PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience.
I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million.
(Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would come from 2 years)
I made close to 50,000 phone calls, leaving probably 20,000 voicemails. I closed atleast 1000 deals purely on the phone.
I've heard excuses, stalls, lies, promises and objections over 10,000 times.
I've seen thousands of married couples discuss if they should go ahead with spending $30-100k. I've seen how they interact while waiting. (Nothing pains me more than couples, or moreso one party, playing games on their phones ignoring each other).
While there is a lot more to modern tech sales than just closing incoming leads, I think car sales is an accelerator course for interacting with, reading, and closing people.
Interesting. I rank buy a car from a new car salesman as the worst consumer experience of my life. So much so that I've since bought used cars and in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience. I understand that it could greatly benefit the salesperson in understanding the social psychology of the consumer ... but never again will I subject myself to that process.
I'd rather go get a cavity filled, then buy a new car. Do it as infrequently as possible (hoping to get another 10 years out of my 11 year old Toyota).
Every time I visit a new car dealer I feel a need to take a shower, just to get the stink off of me.
I once dated a girl whose dad's idea of a fun Saturday was to spend the day at a car dealership to see how low a price he could negotiate for a car. He'd always walk away, regardless of how low they went. I thought that was hilarious.
BTW, apart from fixed price online sales, there are fixed priced dealerships. They advertise price on the website and don't negotiate. You just show up and get car at this price. Very smooth.
Unless you have a trade in as this is one area where they can still get you.
Do those fixed price dealers count their various add-ons (rust proofing, extended warranty...) in the fixed price or not. These add-ons are how most dealers make money (that and warranty work)
For trade-in compare price they offer to Carmax (including taxes and fees adjustment), if less, just sell to Carmax.
Whatever is on the sale sheet is included. You can order extra stuff, they will install it for you, but obviously it’s not included in the advertised price.
Sure, but "smart dealers" won't tell your trade in is worth, instead they give you final payment after your trade in, and they often won't tell you how long the loan term is for.
I had one try to add $3k for invisible (UV) paint the police could use to prosecute the thieves if my car were dismantled. All the extra fees turned a $4500 car, listed at $8500 at that dealership, into $19500. The "fixed price" just meant they were completely and utterly unwilling to negotiate on that sort of insanity, so some dealership down the road got my business instead. $5k later, the same car has had no issues for 50k miles.
Honest question, when the customer knows you're trying to fleece them and is willing to pay a small premium to finish the deal and get on with their lives, why would a dealer double down on something so outrageous?
Because making a $15,000 profit 5% of the time and nothing 95% of the time is better than making a $500 profit every time.
Basically if scamming your customers works a nontrivial fraction of the time and the margin when you're not scamming is small, scamming is the incentivized behavior.
The whole idea is that there is a car and non-negotiable advertised price, you pay the price + taxes + registration + processing fee, which are all known in advance and get the car. That’s it. If you are talented negotiator and have time, you’ll get better price elsewhere, but I value my time and well-being more.
Obviously there could be bad dealership which would try to screw you, read some reviews and don’t go to such place.
You'd like to think that, but no, there are plenty of dealers that will TELL you they're happy to negotiate everything by email/phone and then you just show up and get the car, but once you're there they want to change the deal and will still make you sit in a little office with someone that tries to add-on warranties, paint protection, prepaid services, etc.
You mentioned you liked dealers that don't negotiate. So I mentioned you can buy without negotiating at any dealership. The advertised price is pretty fair at 90% of dealerships.
Beyond that, their advertised specials are spectacular deals usually. Who spends money and attention advertising specials that don't even compete with the competition?
The problem is that you feel like a chump if you don’t negotiate. No one wants to feel like they didn’t get a deal especially on a used car. But the last time I bought one it was from a dealership that didn’t negotiate, a fact I discovered when I started negotiating. And then to see if it was true I started pushing pretty hard and they stood firm and the end result was great, I left very happy with my purchase.
Do your research, narrow it down to a small set of models and trim levels, know what the best deals available are, and set your numbers a bit lower. Ring several dealers and say "I'm looking for X.Y.Z at price $NNN, what can you do for me?". Some will not even respond, and do NOT get pulled into the "we can only talk when you are here" - cross those off the list. I found one that would come very close to what I needed, and did the whole deal via email, only actually physically meeting him when I actually went to trade-in and get the new vehicle.
And guess who got the next sale a year later when my wife's lease ran out? And who will get the next one?
On top of that, my experience at that dealer overall has been FAR better than many others. It's worth the long search and semi-log drive to find the right one.
I've only ever bought used cars, from individuals. Paying extra for the overhead of a dealership and some salesperson's bonus seems absurd to me. You're pretty much guaranteed to get taken advantage of by a professional.
Local classifieds, private sellers, take the car to a trusted mechanic for an inspection.
I've never bought a car at a dealership, and neither has anyone in my family in 25 years. But then again, I know cars inside and out (even from before my car sales career) so I feel pretty safe not accidentally buying a scammers car from Craigslist.
Very few franchise dealerships would ever sell a car with problems knowingly. It does happen, because people trade in cars with intermittent problems without telling the dealership.
Compared to Craigslist where there is no shortage of people selling cars directly with current problems, intermittent problems, hidden problems, and massive paperwork issues that can stop you from registering the vehicle all together until resolved.
This only leaves the potential for massive paperwork and back due fee issues. Surprisingly common on craiglist. A spare current registration sticker gets slapped on that belongs to another vehicle of theirs, and you buy the car not knowing it has 3 years back due fees totally $1000, probably approaching $2k if it's a pickup truck (atleast in California).
Personally I've never paid more than $7000 for a car.. but yeah, a cheque, or a transfer. You transfer the ownership at the govt office, and it's done.
Dropping 30k on a car seems a little nuts to me, but I understand different people have different values.
Just remember that what Tesla saves you in the purchase experience will come back to bite you in the service experience. You need to go into the delivery process as sanely as possible and be willing to walk away from it if you see any issues that you want fixed. The problem is that by that time you will have been waiting a month or more for your car and will then be back at square one and on Tesla's shit list to boot.
> in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience
And see Tesla knows this, which is why the margin on their cars is higher than most.
You may have disliked that sales experience with a dealer or used car salesperson, but it quite likely got you a slightly better deal than had you tried to negotiate yourself.
The margin might simply be from cutting out the middleman while keeping the middleman price. So, the buyer is not necessarily better or worse off. But not having to go through a pushy salesman is a big win. It’s why I love Carmax (and would probably like Carvana).
Tesla was supposed to pass some of those cost savings onto the end customer not to pocket it all like this but I'm aware that it's a corporation that's looking to maximize profits to their shareholders and extract as much value as possible from their clientele.
Tesla, like every other publicly traded company, sells their product at a price they feel they can get away with, in order to maximize profits. Any cost savings in the process only affects the floor price, which they're probably not selling at.
In the current market, most figurative Tesla dealers would be charging $7k+ over MSRP, which is what you can currently make immediately flipping any newly-purchased Tesla, even the base Model 3s. I'm sure there are some who would stick to MSRP out of "professionalism", but it wouldn't be the majority.
This obviously won't last, but just something to consider.
If you buy a Toyota following the Tesla model, where you call and say "I'd like to buy the car you have, for the price you have listed", you will also have a generally good experience.
I wish that was the case. The dealership experience seems designed to maximize the pressure and extract as much value from customers as possible.
My first Toyota dealer experience was offering to buy a car at advertised price, and them refusing/countering with a lease. We just walked out.
Based on that, I waited until Toyota offered pretty good unadvertised discounts and called up a bunch of dealers with an offer/car in mind. I got the car my wife and I wanted for $1k more than my offer, which was I think $9k less than MSRP, and the experience was way better. We only had to sit through the finance departments upsells.
The third sale was paying MSRP at a Lexus dealer and we still were there for almost 5 hours.
Oh yeah, it was on a plug-in prius. MSRP was I think 37K and we paid 28k. It was something like $6k in manufacturer credits because sales had stalled after Toyota ran out of carpool stickers. The dealer only knocked off $3k, and I'm sure they still made money on the sale.
My Toyota experience was okay, but I still needed to sit at a dealership for almost two hours to deal with the paperwork, wait for financing, etc. Tesla allowed me to take care of all of that from the comfort of home.
Buying a Ford was the worst experience I've had with a new car, but that could have been entirely on the dealership.
Yes, they are there all day, until closing time, or longer. Usually, the longer you stay, the more likely you are to buy their car, or give them more money. They control the situation and the incentives are in their favor. This is one reason we loathe car shopping.
My last 2 vehicle purchases (2014 and 2021) were through internet sales managers. I told them what I wanted, when I was intending to buy, that I had sent the same e-mail to every $MAKE dealership from San Diego to San Francisco, and that whoever had the best offer was getting my money. It was a painless experience both times.
Agree. I've heard of this going very well, and other times you get zero bites. I think the courtesy/approach of the email also determines if this works or not.
If you start off combative I think its much less likely to go well.
I just let my fiancée know recently that this is how I intend to purchase our next vehicle. Strictly through email until the day I go to pick it up in person. If they say 'You have to come in' to talk price I am going to hang up immediately and call the next dealer on my list.
If you do enough sales of virtually any product buying a car gets easy. It's just a game. When the salesperson says "I'll need to talk to my manager," you just say "No problem. I'm not in a hurry." And when they try to add stuff to the contract at the end, just say "No."
Entirely this. The main reason why I've only purchased one new car in my life is because dealing with car dealers (new or used) is about as fun and rewarding as pulling out my fingernails.
Alex Hormozi was on a podcast recently talking about how you should learn high volume sales skills in a scenario like a gym chain, car dealer, etc. Do that for a few years and then take those skills to sell the most expensive thing you can to make “real” money with better quality customers. Seemed like reasonable advice and aligned with your experiences...
Selling stuff is an extremely outward-focused career though, and it's its own thing. You have to be really careful due to the creeping boiler room effect. You can lose track of who/what you are inwardly very easily, due to almost no attention given your own values, and in effect a strong counter-incentive for attending to your own stuff.
I have career-coached a lot of top sales people and most of them have been very clear that time spent convincing other people is exactly that much less time spent on personal goals, education, etc. For introverts, the #1 complaint is that it focuses you on your weakest side as your career foundation.
Most also ended up gradually substituting sales education for specialty education, without realizing what they were doing, or that they had a choice. So you get people with tremendous, but less-interesting people skills hitting their '40s and going to tech boot camps because that's where their heart was all along.
I had similar experience myself and if I could go back in time I think people skills learned in basic IT work were plenty. Let sales people be sales people, hire them to do sales, and stick to one's own favorite things...otherwise yeah if you like sales, knock yourself out.
"creeping boiler room effect" -- I never saw this phrase before. I like it. This is the reason that I personally avoid sales people (outside of work / socially).
To me: Sales is fundamentally about upselling -- selling you more than you need. How can people do this 8 hours per day, then go home and pretend they are not a sales person? Every GOOD sales person tells me they are "only like that at work". No, they are not. As a result, I try to avoid them! In social settings with sales people, before you know it, they are trying to manipulate you. It is so tiring.
Doesn’t it matter what they are “selling” after work hours?
I was a salesman 20+ years ago and still engage in up selling my friends. But it’s usually to get them to engage in healthy activities like working out, going for a walk, or eating healthy; or to get them to try a new experience like tasting a new food or being more honest/kind to their loved ones.
Sometimes I wonder if I’m exhausting to them or they appreciate the good intention.
Some people insanely detest being manipulated - even if it is for their own good (that's at least what the manipulating person claims). I personally observe this "manipulation-detesting" character trait in particular to be prevalent in hacker circles.
By the way: this is also a reason that I see why so many hackers date differently from the typical population since dating is about manipulating the other side to love one.
Q Biggie: You hit the nail on the head. Most hackers I know are thinking "run away" when they see / hear a sales person. "Oh fu-k, what are these people trying to sell or make me do?" When I re-read this post, I feel the same about senior technical management that does nothing more than powerpoint, email, meetings, and phone/vid calls. The last time they wrote code or did anything technical was (frequently) never, or so long ago that the technology sounds like an archeological dig!
Then I have to conclude that a lot of dating advice that one finds is plainly wrong: "show off your best side" is for example an instance of "manipulate the other person to believe that you are of higher value than you actually are (and thus a relationship with you is a better deal than it actually is)".
I'd agree that it's wrong. If the person you're dating isn't comfortable with you being yourself, then it's probably the wrong person. Presenting a fake impression of yourself to convince them to stick around seems like a poor foundation for a relationship.
I appreciate that you have good intention, but I don't like it. I sincerely try to avoid sales people. Only when absolutely necessary. And dating sales people is hell. I made that mistake a couple of times. Only with real distance could I see they were always try to manipulate me to do something for them. It was exhausting.
I think the hacker (non-sales) style is to lead by example, not spend so much effort trying to convince others with words. "Deeds lead" for hackers.
For example, instead of trying to directly convince a very unhealthy co-worker to eat less junk food, I might talk about my own struggles with junk food eating... or say that I am trying to cut down. Or exercise more. Or whatever. But focus on myself and my own actions and the messages they emit... rather that trying to directly manipulate the other person with words only.
One thing I learned about the industry is that dealership salespeople are hired from the same pool as, say, McDonalds employees. These are not college graduates who have white-collar job offers. They join with no existing skills at low wage. Turnover is massive, the average sales agent leaves within a year. Meanwhile, the whole industry is pushing hard to adopt Tesla's model of fixed pricing and replacing people with software.
I went to a top US university in a stem degree. My coworker was a med student that couldn't pass the Mcats, but wasn't a bozo. Basically everyone had a degree, and everyone made atleast $100k. I personally made about $225k but as I said, I was pretty good. I know a person in Bay area car sales making $300k+. I assume there are many others.
I assume you agree a McDonald's employee is not going to close accountants and doctors and lawyers and programmers on a car as often as an engineering grad would... And if that's true, why would a car dealership hire McDonald's type employees instead of slightly failed but still intelligent university stem grads? They don't cost more, since it's all pay for performance.
A German brand luxury dealership yes, but honestly just about everything applies the same at a Chevy dealership. The pay per vehicle is less on average, but the vehicles and customers are so much easier to deal with that you sell more per hour worked in my opinion.
That's true of most sales, including medical sales. But this is also why incentives for sales are highly tied to performance. You can't fake that skill.
Fun fact, most surgeons learn to perform surgeries (in particular how to use new techniques and equipment) from sales people who don't have degrees. They often actually go into the surgery with them.
I would get many of these type leads. The better you are, the more of these you can close. They're not anyone's favorite, but if I have a car we can't sell because it's an ugly color, or weird options configuration, or in general we need to move some cars, I'd play along. I'm just kidding a bit.
In reality, even very desirable cars can have this game played on them. I once sold a car $25k over MSRP, and the customer was thrilled because that was the lowest markup he could find.
When it comes to used cars, finding the lowest price is usually a terrible plan I could go into for longer than a PG blog post.
Bought a car via carwoo back when it was in business. The service let you message dealership salespeople and get quotes back. I met the guy that sold me my car for about 15 seconds total in the entire process.
By far the swiftest and best large product purchasing experience I ever had. I was sad to see them close.
I recognize that it could be a helpful and rigorous experience in sales, but most car people I've gone to across dealerships have tried to guilt trip and lie to me to get me to spend more money than I have. As a student paying full in cash, I was pushed ruthlessly despite firmly saying no, and ultimately I got my car somewhere else.
It reminds me how Best Buy used to have horrible customer experience, it was all commission-based, and you would be hounded when first walking in the store. Then Apple came along with the model of "don't force someone to do anything, and the right product for them might not be in the store, and that's fine". (Notably, Best Buy seems to have gotten better since.)
I was about top 1% in the country. So buying from me would be a different experience. Maybe you landed on someone in the bottom 50%, at a bad dealership too.
The owner of our dealership was a Cal grad, the sales manager was a Jewish accounting major, I had an engineering degree, my favorite coworker completed medschool but couldn't pass the MCATS, and everyone else had a degree too.
When I went to work for a Penske dealership (a public company), corporate was in town one day and had a meeting with me to ask how the owner at my previous dealership did things. So maybe it wasn't your typical car dealership.
He used to joke about him being Jewish as part of why he was so good with our numbers. I meant it in a good way? I guess my sales skills are a bit rusty.
Car salespeople say a lot of culturally inappropriate things constantly to each other. The sales manager I mentioned constantly referenced himself being a Jewish accountant to us as a fun way to remind us he's good at his job. Somehow it stuck and I guess I forgot even positive stereotypes are now allowed.
I have to admit, the fun banter between salespeople and even management is the #1 thing I miss these days.
> guess I forgot even positive stereotypes are now allowed.
could have been avoided had you said something like "we had a Jewish accountant, as he often liked to remind us" or something that didn't imply that you personally attached some elevated level of job competence based on his choice of holy book(s).
Isn't Jewish also a race, not just a choice of holy books? When he said it I assume he meant it regarding the race, not that reading the Torah makes you better with numbers.
Do we really need to moderate the fact that while listing proof of how smart and good my team was, I used Jewish accountant as a descriptor? (That I only said because he constantly joked about this himself and it just stuck with me). It was included to accent a list of positives about the groups intelligence.
If I had said we had a Polish mathematician, would that also need moderation? Or if describing how service oriented we were, I included an ex Catholic nun?
Likely they mean one of the step exams. Med school and residency are a brutal game - the exams don’t stop till you pass the boards at or around the time you become an attending!
I appreciate that you understood exactly what I meant, giving a medschool outsider some benefit of the doubt. Yes it was one of the board exams he couldn't pass.
Others instantly assumed I was lying or exaggerating, as if I need some street cred on an anonymous 1 week old throwaway account.
This is getting more irrelevant to the thread, but it’s highly unlikely “inability” to pass a step exam was the reason for exiting medicine. The first pass rate for US MDs is 95-97%. American medical school is designed to make it highly unlikely you will not pass those tests. You could also retake it up to 5 times.
The real issue is that failing a step exam or passing with a lower score (once passed you can never retake) nearly completely eliminates you from certain specialities - especially the more lucrative surgical subspecialties. Some people may simply decide to give up at that point.
It’s much more likely burnout or an overall “fuck this” with the training, or other red flag, eg cheating or egregious behavioral problem then not passing a single exam.
Because although there are a ton of exams after entering medical school none are as high stakes as the MCAT for continuing to be a doctor.
Ah, great points! The person may have said it was an exam to keep the explanation simple for others.
Perhaps they didn’t match (entirely didn’t match or couldn’t match where they needed to be for family/some obligation), burnt out, etc.
There’s tons of reasons one may not make it all the way through, though it is quite rare if you grind hard enough and are adequately flexible RE residency location and stuff. The system wants you to finish once you’re in med school, since med schools and residencies are measured by completion rates and similar success metics.
Medicine is a really tough thing to get in to, and I don’t think people fully grasp that as they apply for med school. It looks prestigious from the outside, but is financially draining for a long time and is extremely inflexible (find out where you match and move with only ~3 months notice?! Who thinks that’s acceptable in the modern world of two working spouses?).
Maybe not the thread, but certainly relevant to the top commenter's story, which sounds really embellished.
"Failing the MCAT" (?) -> "Failing boards as dropout reason" (?) ...
And top commenter is all over the thread, trying to win people back after folks point out these oddities. Seems like a lot of effort.
Either top commenter is the car sales messiah or embellishing (along with his "alleged" med school dropout colleague). Both are possible, but one is more likely.
Can you think of any possible reason I would do this on a basically new account, labeled throwaway, basically making it worthless as a long term account anyway?
Furthermore, I said early on I was top 1% in the country (for my brand atleast, which already only hires 'better' and experienced salespeople) and later narrowed it down to the most accurate at 0.3%.
But let's say I'm lying.. for fun I suppose? Doesn't everything I wrote apply to someone that actually IS top 1% in car sales? Even if I didn't sell 30 cars a month for 10 years, surely you don't deny someone does that? And even if you'd argue that "no, no one can sell 30 cars a month for years!!"... Doesn't the entire point of my original message still stand.. even a salesperson that is just average will still make tens of thousands of calls, practice thousands of closes, see how thousands of people act as they try to negotiate or stall...
Are you implying top sales people don't exist, or that one wouldn't be on hacker News, or that I was simply not one because of the way I write things?
Ps, if you check my post history, you'll see I went to Cal as an ME, and recently self taught and wrote an entire Saas in shitty php that 30+ companies pay for happily. Unless that is ALSO made up, doesn't that sound exactly like the type of person that would probably outperform the average car sales person?
> Can you think of any possible reason I would do this on a basically new account, labeled throwaway, basically making it worthless as a long term account anyway?
On first order principles, I reject your premises that "throwaway" account names make accounts worthless in the long run. There are tons of counter-factual examples, e.g., "ironic name."
> Ps, if you check my post history, you'll see <insert resume"...
See, this is circular reasoning. If your account is "worthless," what incentive do you have to be reliable/honest?
What's interesting is that I think you know these counter-arguments and are trying to steer away from them.
No, I didn't know of apparently a popular user named ironic name. However, I'd still argue that ironic name is just a username like most. A username that says throwaway in the actual username is always going to be considered basically trollish imo and serves no real purpose of building a reputation around. What, am I going to magically turn this into a network play to land a VP of sales job somewhere?
And to your second point, that while obviously there is no proof of anything by just reading my post history, you'd have to be slightly crazy to think I started a new account recently, and from the FIRST post dreamt up an elaborate plan to seem like a php Saas creating, Berkeley grad, top salesperson persona..
And to think, you caught me in my massive lie because I mistook the MCAT exam for board exams! Something no regular person would EVER do.
I didn’t necessarily think of that as an oddity though. There’s a lot of stigma associated with dropping out of something like medicine combined with very few people out of medicine knowing any details of the training and licensure process. That said, the overwhelming likely scenario is either quitting or getting kicked out and using the “board” failure as a cover (colloquially doctors hardly ever call them boards in the US, they just call them “step”. Boards usually refer to exams taken for specialities after one is licensed and has completed residency). Regardless of the posters possible embellishments I wouldn’t expect them to know any of this. Also some people assume it’s like law where there’s some type of bar exam with a terrible first pass rate. There isn’t. Specialty board exams have lower pass rates, but failing those won’t prevent you from being a licensed practicing physician.
> There’s a lot of stigma associated with dropping out of something like medicine...
Sure, there's external stigma, but IMO, the larger driver for stigma is self-imposed. Med school enrollees are filled with "most likely to exceed" personalities who are harder on themselves and catastrophize a minor setback v. peers as "the end of the world."
> (colloquially doctors hardly ever call them boards in the US, they just call them “step”.
Anecdotally, I've only heard friends in medicine (US) refer to them (the USMLE exam[0] and steps) as "boards," while in med school. I'm sure that some call them steps, too. I'm also aware of post-residency/fellowship specialty boards. Those are usually singular because you only need one and sometimes they're oral, like a thesis defense where you get grilled on a schedule of of your cases over the past couple years.
> catastrophize a minor setback v. peers as "the end of the world."
The counterpoint to this is that most medical trainees endure a tremendous number or setbacks during training that they must overcome. If anything residency teaches it is grit. I would say trainees generally tend to evolve in this respect from premed undergrads and 1st/2nd year med students who are relatively insufferable throughout the rest of training where there is necessarily a personality shift.
> Anecdotally, I've only heard friends in medicine (US) refer to them (the USMLE exam[0] and steps) as "boards,"
Yes, probably when talking to non doctors to keep it simple. But everyone inside usually just says specifically Step 1, Step 2 etc or USMLE.
> Those are usually singular because you only need one
No. If you subspecialize - you will board in two or more things. For instance an interventional cardiologist will be boarded in internal medicine, general cardiology and interventional cardiology each with their own training requirements and exams.
> sometimes they're oral, like a thesis defense where you get grilled on a schedule of of your cases over the past couple years.
The vast majority of even the oral exams are standardized tests with standardized cases. I can only think of OBGYN that does the case review.
Again, I'm not qualified to get at the nuance so I defer to you if you're in the industry.
> No. If you subspecialize
Sure. I agree that you need a singular board for a terminal specialty and potentially interstitial boards along the way.
> Yes, probably when talking to non doctors to keep it simple. But everyone inside usually just says specifically Step 1, Step 2 etc or USMLE.
Again, I'm not in the field, but see a lot of references on the web using "boards" language. From a quick google search "USMLE called steps or boards", I get a test prep site [0]. I'm assuming this is a matter of "precise v. common" usage.
> The United States Medical Licensure Exam (USMLE) Step 1, commonly called “the Boards,” is a standardized test
I think in another post they said they were premed, so maybe they completed that program but couldn’t get a high enough score on the standardized test that most schools require.
In my experience[1], interacting with the salesperson and agreeing on the cars' price is about 25% of the sale process (and hassle).
The salesperson nails down price, model/unit, with the customer, which already involves all manner of sleazy games on pricing.
After the "sale", there's a much longer gauntlet of pitfalls and traps to navigate: extended warranties, add-ons (roof racks, floor mats, etc...), financing, trade-in value, anti-theft, pre-paid maintenance, etc, etc... (it goes on and on, it's exhausting).
I'm going to guess, just based on the amount of manhours the dealership spends on the initial sale agreement, versus all the other crap, that the true money is not made by the dealership on the actual car sale, but on all these add-ons after the sale.
[1] - fairly limited, bought 3 cars over the ~15 years, 1 used, 2 new, and it's been about 8 years since my last purchase, not sure how much its changed since then.
I agree, the "finance person" that technically does your paperwork and pitches you all those aftermarket products is the biggest crook in the industry (right next to the service advisors that tell you what service your car needs and the price).
I would sometimes fill in for finance on a rainy day, and even though I was top 0.3% in the country when it came to car sales, I Couldn't sell that garbage even with a gun pointed at me. I just can't lie like that.
It seems somewhat simple to just stand firm with the finance person and refuse all the add-ons, but how does one figure out what services are actually needed when the service adviser comes to you with a list of issues?
> how does one figure out what services are actually needed when the service adviser comes to you with a list of issues?
As a basic set of rules:
a) say no to everything.
b) look at the service intervals in the book (or what the maintenance minder in the car says).
c) ask them if the factory service plan would cover it
d) ask them if it's critical to safety, and if so, explain what would happen if you didn't do it, how you would notice it was an issue, and how you should respond while it's happening on the road.
e) as soon as you run out of factory service, and maybe factory warranty, use an independent mechanic
Now, sometimes the factory service intervals are wrong, and sometimes there's stuff you probably should do that the factory doesn't say to do ever; but for the most part, the factory schedule is a good baseline, and dealer service wants to do extra frivolous stuff. Some independents do too, I have never seen a next oil change sticker printed with factory intervals.
These are good questions to ask if you assume you would get truthful and non-misleading answers. I wouldn't trust a salesperson to answer these truthfully.
Is there any magic phrase you can say to this person to get them to stop? I've leased 5 or 6 cars from the same dealership which is all around great except for this one part.
For example the green energy clipboard person trying to get you to switch power companies, you can tell them that you rent and there is no comeback.
I've bought several cars at dealerships in recent years. I found that simply saying "I feel lucky" with a slight grin, when presented with the warranty, pre-maintenance, tire damage and so on, works well. The finance person laughs (sometimes weakly, sometimes genuinely) and we move on to complete signing the forms. A couple of times they pressed the issue, so I said "I feel really lucky" and that did the trick.
Everyone checks KBB, edmunds, and all the others before buying a car. Thus everyone knows exactly what the dealer is paying for the car before walking in. Nobody is willing to leave the dealer a reasonable profit margin or the salesman a living wage. There are plenty of other dealers and nobody is loyal so odds are they won't see you again no matter how good the experience is (if you are a corporation buying for a fleet you get different service). As such dealers look to other places to make money.
If people would decide to allow the dealers a reasonable profit margin things could change. Right now though dealers just see a sucker when someone does that though. I'm not hopeful things will change, but that is the first key.
I personally don't think what the dealer paid matters. If a car is desirable, a few are available, we're going to sell for as much as possible.
If a car is undesirable, and many are available and we need to move them, we will sell them for a loss.
I don't blame people for buying cars we sell for at a loss (although sometimes I wonder why these people don't stop and wonder why this car is so heavily discounted). And they shouldn't blame us for charging more for something many people want and is in short supply.
You could probably make a post on dealer allocations by manufacturers. Dealers are effectively obligated to move the cars sent to them, the crap and the gold.
Then there’s the gold that only gets short-listed to customers that have been long-time customers and sometimes helped you move the crap (but that’s probably only on the higher-end of things).
Beyond even what you mentioned, there's crazy payment bonus (holdback) structures based on so many variables it really doesn't make much sense to try to figure out what a dealer paid for a car.
A dealer for example will get more back per car sold, if they have the most modern building style. (a way manufacturers entice dealerships to remodel to latest corporate recommended aesthetics/experience).
They also pay more if your dealership is stand alone. A joint VW/Audi/Porsche dealership will end up paying more for cars (getting less money back technically) than a standalone dealership.
I could go on and on about the various metrics for getting more or less rebate money back.
Would you really pay more for your car because a dealership paid more because they hadn't remodeled recently? Of course not. You compare to what others are doing and that should be enough, unless you really want to try and randomly guess just how low they might go that day and walk and try again everywhere?
As others have said things like holdbacks and incentives are not known. (And since incentives depend on number sold they can't be known) Still buyers have good information and take advantage of that.
I think any work that puts you in direct personal contact with thousands of people is going to be valuable.
I sometimes used to think how fun being a waiter could be compared to car sales, because the interaction in nowhere near as tense and adversarial. In the best of sales, you quickly become and stay friendly with people, but the bottom 25% are mini wars and that beats on you after a while.
Yeah waiting tables almost always ends well. And there's something satisfying on a primal level about feeding people and watching them leave happy and full.
100% agree here -- and you don't necessarily need to "work" such a job! I volunteered at a farmers market for a couple years and it gave me a fantastic view of people outside my bubble.
Same as with how to be good at coding: perform a lot of it, in as many different contexts as reasonably feasible.
The finance arms of sales teams however, like the teams that assemble “no interest” parts of the deals, I was no fan of. There ain’t no free lunch, and the linguistic gymnastics they went through were a waste of my time to parse.
> I think car sales is an accelerator course for interacting with, reading, and closing people.
There’s a lot of truth to this, but you could easily switch out "car sales" with any other kind of client and customer interaction. When I worked closely with users many moons ago, I quickly realized that most of them weren’t getting their needs met and were super excited to have me work one on one with them, and a very small percentage were actively hostile to any interaction at all. This kind of thing has held true for every job I’ve ever had. 1% of the customers cause 99% of the problems.
Yes that's true about any sales really working, but I thought car sales was an interesting mix of volume and high dollar sales.
Obviously selling a $1M Saas enterprise contract is even higher dollars, but you probably don't get to try and close 5 of those in one day like you do in cars. You'd be lucky to get 5 in a month I assume, if not quarter.
You could get more sales practice selling items at an electronics store, but the stakes are lower than a $50k car so you won't learn the reading people part because few people totally shut down when discussing buying a stereo.
Bought a new car recently and it was a joy, the market being what it is you go in knowing you’ll pay MSRP. Yeah it feels expensive, and is, but removing the negotiation was great UX
Also helped that the dealership was pretty empty. A few of the dealerships I went to were madhouses and I just wanted to leave immediately as it was a chaotic environment
You must have been a top seller. These are incredible stats! That means your average car price was about 45K (I assume: USD). Wow. What brand of cars were you selling? Did other dealers try to buy you away... or did your own dealership give you huge bonuses for these revenues?
About buying a car: As I understand, it is the most expensive "consumable" product that most people buy in their life. And they buy at least one every 10 years, so about 6-12 in their life. Compare a house: Many people only buy one or two in whole life. When selling cars, you are seeing the pinnacle of retail sales. I agree: The experience must be incredible. What do you do now? I hope you are doing B2B sales in software or pharma (where the markup is crazy)!
While what you are saying is historically true, the internet has made the car salesman role pretty much irrelevant. I expect the job (and dealerships themselves) won't exist a decade or two from now. There are enough pictures, videos, spec sheets, expert reviews and forum discussions available online that the word of a sleazy salesman is worth nothing. More and more customers today walk into dealerships only because they have to by law, but know exactly what they want and what price they are willing to pay.
People have been saying this for 20 years. Yet car salespeople are more important than ever from what I've seen. But let's ignore that because you could argue it's just opinion.
My favorite example/rebuttal to this is:
Imagine a car sales evolves to basically vending machines. You walk up to the box, pick a car, swipe your card, and a roll-up door opens and your car pops out. Amazing! No salespeople needed. Every town just gets a few vending machine!
Then one day, one vending machine owner decides to pay a bright kid to stand next to the vending machine in case the people have questions. Sales would go up at that vending machine. Soon all vending machines have a salesperson standing next to them helping people. And we're back to where we started.
(Unless you think a smart helpful person standing next to the vending machine would make sales go down I suppose... But this is against everything I've seen selling thousands of cars)
Who was saying this 20 years ago? eCommerce was barely a thing back then. Smartphones, YouTube and Twitter didn't exist. The only people who knew about new cars and their features were enthusiasts who got a dozen magazine subscriptions.
The difference is that today there are actually companies successfully following this model, Tesla being the most prominent example. All other manufacturers want to cut down on the mandatory middlemen fees (and have publicly said it - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629075106/https://www.nytim...). It's a matter of when, not if, they will get to it.
People have been saying this since dealerships stared buying internet leads. I started in 2008. Even then internet departments were fully built out and everyone was worried about the end of salespeople for several years. So yes, even back in 1999 you could email a dealership and work multiple salespeople against each other. And that made people talk about the end of salespeople, negotiated prices, and dealerships.
Even Tesla has a lot of salespeople, at corporate and at the showcase stores. You just can't get a discount from them.
If someone built a car vending machine, it would only be a matter of time until someone noticed you can make sales go up at the vending machine by putting someone standing next to it.
I recall a number of stories of "automobile vending machines", and believe there may have been some early instances based out of Dubai or China, though the earliest online stories I'm finding presently are from the 2012--2014 period, about one decade ago, not two. That said, the concept surely occurred to someone prior to that.
"Think back to the Automobile Vending Machine concept presented earlier...", in Implementing Japanese AI Techniques: Turning the Tables for a Winning Strategy by Richard Tabor Greene.
A smart helpful person is one thing. Someone whose pay cheque depends on convincing people to buy a car even if it's not the right one for them is something else entirely.
Dealerships try to hire smart helpful people that can sell 30+ cars a month like I did. They don't always succeed, just like most companies can't hire the best programmers consistently either.
In most industries salesmen are rewarded long term for selling you the right thing even if it isn't the most profitable today. However in the case of cars you buy one and odds are the next one will be a different brand and thus new dealer, even if it is the same brand you can choose a different dealer.
I don't doubt what you're saying. I also assume the bright kid is lying or making it up. This is not just for car sales, but any salesman. If I can't find it out myself, I have no reason to ask the bright kid. Sometimes I ask them a token question to see if they'll lie to me.
I'd buy from the vending machine in a hot minute. But I might be a freak.
To be fair, my most recent car buying experience was just fine. It was a new Subaru, just as the pandemic was starting and they had a lot of excess inventory. We paid the asking price, but it was close enough to the best price we could find from our research. The finance salesman pushed every possible add-on, and we simply countered with "let us take the brochure home and figure out what we want to do." At the end we wrote a check for the car with no extra goodies and drove away.
Even the grocery stores with good self-checkouts have someone there to resolve issues and answer questions. I wouldn't use a self-checkout that didn't since I'd have to hope someone working the day I had trouble was trained on the system.
On the other hand, I learn that working in car sales might teach you about wrong sales "skills". At least, one does not learn skills needed for companies which want to have relationship with their customers.
But you also learn a lot right skills (follow up, tick skin, read people, etc.)
Early stage founders also have to sell something (a hope and a dream) that's harder to move than used cars, so maybe that selling experience translates!
To be honest, so was I. Selling you something stupid is a lot more work, and riskier, than selling you what you want and works well.
I personally had more leads than I could handle, because I didn't burn my leads. So if you came in wanting a vehicle for the snow, and all I had was SUVs with the sports package and performance tires, I didn't lie to you or try to downplay it. Sure I mentioned you could have a winter set of wheels and swap, and get the best performance year round, but I didn't say "don't worry, these tires work just fine in snow". It burns leads that know better.
Thus if I couldnt really help you, I'd make the best of the situation if possible and move on. I had enough people to email and call back waiting on me, that spending an hour lying in hopes of a sale really wasn't worth it.
I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million.
(Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would come from 2 years)
I made close to 50,000 phone calls, leaving probably 20,000 voicemails. I closed atleast 1000 deals purely on the phone.
I've heard excuses, stalls, lies, promises and objections over 10,000 times.
I've seen thousands of married couples discuss if they should go ahead with spending $30-100k. I've seen how they interact while waiting. (Nothing pains me more than couples, or moreso one party, playing games on their phones ignoring each other).
While there is a lot more to modern tech sales than just closing incoming leads, I think car sales is an accelerator course for interacting with, reading, and closing people.