|
| May 10, 2000 Kit, I attended the recent UAEL confrence and wanted you to know that I felt you were right on when you made the comment about the customer is your concern and the vendor is your customer, but is not as important as the "real" customer of you signs the lease and makes your monthly payments. Our industry is transaction oriented and the ones to prosper in the future are the ones who are customer oriented and use the internet to add value to those customers and vendors. In a transaction oriented world I do not want to compete with the .com's of the leasing industry. I was a branch manager for a Burroughs distributor in the 80's and then started a software company called LeaseTeam, Inc. with Randy Haug and developed a product called LeasePlus. I wanted a change and sold my stock in LeaseTeam and started P&L Capital in 1996 with no customers, no vendors, no lines. We have been customer oriented since day 1. We qualify a customer and take the time to understand the needs of the customer and structure a finance solution. We work with VARS on a national basis and direct customers on a local basis. I feel it is basic sales, to QUALIFY and QUALIFY again our customers needs. I fired a sales rep that I hired from a so called veteran leasing company when they consistantly could not even tell me the type of business the customer was in. Said that was the vendors job. It is your job. In a short 4 years, although a war, we have grown to 12 people and continue to grow. We know our customers and they know us. I tell all my new employees. WE ARE NOT IN THE LEASING BUSINESS. IF ALL WE ARE IS A LESSOR WE WILL FAIL. WE HELP COMPANIES REACH THEIR GOALS! Again, I simply wanted to let you know I agreed with many of your comments.
Phil Lieber Of all the vendors I deal with, having an answer in an hour vs 1 day means nothing next to servicing of their customers. For us the idea of pre approving a customer is detrmimnental to closing transactions. We obtain commitments prior to issuing a formal approval and have found this lends itself to much higher approval to funding ratios. My experience with vendors tells me they like to do as little as possible when it comes to the lease. I can't see many of our vendors wanting to go through the time and effort of having to input the applications ad then sell the lease,print docs etc. Secondly, control of the sale is paramount to the vendor, and thirdly I guess each time a different company gave an approval the vendor would set up a newaccount... I've never met a vendor that cares what his customer pays for a lease if the leasing program sells more equipment. Finally, my experience with other industry portals has not been that good. I have requested mortgage, insurance and car loan quotes over the internet and been extremely disapointed with the results, save the car loan which in the end had alot of hassle before it was over. There is a human touch that must exist in all but the most simple transactions in my opinion and no amount of trying to remove that will succeed. Michael
Duhamel Kit, In a past life I did auto leasing with the Hertz Corp. under the infamous Jose Memendez whose sons killed he and his wife in their Beverly Hills manison in August, 1989. Another story! Anyway, one of the tricks of the trade still used by dealers is to get an individual to give them an application and the dealer shotguns that app to every source they have. They take the first approval, not necessarily the best, and they then "own" that applicant because the applicant has so many inquiries no one will touch them. Since we are now seeing good credits turned down every day because of inquiries I see this "shop at one site" leasing as just that. The applicant goes in and ends up with x number of financial inquiries guaranteeing him/her a turn down when someone like Bob or I get involved attempting to address why they were turned down in the first place. One of the values a competent broker adds to the equation is the ability to take the applicant to a funding source who will buy the credit with explanations if needed. Any boneheaded lender can buy the "A" credits all day long. I like this latest innovation because after a few internet happy vendors get burned they will be back to beating up their trusty broker who continues to deliver on the vendor requests through thick and thin. If you pull up leasing on any search engine you are going to see about 1500 URL's. What miracle would get a customer to my web site rather than Bob's or Advanta's. Pure blind luck! It is also my understanding from a reliable source that the one leasing company who has gone completely to internet apps is experiencing a huge fraud problem. According to what I was told they are not funding about 40% of the signed deals because of the applications not being as presented. The scary part is if they catch that many how many are getting through. The internet is a wonderful opportunity for fraud. If the bad guys are smart enough to use the internet then we are already in trouble. In 1990 seven of us sat in a room in Atlanta drinking coffee discussing fraud and how to keep it from killing our industry. NAELB was born from that meeting. Unless we can figure out a way to screen out the internet fraud we are facing a whole new set of problems. I am attending a seminar on the 12th to discuss how the internet can be used in our business. Okay, I am off my soap box! Adrian
|
 |
|||||
| |||||
|
|
