Having said that, what more does one need to prove to say they are serious about buying? I told each sales person I needed to buy a car and intended to buy one that day. I told them I was a well informed buyer and that I didn’t want to waste my time playing games on pricing. Yet two of the sales people chose not to believe me and to play games with me. The sales person that chose to believe me got the business immediately. The “deal” took 20 minutes.

Every sales person needs to qualify the customer. Sometimes we misread them–we qualify customers who really aren’t qualified, or we don’t qualify customers who really are qualified. The sales person has to live with those consequences.

Selling cars is one of the most difficult sales jobs I can think of. I respect those sales people who are very successful at doing this. However, I can’t help but think the dealers have brought much of this on themselves by using sales models that were created in the 1930′s.

There are dealers and sales people that have broken out of that mold. When I find those dealers and sales people, I reward them with my loyalty. They create hassle free buying experiences, giving me fair prices, and responding to my needs as a customer.

The issue has nothing to do with a person being on 100% commission or on straight salary. It has to do with how dealership values the customer and the buying experience they want to create. I suspect those that create great buying experiences have fewer customers who “take advantage” of them. I tend to believe, and there is research supporting this, that the tone set by the seller in the experience they create is mirrored by the customer. So if you set a tone of trust and service, the customer is likely to be more trusting. If you set a tone that creates apprehension in the customer, then the customer is likely to be more suspicious, less trusting, and less responsive.

I do appreciate you taking the time to comment and am very sympathetic with the challenges you face. Every sales person faces those challenges. Every sales person has time wasted by customers who are not serious, whether it is buying a car, getting a mortgage, buying enterprise software or buying consulting services.

I work at a dealership that does not pay a base salary. We get 100% commission. Therefore, we need to know if a customer is serious about the vehicle before we offer them the “best price”.

I have a lot of customers come in and say “hey, can you give me the best price on this vehicle?” My first response is the same as every sales person you dealt with. Are you serious about purchasing the vehicle?

You said that by being in the showroom, asking for the best price is considered being serious. Well unfortunately thats not always the case. We have people that come in, get our best price, and then go to another dealership and get them to beat our price. Waste of my time? I think so.

Why would i want to give you my best price, when all you’re going to do is shop it elsewhere. I dont get paid to give quotes, thats what our website is for.

Until you are ready to put your credit card down and sign on a piece of paper, you will not get any dealers best price. There is just too much competition out there, and as you said, the customer is much more educated about the product when they come in.

If I were getting paid hourly, maybe id have a different attitude towards customers, because id get paid regardless of whether they bought or not.

That’s like going in to a mortgage brokerage, getting them to give you their best rate, and then going to your bank only to have them beat the interest rate by 0.01%. Wasted the brokers time.

This is why we are like this. Not because we dont trust you mr.customer. Not because we dont believe that you are “serious” about the vehicle. But because we would like to secure your business before moving ahead with the important stuff.

We would like to feed our families too.

Regards,

DL

If you want to better the overall experience, it helps to be an honest customer. Everyone wants the same outcome; customers want to pay the least and dealerships want to make the most.

At the end of the day, hopefully we both go home satisfied. The difference is, next time my satisfied customer comes back to see me, I`ll have been
run off by the old crusties in management who have been holding a gun to their customers heads for decades before you or I bought our first car!

How did we get here? How did automobile salespeople get so screwed up that it has come to this?

Is it really true, as Bret says, that it works on some people? I’m not convinced that it does. I have this suspicion that this is one of those marginal benefit things, where yes, if you hold a gun to someone’s head and threaten them, you probably can get them to say they love you and give you their money. But it’s the last time you’ll play that game.

Wouldn’t even Bret agree that this is scorched-earth selling? Why would anyone ever want to do repeat business with someone after being ravaged like that? And why would any intelligent dealership want to employ people who ruin future business prospects like that?

A few months ago Chris Brogan wrote an interesting piece too on how clueless auto dealers were–he even gave them, as I recall, a complete turnkey roadmap to doing it right. But somehow I think hardly any of them will have the smarts to believe him.

This all reminds me of the boiling frog metaphor (yes, I know, it’s been proven a myth, but it’s still a helluva metaphor): some people (like auto salespeople) believe that just because holding a gun to a customer’s head leads them to sell, that they should always hold a gun to a customer’s head.

This kind of thinking just totally ignores the effect on the customer–which is to never come back, and to tell all their friends what jerks they are at that dealership.

What do you think it is, Dave? Why do they do this?

And thanks, by the way, for writing a really funny (funny painful, not so much funny ha ha) narrative of this horrendous sales experience.

Sadly, this isn’t exclusive to the auto industry, nor is it the times we are living in. I experienced this when I refurnished my entire home 2 years ago, with a wedding planner (23 years ago) and numerous other times throughout my career.

The great news is that it provides opportunity for those “who get it”!

I really enjoyed this post and will make it a point to take extra special care of my cars so I can avoid the experience

Respectfully,
Paul Castain

Thanks for the comment!