Working The Deal Backwards

The big “no-no” of my young Car Man life was working a deal backwards. All car deals, as I was taught, had to be worked in specific steps in a specific order. To do otherwise, would reduce your chances of closing the deal and would cost you gross. If you attempted to work the deal any other way, your customer would be turned to another salesman and your commission would be cut in half.

My early trainers likened working a deal properly to a roll of nickels. Each nickel represented a step of the deal, the first being the initial greeting, the last being the time just before they leave in their new car and you tell them you ripped their heads off. (Ah, the days before CSI!) These steps were drilled into me so thoroughly that I became incapable of working a deal any other way.

All in all this was good because working the deal in an organized way is very important. I discovered that if I followed the steps faithfully, the types of objections I encountered were usually the same, so overcoming those objections just became a matter of trial and error. The weird part was that if I wandered from the steps the objections changed slightly, like the time a customer told me she couldn’t buy the car because it was a full moon and she needed to get home before the “change” started to occur. These new objections threw me off because as a young salesman I was unsure of myself, not particularly creative on my feet, and still unfamiliar with the creatures of the night.

Of course, after selling cars for nearly forty years, I’ve heard every possible objection a million times. Overcoming them, or in a lot of cases simply ignoring them, has become as natural to me as drinking beer. But I still remember being young and dumb as if it were yesterday. Now I realize a case could be made that I am now old and dumb, but now is not the time to get into that.

So what point am I trying to make? Learn the steps of a deal and follow them, God damn it! Work each deal with the precision and organization of a brain surgeon. You’ll never be able to cash in on a Big Dummy With A Way To Go if you screw up your presentation.

Ironically, I deal almost exclusively with flakes, and I now work most of my deals backwards. Well, I suppose it’s not truly backwards. Let’s just say that I’ve had to resort the roll of nickels. When you deal with flakes you can’t line them on a car in the traditional manner. You have to find out up front about their credit, down payment, whether they have a driver’s license. Many times I run their credit before I even show them a car!

But every time I do this I feel a twinge of guilt even though I know I’m doing things properly. In my mind I envision my brother, Danny, scowling at me, tearing up my credit app and turning the deal.

In my declining years I often think about the rules of our business as they apply to real life, and the term “working a deal backwards” has new meanings. Every day I run into people who live their entire lives doing things backwards. They land on cars they can’t possibly afford. They purchase the latest styles in clothes but don’t pay their rent. Every thing on their credit is bad, and they can’t understand why they can’t buy a car with nothing down. And the saddest of all: they have children without the benefit of a spouse. Their lives are as out of control as leaves blowing down the street in a winter wind. It’s all quite sad.

Jeez, this commentary has taken a sober turn! I’ve gone from creatures of the night to social commentary in a few short paragraphs. Somebody slap me!

The bottom line, I suppose, is that we can’t do much about The Others and their messy lives. The only thing we can do is figure out a way of selling them a car and making a little money to starve of our own creatures of the night. The important thing is that we do it competently and with integrity. And we must do it quickly—before the full moon when the “change” occurs.


Talk to you later,



David

P.S. Writing this has given me a feeling of déjà vu. Am I starting to repeat myself?