Ransom Riggs
How to Sell a Car
by Ransom Riggs - January 26, 2009 - 2:04 PM

used-car-salesman.jpgI wandered into a car dealership yesterday with a few innocent questions and about twenty minutes to spare … big mistake. An hour and a half later I had missed a lunch, been through an (I think unnecessary) credit check and felt like I had been interrogated by the Gestapo. Naturally, I decided to find out what makes car salesmen tick — and found some wonderful information online, in particular a long article by a journalist who had gone undercover as a car salesman for three months to learn the tricks of the trade (emphasis on tricks). From “Confessions of a Car Salesman,” here are the top techniques salesmen use to get you to sign on the dotted line.

Be high-pressure because you have to be

When I was interviewed for the job, the dealership was vague about how I would be paid. On the one hand they promised I could make serious money through commissions — maybe four or five grand my first month. On the other hand, they alluded to an hourly wage to begin with. Now I found that I was, in fact, working on straight commission. If I sold cars I made money. If I didn’t sell, I didn’t make a penny. Maybe that’s why there were so many salespeople working here (about 85 in new and used cars). It didn’t cost the dealership extra to have a big staff.

Use the “up to?” trick

The process begins by asking the customer how much they want for a monthly payment. Usually, they say, about $300. “Then, you just say, ‘$300… up to?’ And they’ll say, ‘Well, $350.’ Now they’ve just bumped themselves $50 a month. That’s huge.” You then fill in $350 under the monthly payment box.

Michael said you could use the “up to” trick with the down payment too. “If Mr. Customer says he wants to put down $2000, you say, “Up to?” And he’ll probably bump himself up to $2500.” Michael then wrote $2,500 in the down payment box of the 4-square worksheet.

I later found out this little phrase “Up to?” was a joke around the dealership. When salesmen or women passed each other in the hallways, they would say, “Up to?” and break out laughing.

Create a sense of urgency

After the customer test-drove the car we brought them into a sales office and offered them coffee or a Coke to relax them. Then we filled in the information about the car [on the sales sheet] … and called the tower [the sales managers]. Michael held his hand like a phone receiver with his thumb and little finger sticking out. “You say, ‘Yes sir. I have the Jones family here with me and they have just driven a beautiful new whatever model, stock number blah blah blah.’ Then you say, ‘Is it still available?’ Of course you know it is. But you want to create a sense of urgency. So you pause, then say to the customer, ‘Great news! The car’s still available!’

“Never give the customer even numbers.”

“Here’s another thing. Never give the customer even numbers. Then it looks like you just made them up. So don’t say their monthly payment is going to be $400. Say it will be $427. Or, if you want to have some fun, say it will be $427.33.”

Steal the trade-in

At one point he said, “Oh! This is a good one! This is how you steal the trade-in.” He looked around quickly to make sure no one overheard him. “When you’re getting the numbers from the desk, they’ll ask if the customer has a trade-in. Say it’s a ’95 Ford Taurus. And say you took it to the used car manager and he evaluated it and said he would pay four grand for it. If you can get the trade for only three, that’s a grand extra in profit.

“So what you do is this,” Michael pretended to pick up the phone again, “you ask the desk, ‘What did we get for the last three Tauruses at auction?’ Then they’ll give you some figures — they’ll say, $1,923, $2,197 and $1,309. You don’t have to say anything to the customer. But he sees you writing this down! And he’s going, ‘Holy crap! I thought my trade was worth $6,000.’ Now it’s easy to get it for $3,000. That’s a grand extra in profit. And it’s front-end money too!” (I later learned that front-end money was what our commissions were based on. Back-end money was made on interest, holdbacks and other elements of the deal.)

Get them off the lot

“You’re walking through the lot with Mr. Customer and he’s eyeballing all these cars,” Oscar said. “He stops next to this one and bam! that’s the one you’re gonna sell him. You pull it out of the row, open the doors and ask him to see how good the seats feel. When he sits down you slam the door and take off.”

“You mean, you ask him if he wants to demo the car?” I asked.

“Hell no. They never go for a demo if you ask them. ‘Cause they know they’re weak. If they drive it they’ll buy it. The feel of the wheel will seal the deal, my friend. So you got to kidnap them, man. Just slam the door and take off. Come on, let’s go.”

We got into the car and he palmed the wheel, backing up, then pulling out onto the street. A block later we hit a light. When it turned green Oscar punched it and I felt the G’s pressing me back into the leather.

“Whoa,” I said. “Great torque.”

“Strong,” he agreed, checking the review mirror. We made a right, then another right into a shopping center parking lot. We got out.

“Now you got them away from the dealership, you can relax a little, show ‘em how awesome this car is. What you want to do is open all the doors and windows, the hood and the trunk. Then you do your walk around. You start at the driver’s door and you point stuff out as you go. ‘Mr. Customer, this car’s got the highest safety rating because it’s got front crumple zones and breakaway engine mounts. It’s got a 170-horsepower V6 with four valves per cylinder and blah, blah, blah.’ See, it doesn’t really matter what you say — most people don’t even know what the hell you’re talking about -— but the important thing is to keep talking: ‘Here’s the headlights, here’s the gas cap. Here’s the trunk. Here are the tires.’ Anything! Understand?”

It all starts with the handshake

Over the next few days I noticed that car salesmen shook hands with each other a lot. I shook hands with each of my team members when I arrived in the morning; we shook hands before we left the dealership at night. We might shake hands with each other two or three more times during the day. If I happened to be standing on the curb and if another salesman walked up I shook hands with him. It was like we were all staying loose, practicing on each other, for that moment when we would greet Mr. Customer and needed to use a good handshake that’s going to seal the deal.

At one point, during a sales seminar, I was actually taught how to shake hands. The instructor, a veteran car salesman said: “Thumb to thumb. Pump one, two, three, and out.” Another vet told me to combine the handshake with a slight pulling motion. This is the beginning of your control over the customer. This would prepare the “up” to be moved into the dealership where the negotiation would begin. The car lot handshake is sometimes combined with the confident demand, “Follow me!” If you employ this method you turn and begin walking into the dealership. Do not look back to see if they are following you. Most people feel the obligation to do what they are told and they will follow you, if only to plead, “But I’m only looking!”

Make ‘em laugh — if you can

Many salespeople find that humor is a good way to overcome objections. If a customer says they’re “only looking,” the salesperson might answer, “Last time I was only looking I wound up married.” If a customer objects to being hurried into buying the car, the salesperson might say, “The only pressure on this lot is in the tires.” These prepackaged lines were exchanged between car salesmen in the slow times with the feeling that the right joke at the right moment could be the ticket to a sale.

Of course, a good joke in the salesman’s opinion might be considered the ultimate cornball line by the customer. In one case a veteran salesman bragged to me that he sold a car to a woman by telling her, “You know, you look great in this car. The color matches the color of your eyes.” Oddly enough, that very night I was talking to a woman who told me she had once had a car salesman tell her that the car matched the color of her eyes. Her reaction to this? “Oh please!”

It’s just like Glengarry Glen Ross

Compare this sales meeting with Alec Baldwin’s famous, brilliant, and NSFW speech from David Mamet’s masterpiece, Glengarry Glen Ross. I think you’ll find more than a few similarities.

Behind the sales manager’s desk were three large white boards. The first listed the names of all the new car sales people. Beside the names was a blue box for each car they sold. Since I started near the end of the month, some of the salesmen had a long row of blue boxes showing they sold as many as 35 cars. Others had only two boxes. This board enabled everyone to see who was doing well, and who was falling behind. The next board showed the number of cars sold by the entire dealership. And the final board listed the names of the salespeople who hadn’t sold any cars for three days.

“How ya doin’ guys?” Ben asked, looking down at us. He was in his mid-forties with graying hair combed back. His face was thin, his nose pointed, giving him a fox-like appearance.

“Doin’ good, boss,” the salesmen muttered.

“You lose some weight, Ben?” one of the salesmen asked.

“A few pounds maybe,” Ben said, slapping his gut.

“They didn’t feed you much in prison?” the salesman said. Everyone broke up.

Ben’s face got red. “Will you quit telling everyone that?”

It was an odd response. He wasn’t denying that he had been in prison. So I had to assume it was true.

“OK guys. Listen up. It is slow. Slowwwww. You need to start working the phones, get some customers in here. Who’s got an appointment today?”

A few hands were raised.

“Here’s the deal. No appointments, no ups. You guys each have to have one shown appointment or you don’t get to take any ups.”

I found out that a shown appointment was one where the customer actually showed up. This prevented salesmen from putting down a fake name just to fulfill this requirement.

“No shown appointment, no ups,” Ben repeated. “Is that clear?”

“It’s clear, boss,” a salesman mumbled.

“OK. Now here’s the other thing,” Ben said, looking down at the assembled masses. “The guys in used cars think we’re a bunch of wimps. They’re going around telling everyone they can sell more cars than us. So I bet dinner, for each guy here, that we can outsell them over the next four days. What do you say about that?”

We all cheered.

Ben looked through the glass and across the dealership at the used cars tower. All the salesmen were in there meeting with their managers, just like we were meeting with ours.

Ben picked up the phone. “Now I’m going to call used cars and we’re gonna show them who we are.” He dialed the extension for the used cars department. When they answered he yelled to us, “What do we think of used cars?!” He then held up the phone so we could collectively yell into it. We shouted, “Used cars sucks!”

Then Ben asked us, “Who’s strong?”

We yelled, “New cars!!!”

Meanwhile, of course, we could see the guys in used cars were yelling and screaming at us, telling us we were a bunch of wimps. The receptionist, who sat between the two towers, looked like she would die of embarrassment.

“All right guys,” Ben said. “Get out there and sell cars. Let’s rock.”

The meeting broke up. The salesmen went outside and stood around grumbling. Then, one by one, they went inside and hit the phones.

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Comments (16)

  1. Obviously this is a big city dealership. My family owns 4 new car dealership and one store has 8 sales people. The store I work at has 2. And we don’t use the 4 square either, its just straight numbers.

    posted by Steve on 1-26-2009 at 4:12 pm

  2. disturbing.

    posted by tiffany on 1-26-2009 at 4:26 pm

  3. When was this written? 1972? I sold cars at three different dealerships (almost right out of high school)…and really not too much of this rings true, even back in 1997. As a young female I had many challenges car sales, but I never pulled these dirty tricks on people. Most people are way too Internet saavy to even walk into a dealership unprepared.

    When buying a car, there are four things, and ONLY four things you need to know:

    1. The selling price of the car. People get way too hooked on the monthly payment amount and that’s where the dealership can make it’s money.

    2. The value of your trade. Know what your vehicle is worth…really. Use several references and you are not going to get “good” or “mint” for your car. I don’t care how nice it is, the dealer is NOT going to give you Blue Book or NADA value for your car. Set your mind at “fair” and “poor”. If you did get Blue Book on paper, they built in the rest into the price of the new car or there are dealer incentives you didn’t research.

    3. Incentives & Rebates. They change monthly, and by model. There’s a difference between dealer cash and customer cash. The dealer doesn’t have to tell you about dealer cash…but if you know about it, you can work it to your advantage.

    4. Interest rate & term. If you’re getting a loan, you need to pay attention to these two items. Don’t let the bank rob you either. Really, 60 months is the longest you should ever go on a car loan. Before you head off to the finance office, find out what rates you qualified for.

    And lastly, be prepared to walk away. There are other cars and other dealerships and other offers….TRUST ME.

    posted by Jamie on 1-26-2009 at 5:00 pm

  4. Oh yes, always walk away.

    You don’t have to fall in love with a car. There’s another one like it at the dealership down the road.

    And most customers these days should know what the inventory is at the dealership. I just went shopping for a car with a friend of mine and we had the stats before we walked in the door.

    We did still get the “Let me talk to my manager and see if I can throw in the floor mats for this price” thing but that got an eye roll.

    There was a set price in mind when we came in. Sat it down and said beat this. Don’t match it. Beat it.

    Then let them talk. And yeah, be prepared to walk if it’s not beaten.

    posted by Reece on 1-26-2009 at 5:25 pm

  5. You said it in the post, that these people don’t get paid if they don’t sell a car. That gentleman asked for your business and didn’t hold a gun to your head.

    While you shouldn’t be bullied into anything, us as “almighty” consumers shouldn’t go down to car dealerships without being ready to do business i.e. your lunch break. It isn’t the mall where you can go with absolutely no agenda.

    posted by Ian on 1-26-2009 at 5:56 pm

  6. All of the dealers I worked for in the earlier part of the decade used a 4 square. In fact, a lot of what was listed in the article still pertains, at least in this market. *shrug*

    There’s also the addition to “up to”… the “but not higher than?”. You can bump someone $50/month with that, if it works. Trying to raise someone $3,600 is hard.

    Even some of the silliest stuff works. I was working a sale, and these folks were set on a Silver vehicle. I only had a white one. I didn’t want to do a dealer trade as it’s been on the lot for awhile. So in a last ditch effort I said… “The price is right, it’s a light color… How about I throw in a silver pinstripe on this one”. And they bought it

    Which is scarier? 23,600 vs 20,000 or 450 vs 400.

    The car business is well worth it for people to try, IMO. It’s a roller coaster, but you learn a lot that can be applied not only to your own buying abilities… but negotiation techniques and people skills in general.

    posted by Joe on 1-26-2009 at 6:17 pm

  7. When I bought my last car (2001) the sales guy told me that his dealership would throw coins in various places on the lot. The idea was customers would find one (heads up) and think they had good luck…

    posted by Meri on 1-26-2009 at 6:32 pm

  8. Now, how about some tips from the other side?

    My dad’s favorite strategy: When they leave the room to “negotiate with their boss”, he gets up and leaves. The salesmen always come running back. He doesn’t act like he was mad – just had to get something from the car, or remembered he had to be somewhere.

    My lame trick: A former salesman taught me about the 4-, 6- or 8-digit code that they use to encode the year of the car and their minimum sales price. The salesmen can’t be expected to know all of the cars’ prices, so they encode it on the sticker. Find it, decipher it and you know how low you can go. I then had a 3×5 card printed with a grid of interest rates x loan durations indicating the payment for a $1000 loan.

    When they asked how much I could afford per month (another trick of theirs – talk in terms of payment, not sales price), I chose a reasonable interest rate and loan duration, multiplied the indicated payment it by the thousands portion of minimum price (round up – you have to let them make some money) and said, “I can afford $238 a month.” It was fun to watch them work the math backwards to the sales price.

    posted by Bryan on 1-26-2009 at 8:22 pm

  9. My father is a car salesman and is the most honest person I know. (And, for the record, has never smoked a cigar–or anything else, for that matter– or worn a pinky ring or gold chains. So there. :p)

    posted by NYCGirl on 1-27-2009 at 4:41 am

  10. I’m sure that when the reporter went looking for a good inside story on car sales, he didn’t go to a dealership with a good reputation. All the honest car salesmen don’t make news.

    posted by Bryan on 1-27-2009 at 11:23 am

  11. There are good number of techniques adopted by salesman for used cars sale. For example they approach people interested in buying used car and start asking how much they can afford towards the monthly payment. When they say some event amount, the salesman suggest upto which amount he can be able to pay. In this way the salesman bump up the down payment, as well as monthly instalments.

    posted by Car buying tips on 1-27-2009 at 11:34 am

  12. I’ve actually read this entire report. It came out about 6 or 7 years ago. The reporter actually went to 3 or 4 different dealerships. First, it was the big price, high pressure car dealership. Then, he went to the mid priced, mid-pressure dealership, and last a mom and pop no-haggle used car dealership. The funniest part of the whole article (only about 1/4th was printed on this blog) was that he noticed that all the salesmen wore a lot of jewelry. Watches, rings, bracelets, necklaces…and he felt wierd working there without having anything on. He even admitted that when he “popped his cherry” and sold his first car, the entire place burst into applause and he started to enjoy the job. Really good article. I think it was written for consumer reports…but it’s somewhere around 9 pages long.

    posted by tommy on 1-27-2009 at 1:35 pm

  13. when I bought my new car, I did a LOT of research, but the single best tip I can give anyone is:

    SECURE YOUR FINANCING FROM YOUR BANK OR LENDER *BEFORE* YOU STEP FOOT INTO A DEALERSHIP.

    doing so allows you to bypass the ‘monthly payments’ flim-flam. You agree on a total price. With some research you can find out with a fair bit of accuracy how much the dealership paid for the car.

    The car I own sold when new for an average (national) of $29,700 US. I paid $23,400.

    The best part: when they tried to herd me into the financing office and I said, “no thanks, I have financing and I’ll be back with a check shortly” they did bent over backwards and gave me a loan at 1.5% lower interest than what I walked in with, all done without hassle or haggle… simply because I was ready and willing to say “No, I’ll buy your car without your financing”

    posted by w3weasel on 1-27-2009 at 2:23 pm

  14. I purchased a car six months ago. A sales manager scheduled an appointment at Germain Toyota (Columbus, Ohio) and when I showed up, he was at lunch. I had specified on the phone that I had already test driven the car and wanted to talk numbers since I had to be back to pick up my child at daycare. After I left the lot and picked up my child, the dealer called to say he was sorry he missed me but he was hungry. (Rude!!)

    Instead of wasting time driving to various dealerships, I did research online so that I would be comparing cars with the same features to one another and then I began calling dealers. I explained I had already driven the car and wanted to know their best deal. I gave them a number to call me back. I ended up getting pricing from $18,500-21,500. All were well below the sticker of $23,700. With a little internet research and a few phones calls and I ended up with a car that was $5,200 below sticker.

    When buying cars I have two rules…never buy the first time on the lot. Even if you need a car, wait. Second rule, always be ready to walk away. There are dozens of car dealerships around, find one that will deal with you. The salesman is not your friend, buddy, etc. They are sales people. Make them do their job and sell you a car at your price.

    posted by Del on 1-27-2009 at 8:00 pm

  15. A couple of years back, I sold cars for half a year, and besides it being a stopgap job, and the long hours, I really liked it. I did well.

    Any sales job is about changing a customers perception about your product’s value. Selling cars is no different. I was easily the smartest guy in the dealership, so it was easy for me to develop trust in my customers with my product knowledge. I read that article, and I found that lots of these tricks were just plain unnecessary. In fact, the hardest thing to get over was the ‘car salesman’ stigma.

    Still, do your research. The internet has made this a lot easier. If possible, try to sell your car independently, and get financing independently. If your state has blue laws, check out their inventory on a Sunday. It costs dealerships far more to keep a car in inventory because of the business loan they take out to buy it from the manufacturer, so you can often get a good deal on those.

    posted by B on 1-31-2009 at 9:30 pm

  16. Great article! I am posting this to my favorites. I have to do this very soon, and I forgot how much work it is! Thanks for all the great tips!

    posted by endrewhudson on 3-9-2009 at 6:37 am

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