Customers love having choices. It’s true in the restaurant business, in entertainment, and when it comes to the financing options your business offers. Whether you’re running a veterinary clinic, an auto repair shop, a furniture and mattress store, or another establishment altogether, you need to be able to connect your customers with a range of lenders, so they can make the choice that’s right for them.
It sounds simple enough on paper, right? Pick a couple of credible lenders to work with, connect your customers with them, and voila! That’s all you need.
As nice as that sounds, the truth is a bit more complex. When adding finance options, you need to focus on establishing a Perfect Lender Lineup™ that matches your customers’ actual needs and purchasing behaviors, as opposed to a simplistic, one-size-fits-all lending approach. But how do you go about establishing that lineup? What should you be looking for from lender partners? And how can you know for sure that your lender lineup is, indeed, perfect?
Before we dive into selecting and defining your lender lineup, let’s cover the basics.
The Basics of Offering Consumer Financing
Offering finance options to your customers is a good idea for many reasons. It helps them bridge the gap between considering a purchase and completing it. You want them thinking about your product or service, rather than the process of acquiring it.
Consider the following example. Let’s say you own a furniture store and you have a customer who’s looking to purchase a new couch. They’ve done their research. They know exactly what kind of couch they want, and hey, good news, you’ve got it in stock. The only problem is the number on your price tag and the number in their head isn’t lining up. And as much as that leather four-seater appeals to them, they just can’t bridge the gap between the two figures.
Instead of thinking about the result — having a great new couch in their living room — they’re crunching numbers and wondering what expenses they can put on the back burner to pay for it upfront.
Offering financing from credible lenders erases that issue. It gives your customers the ability to purchase what they want when they want it. And by working with Financing Your Way specifically, you’ll ensure you get your funding within 1 to 5 days, without having to sweat a major down payment. In short, financing options are beneficial to both parties, in more ways than one.
What to Look for From Lenders
At the end of the day, you want your lenders to appeal to your customers. You want your customers to find a lender that works for them and breeze through the application process. FormPiper helps enormously when it comes to the latter consideration, by greatly simplifying financing applications for both you and your customers. But what about helping them find the right lender?
Let’s go back to the idea of choice. It’s something everyone values. If you pulled up to a fast-food drive-through and there was only one item on the menu, you’d probably feel a bit perplexed and more than a little restricted, right? It’s the same scenario when your lending options are too limited for your customer base.
The Perfect Lender Lineup™
Keeping in mind that customers love having a choice among lenders, let’s answer the question of how you establish a Perfect Lender Lineup.™ It starts by understanding your customers. You need lenders that appeal to customers of every background and financial status.
Just as it wouldn’t make sense for a restaurant to offer three vanilla milkshakes with different names, it does you and your business no good to provide multiple identical lending options. Differentiating your lenders — and understanding the differences between them — will go a long way in selling your customers on the idea of financing.
Work with Financing Your Way to get connected with lenders who are right for your business. Then follow up by implementing FormPiper to both simplify the application process from start to finish and to show all of the lending options you offer to your customers in a straightforward format. It’s the first step in establishing a long-term finance option that helps you sell more while building stronger customer relationships.