Eye contact is one of the things they tell you about when you’re learning to be a salesman. As they say, “The eyes are the windows of the soul”, so it’s important to look into the eyes of your prospect to see if they give off any information you can use against them. Scratch that. I meant to say so you can help them.
But sometimes a customer refuses to look you in the eye, and most of the time it’s not a good sign that you’re going to sell a car. If after applying all your Car Man wiles on them and determine you don’t have a deal, I highly recommend that you take this opportunity to mess with is the guy (or gal). I mean you’re not going to make any money anyway so you might as well have a little fun. Right?
The most extreme example of no eye contact is the guy who not only will not look at you; he turns his back to you while he’s speaking. Not only is this guy hard to hear, he’s damn rude. Oh, he tries to pretend he’s looking the lot over as you talk, but if you do a little experimenting you will quickly discover he’s not doing anything as logical as that. If you start to move toward the front of him, he will rotate away from you. It’s kind of like the moon orbiting around the earth always showing the same side, but in the customer’s case it’s the back of his head or the side of his face! It’s fascinating in a piss-you-off sort of way.
When faced with this type of customer try this: start maneuvering yourself to face him and when he moves away, just continue the rotation. In the most extreme cases, it can look comical. There you are trying to align yourself in front of him, and there he is spinning faster and faster to avoid any possibility of eye contact. As I was doing this once I caught sight of a couple of guys in the showroom watching me. They were laughing their asses off. And the weird part is that the customer rarely catches on that you’re screwing with him.
This situation doesn’t happen very often, damn it. Most of the time, eye contact fearing customers will simply look off to the side trying to avoid any contact with your evil, hypnotic, car salesman peepers. A fun thing to do with these people is if they are looking off to your left, for example, you look off to their right. Then you have two people taking to each other but not looking at each other. Eventually the customer will realize what’s going on and it tends to really freak him out. Great fun!
Once I had a goof who kept looking down towards my shoes as I pitched him on a new ’78 Datsun B210. As it happens I was standing next to a long planter box. When my irritation point overcame my need to sell a car I sat down suddenly on the edge planter, my eyes finally locking on his. He jumped back as if I had goosed him and bolted off the lot!
I guess he couldn’t take a joke.
Talk to you later,
David
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