"Recently," writes Mark Riffey at the Business is Personal blog, "you've seen a number of major car companies offer to buy your car back if you lose your job—and that's after they make several months of payments for you."

In the case of one Hyundai dealership—located in an economically depressed area—the introduction of a corporate buy-back program produced the most profitable weekend in its history. According to Riffey, there's a lesson to be learned: Many customers had the means and desire to make a purchase, "but their anxiety about the future kept them from buying."

What can you do to ease customer concerns and open their checkbooks? Riffey suggests offering a good, old money-back guarantee. He describes an initiative at a former company: "One of our solutions was to extend our 30-day money-back guarantee to 60 day[s] and then to a whole year," he reports.

Scary step to take? Not really, he says. "In our case, we knew that if they really used [the product] for a year, they’d never ask for their money back. We were right, and it made a huge difference in sales, despite seeming like an insane thing to do."

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