehicle buyers to also purchase extended service contracts to cover potential repairs.
It has proven particularly effective in winning over buyers of vehicles with strong reliability reputations, such as Hondas. An F&I manager once quipped it’s hard to get Honda owners to buy service contracts “because they think God made their car, and so it will never need repairs.”
F&I trainer Tony Dupaquier, executive director of The Academy based in Austin, TX, improvisationally came up with the Stapler Close while doing a training stint at a client Honda dealership. He was there so often, he had a temporary office.
He recalls, “One day an F&I guy comes in and says, “Can you take a turn on this customer who is buying a new CR-V and trading in an eight-year-old CR-V. She bought a service contract before, but doesn’t want one now.”
Dupaquier met with her. She told him, “I never had a problem with my old CR-V, so I don’t see a reason to buy a service contract for my new one.”
He noticed a stapler on the desk. An idea struck him. “It came out of nowhere,” he says.
He picked up the stapler. In his other hand, he held his smartphone. Then he compared the two in automotive terms.
“I told her, ‘Your old CR-V is like this stapler. It’s simple and basic without a whole lot of technology in it.
“Your new CR-V has much more technology. You need all that technology to make everything in the vehicle work. Technology is the operating system of a car, just as it is in this phone. Five, six, seven years down the road, which is going to work the same way, the stapler or the phone?”
She said the stapler. “I said, ‘Right, that’s why you need an extended service contract for your car.”
He went on to explain, “An eight-year-old phone’s operating system is not going to work the same as that in a new one. The same is true for a car.”
She ended up buying a service contract.
The F&I manager who witnessed the novel presentation later asked, “Where did that come from? You never taught me that close.”
“Christian, I just made it up,” replied Dupaquier (pictured, left). But he acknowledges it didn’t come completely out of the blue.
“In my mind, I had been working on a fresh service-contract close,” he says. “I wanted to compare the maintainable vs. non-maintainable. You can maintain a vehicle’s powertrain with oil changes and proper fluid levels, but you cannot maintain the technology, including information touchscreens or steering-wheel touch controls. Yet telling a customer that is just verbal. I was trying to come up with a way to make it visual.”
Then he saw the stapler.
The F&I manager insisted he share the presentation with the entire staff. “So, we did, after cleaning it up and making it a little better. Seven years later, it’s become legendary.”
(Steve Finlay is a retired WardsAuto senior editor.)
