Saturday Car Dealer Ramblings

Have you ever known someone who told you they were going to "try selling cars"? I would imagine most of you probably do as the car business tends to attract almost every sales oriented person at one time or another.

Somewhat surprisingly I would say only ten to twenty percent of the folks who try selling cars actually choose to stick with it for any meaningful amount of time. Most of the car salespeople I started out with have long since moved on to their version of bigger and better things. I should qualify this post and my opinions about car sales in general by telling you now that other than selling expensive bicycles for a year I've spent my entire adult career doing nothing but selling new and used cars so my viewpoint may be a bit warped here.

I've never understood why so many salespeople only seem to make it two or three months in this business. It is not terribly hard to sell someone a car and virtually everyone you know is a prospect. I've always told my people that to succeed in car sales you have to like one of the following three things:

• Cars
  
• People
• Money

It doesn't particularly matter which of the above you like or which order you may happen to like any of them in, but you need to like at least one and the more the better. The car business is really that simple unless you choose to make it complicated.

A car salesperson shows up to work, calls customers, watches the lot for customers, helps with moving the inventory around, pals around with the other employees, calls salespeople at other car dealers, answers and writes emails, writes letters and mails cards, and stays up on new car product information via manufacturer support. There is training and such to attend to as well as various other duties and responsibilities of course (here in the North we have to scrape the snow off of the cars each time it storms) but absolutely none of it is difficult. The best part is that all of the above only takes up half of your day and what you do with the rest of the day depends on how motivated you are.

This post is the beginning of a Saturday tradition where I will share stories and events, both past and present, that have happened to me, with me, or around me, as I spend my day staring at traffic and talking to customers. As always thanks for stopping and please come back soon.