My wife had decided she wanted a bigger car. Nothing too outrageous, just something to haul all of the kid’s stuff to every single place she went. So I did what any person in sales would do. I sold her car to prepare for buying her kid and kid stuff carrying bigger car.
The idea was that I would list her car and it would take a few days to sell. In the meantime, we would search for it’s replacement. I imagine real estate shell games are often like this on a grander scale.
But I sold the car in less than 22 hours. And we still needed to find her gem of a car.
We ended up finding one at a dealership. Let me say before I continue, I hate working with dealerships. Their entire business model seems a little slimy to me. More importantly, they have not kept up with the power of the internet.
It turns out that if I want to shop for cars at 10pm, I can. I can organize my finding by make and model, color, and all manner of details. Then I find the car I want at the price I am willing to pay and go about acquiring the car.
This is where dealers drop a huge ball and where the basis of this article comes about.
To continue the story, I find the car my wife wants on the internet. The dealer that is offering it has no pictures of it listed. So I call them up. They tell me the car was just traded in and it needs to be prepped. Now my wife and I spent a few solid hours prepping her car for sale. It was waxed, vacuumed, polished and every nook and cranny was cleaned up.
It was a mess, now it was showroom beautiful.
So from my observations, I figured the dealer has a team of experts with tools and car bays made to prep a car for sale. It’s what they do. Typically you expect professionals to do a job better and faster. That’s why they are professionals.
Turns out I was wrong. I was told this process will take days.
Keep in mind, my wife and I were ready to move on the car, with cash and no haggling. I wanted to haggle a bit, but the price was fair and my wife needed a car immediately, so I didn’t. Knowing what I know now, I will recommend you always haggle.
So we schedule an appointment to see the car in a few days. Note the plural. In the meantime my wife is glaring at me for selling her car too quickly. We arrive and the car is not only not ready, it has a broken power window motor. (They don’t tell us about that detail until after they have our money.)
In between us arriving at the dealership ready to take ownership of this car and us actually leaving with it, we eliminate over two hours from our lives.
While those hours pass, I notice a few things:
- This dealership has seven sales people working, plus managers and finance people and we are among the only two customers that were around the entire time.
- The employees of this dealership do a lot of leaning and joking and hanging around not doing a damn thing.
- If I was the owner of this dealership, I would be upset.
We brought my 4 year old son with us to the dealership because paying more than $60 for a babysitter while we buy a car seems like a waste. My son needs to pee, so I take him to the bathroom. The bathroom trash is overflowing, the soap is out and the sink looks like someone may have had a great night and a rough morning.
Keep in mind we have seven salespeople just lounging around waiting for a sale to fall in their lap. None of them were making calls, jumping on a computer to email prospects, or even doing anything shy of consuming oxygen.
None of them were cleaning the bathroom. Which is odd since based on the volume of customers that walked through the doors (two including us) the bathroom was a mess from the sales people using it.
The fire was clearly gone from these sales people, if it ever existed. Can you make sales when the fire is out?
Along with me observing this offront to other sales people around the world, we were offered a dozen ways of spending more money with the dealer. Questions such as, “Do you want some fancy warranty with pages of fine print you will never use?” and “Do you want rust protection on all that plastic?” and something like, “Do you want unicorn tears in your coolant?” were a constant barrage of attempts to sell what amounts to snake oil, in my opinion.
We said no to all of it, as you should too, and were asked to sign a document stating we refused this extra money maker for the dealer. Can you imagine making every one of your prospects sign a document saying they did not buy from you?
This is why people buy cars from sometimes shady people on Craigslist. The shady people may not have ties on or offer a TV blaring some crazy daytime show, but you can trade cash for a car in a pretty short amount of time and not be hounded with annoying upsell questions.
I asked the guy if he were to sell a car to his mom, would he offer this stuff to her. All I needed was his immediate split second facial expression to know my answer.
Don’t try to sell people stuff you don’t believe in.
All of this is meaningless drivel if I don’t offer a solution.
We have two issues here: 1) an outdated sales model and 2) an unmotivated workforce.
For the car dealer sales model, what good are they? Years ago cars with anywhere near 100,000 miles were things you stayed away from. Now some warranties go beyond that. Cars are just better now, at least from a longevity point of view.
If I can buy a car online and have it shipped to me and have the trust to really make it happen, I have no use for many dealers, sales people or endless paperwork. I should be able to buy a car the way I can buy a pair of pants online.
For your employees, you need to keep them busy. You need to have them keep in mind the perception they are bringing to everyone that sees them.
They looked desperate. They looked like they needed a sale, but only wanted an easy one. They were not willing to work, though I know they needed to eat. Some of them looked extremely well fed.
The main idea is to give your employees work and more work and work on top of that work so that they keep working. The mantra every kid that has ever worked at any crap job, “If you got time to lean, you got time to clean!” should not be lost once you pass minimum wage.
On top of that, I want my sales people to be hustlers. I want them hitting the phones, sending emails and cards and walking the car lot. I want them making the place spotless and making it attractive. I want my sales people to stand out from the crowd of every other business doing what we do to make prospects hunger for doing business with us.
I want my people to be proud of where they work. It is our job as managers, leaders and entrepreneurs to make sure we empower our people by hiring the best and training them to be better.
And if ever you see an employee leaning, tell them where the mop bucket is.
James Kademan is a Business Coach for Draw In Customers Business Coaching in Madison, Wisconsin as well as the author of The BOLD Business Book. When he isn’t surfing used car sites, he is busy guiding entrepreneurs to success in business and beyond. He blogs successfully to the world at www.drawincustomers.com. If you are considering hiring a business coach, take a moment to call James at (608)210-2221. Keep your car, workspace, and selling systems clean.
