this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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I sold cars for a year. During the initial onboarding we were asked to "sell a pen" to the trainer.
Everyone jumped right in to selling the qualities of the pen they had in hand.
At the end of the exercise the trainer said, "I'm looking for a pencil".
The point was, don't assume what the customer is looking for. Ask qualifying questions and identify 3-5 hot buttons, then based on what should be knowledge of the inventory and inventory of surrounding dealerships (yeah, they're all connected to some degree), make recommendations that fit their needs.
Then describe all the ways it could fulfill their wants using positive, yes questions. Don't ask a question you don't know the answer to. We were taught that it takes 5-10 Yes responses to offset the negative mental energy from a question asked resulting in a No - so we weren't supposed to mess that up. That was just one of numerous psychological plays we were taught and forced to use or get threatened with being fired or having bonuses taken away.
The whole training series was bullshit. And I say it was bullshit because it sucked playing all these games on people. Yeah, 1/5 of the time it didn't work because they caught on. But the amount of times it actually worked made me feel guilty and sad.
The amount of times you put someone into a car they couldn't afford because you successfully sold them on their wants and not their needs was awful.
I quit near the end of that year because fuck car sales and fuck car dealerships. This was 15 years ago, so who knows what it's like now.
Also, because I assume someone might ask (lol assuming, I fail), this was for a conglomerate that owned 5 used car lots, a Scion lot, a Toyota lot, a Lexus lot, and oddly a Ford & Chevy lot. Last I heard they're just down to a Lexus lot and one used car lot now. Apparently the mortgage bubble and COVID hit them hard. Fine by me.