How to Boost Profitability Through Auto Dealer Finance Training

This article was updated in January 2025 by the PNI Marketing Team.

The F&I department (finance and insurance) is a highly important source of profitability for dealerships. With each sale, it helps auto dealers earn money beyond the sticker price of a vehicle. In this economically uncertain time, financing and add-ons have become key elements of dealers' revenue.

With the right training, F&I experts can improve customer satisfaction, drive sales, and maximize dealership profits. HR leaders can empower F&I specialists with this type of training and help them become an integral part of the company's success.

What Is Auto Dealer Finance Training?

Auto dealer finance training focuses on helping F&I team members hone their expertise. During the training process, your staff learns:

• How to interact with customers to increase the conversion rate.
• About various financing opportunities for the customers.
• About the nuances of sales contracts.
• How to arrange financing terms that generate maximum profit from interest for the dealership.
• Add-on product characteristics and nuances.
• How to control sales and work in tandem with the sales department.
• How to work with the sales documentation and complete the paperwork.

Auto dealer training and F&I focus can change how your entire dealership functions, putting it ahead of the competition.

Since customer preferences, purchasing power, and the state of the economy change frequently, F&I managers and new hires must undergo regular training to stay on top of their game.

Here's a tip for ensuring F&I training stays top of mind: Incorporate it into the sales and training meetings at your dealership.

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How Auto Dealer Finance Training Boosts Profitability

Besides putting your dealership ahead of the competition and keeping it afloat during economic downturns, F&I departments contribute to its financial stability. Training these team members can boost your company's profitability in several ways.

1. Improved Onboarding

In many dealerships, the number of salespeople exceeds the number of F&I managers, thus creating bottlenecks and reducing customer satisfaction.

With the high importance of the F&I department for your business, speeding up the onboarding process should be on the agenda.

If you arrange proper F&I training early on in the new hire process, employees can start generating more profits for your dealership much faster than with a standard onboarding process.

Faster Onboarding

High-quality training can speed up the onboarding process and give your F&I department additional tools to improve profitability.

Whether you already have a large F&I department or only plan to hire these experts, you need the new talent to start working as soon as possible.

By speeding up the onboarding process with proper training, you are also giving new talent an opportunity to receive F&I certification faster.

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Reduced Turnover

The majority of dealerships in the United States suffer from employee retention problems. According to NADA, the average employee turnover at car dealerships is around 46%, with sales positions churning even faster, costing companies hundreds of thousands of dollars annually. Meanwhile, almost 70% of employees are more likely to stay with a dealership for three years if they experience high-quality onboarding.

With the right training, it's possible to keep your top performers in place while reaping the benefits of working with new experts faster.

The bottom line: Improving onboarding cuts costs and allows your dealership to start capitalizing on the F&I department's expertise quickly.

2. Familiarity With the Modern Selling Environment

The selling process is changing throughout all industries, including the automotive sector. The COVID-19 pandemic introduced new modern selling tactics and technologies, while recent economic conditions have inspired dealerships to achieve maximum financial efficiency.

F&I departments need to adapt quickly to keep up with these trends, including:

• Contactless payments
• Online sales
• Online documentation (e.g. applying for an auto loan)

As modern buyers' needs and purchase behavior change, failing to adapt to the new demands could put your dealership behind the competition. Though vehicle sales were up 2.3% in 2024, high prices and interest rates are still affecting sales. Dealerships need to pay serious attention to F&I team training to keep them afloat in a competitive market saturated with competitors. 

F&I managers can be trained to adjust to the new reality and start tweaking the selling process to boost dealership profitability. 

Keep in mind that trends, efficiency, and profits should never come before dealership compliance. Failure to meet compliance standards for fair lending, add-on transparency, and other regulations can greatly cost your dealership and diminish the benefits of your F&I training.

The New Normal

Training will be vital in any economic conditons. The selling environment can change drastically due to a variety of factors, including the political landscape, new technologies (like driverless cars), buyer preferences, regulations, and much more.

By designing the right F&I training process for your dealership, you can ensure that it is ready to adjust to any change quickly and compliantly. 

3. Proper F&I Product Knowledge

Both new and existing F&I team members can benefit from training to familiarize themselves with the all the products a dealership offers, including:

• Prepaid maintenance programs
• Tire and wheel protection
• GAP (Guaranteed Asset Protection) insurance
• Key replacement
• Interior and exterior protection
• Anti-theft protection
• Lifetime engine warranty

While a dealership can offer a huge variety of products, a lack of extensive knowledge about each one could hinder the entire sales process. All staff should be familiar with the full scope of products and services your dealerships offer to ensure they capitalize on every opportunity to meet a buyer's needs.

Since your collection of add-ons should change over time to align with demand, ongoing staff training about your services is a must.

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Financing & Documentation

The F&I department needs to have extensive knowledge of financing options for the dealerships' clients, and how to properly document auto loans to maintain dealership compliance.

To speed up the sales process and ensure the deal goes through, F&I managers need to understand each sentence in the contract in depth. They also need to understand which financing options are suitable for each particular customer.

Although some of these skills come from experience, the majority can be gained through a well-arranged training process. 

Streamlining Auto Dealer Finance Training to Boost Profitability  

Since an F&I department is highly important to the dealership's success, HR managers are working hard to attract and retain top talent. Without proper onboarding and training, it's hard for your F&I department to work on boosting the company's profitability.  

With the right tools, you can arrange high-quality training, simplify onboarding, speed up F&I certification, and contribute to the company's success.

PNI•HCM's Dealer People Cloud, for example, is specifically designed to provide your team with excellent training opportunities while reducing turnover rates and increasing dealership productivity. It's an excellent all-in-one resource for profit-minded dealerships who want to simplify training and compliance all at once.