I used to sell cars. I’ve written of it a time or two, though not in a long while. There were about 20 months between when my life as a college student ended and my life as a technical writer began, and for some of those months I sold Acuras.
I graduated from college in the spring of 1992, which made me one of the last to earn a degree with, essentially, no World Wide Web. It was just barely there, and there was almost nothing on it. Huge swaths of a college student’s life today bear no resemblance at all to the experience I had.
I bring that up because the timing of the rise of the Web had a lot to do with the way I was trained to sell cars, as well. Buying and selling cars now is worlds apart from the way it was, even those 16 or 17 short years ago. All of the information is available everywhere. Margins have shrunk. There are basically no bad new cars for sale. There is still salesmanship, good and bad, to navigate, but the buyer has benefited from an information-generated power shift that is likely permanent.
But way back in the summer of 1993, when I sat for my sales training, I got it old-school and in-your-face from a grizzled veteran. To be sure, I got a lot of valuable human relations training as well, but the way I was taught to sell cars was with time-honored, “classic” techniques—the “let me check with my boss” routine and what-not. (I really did have to check with my boss, by the way. In some ways, I was as much a pawn as you were.)
Mind, I have little doubt cars are still sold that way every hour of every day. You have to be the car dick and fight with some people. There’s a certain kind of 50-60ish jackass redneck who requires you to argue and raise hell, and if you don’t, he’ll go buy from someone who will. I’m just saying it’s not the only way (or even the dominant way) it’s done anymore.
I got to chuckling today thinking about the euphemisms we used to employ. We had a list of taboo words, and the words we were supposed to say instead.
- We didn’t talk about a car’s price; we talked about its market value.
- I would never ask you “what kind of payments can you afford?” Rather, I would say “what type of monthly budget were you considering?” (The right answer there, of course, is “I’m not thinking of payments; we’ll negotiate the bottom line.”) If, instead, you named a number (as probably two-thirds of you did), then my immediate response would be “Up to what?”
- We never “allowed” you a dollar amount on your trade-in. Rather, “this is what we’re paying you for your car.”
- I always talked to my boss, not my manager. If I tell you I’m talking to my manager, you might think “well, I wonder who his manager is?” Boss has a lot more finality to it.
- The stereotype is “what do I have to do to get you in this car today?” The reality was “you will own this car now when the figures are agreeable. Is that correct, Mr. Prospect?”
- It crawled into the official paperwork lingo, too. What is a “capital cost reduction” on a lease agreement? How about a “down payment”?
(And so forth.)
Once I was sharing some of this on a visit to my mother’s, and her husband cockily announced “you know, none of that stuff ever works on me.” Well, of course not, man. When I’m sitting here and laying it out point by point for you, it’s easy to say you wouldn’t be influenced by it. It’s like the magician beginning the conversation by showing you the false floor in the cabinet, dig?
I’ll stop here for now, but I’ll have a post or two more on this soon. Even though a lot of what I was taught seems a little antiquated and corny now, I also learned a lot of great things about understanding motivations, behavioral triggers, and so forth (that dovetailed nicely with my academic training, actually) that have remained valuable to me.
I have no desire to go back and do it again—it’s a stressful and brutally long-houred job, even when it’s going well—but I’m certain I’d be much better at it today than I was as a green-gilled 22-year-old. (And I didn’t suck then, baby. Heh.)
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