Car buying from the inside

This has been out for a while, but I just stumbled across it: Confessions of a Car Salesman, an article on edmunds.com where they send a journalist undercover to work as a car salesman.

Good reading to brush up on what you need to think about when purchasing a car and the tricks of the trade that will be used against you. Really interesting to me, though, was the description of the sales seminar the reporter went to when he started to work for the “no haggle” dealership. It’s exactly the same philosophy as the training for other “low pressure” forms of sales operations I’ve heard about.

The whole idea of guiding the customer to the right product and getting their buy-in on the process by paraphrasing their statements back to them is a good principle both for generating decent sales volume and keeping the customer happy. However, in all sales environments it all comes down to your success depending not on how happy the customer is, or how right the purchase is for the customer, but to how many sales you make. When the rubber hits the road, a sales person is about the sale, not the customer. It’s always good to keep that fact in the back of your head.

Finally, as a lingo fan, I immensely enjoyed the glossary of car sales person terms. Are you a mooch or a lay down?