WHEELS OF FORTUNE : They’ve slowed for some car salesmen during the current buying slump. Thus, morale is low and turnover is high among the ranks of sellers.
A game, a dance, an arm-wrestling match. This is how the people who sell cars for a living describe what they do. That is, when they do it these days.
Customers have put the brakes on car buying this year. With some exceptions, times are harder in the nation’s showrooms and car lots than they have been in nearly a decade.
Business has been pretty lousy, admitted one Chevrolet salesman, who requested anonymity. “I could write a book.”
Another recounted a heavy negotiating session recently. “I said, ‘If I give you that price, will you buy it?’ He said yes. He lied,” said the car peddler, who wished to remain anonymous.
“I’ve been on the phone with him twice. We’re below invoice now. I’ll be lucky if I can make $45 on that car.”
As they say on the showroom floor, that’s sales.
“We have a joke in the industry,” said Jimmy Banos, a 22-year career salesman who has sold Acuras in Glendale for two months. “We lose money on every sale but we make it up in volume.”
Actually, sales have been cruising along nicely at Glendale Acura and other Acura dealerships because of the popularity of the Integra car. The same holds true for the Mazda Miata, for which, salesmen report, some shoppers have offered more than the sticker price since it was introduced July 1.
Overall, car sales were down for the first half of the year, led by a big drop at General Motors and smaller declines for Chrysler and Ford. Most of the big Japanese car makers are up or are even with last year’s sales.
But for many auto salesmen--and the vast majority are men--the sales slump has made what can be a difficult job even worse.
“Car sales is the toughest sales there is,” said Lou Miller, who owns Mazda, Nissan and Subaru dealerships in Culver City and who started in the business as a salesman.
To be sure, there is a good living to be made selling cars and the business provides a home for a lot of people who could never sit behind a desk for eight hours each day.
Nomadic Life
Still, the hours are long, fat months can be followed by lean ones and hostility from customers is common.
Among the nearly 190,000 people selling new and used cars is a core of career salesmen who have been at the same dealerships for years. However, in times such as these when a good salesman sells and a mediocre one languishes, it becomes a nomadic life.
“We’re seeing a lot of increasingly transitory behavior. We always see this when it gets this way,” said Jeff Morris, director of training and development at J. D. Power & Associates, an Agoura Hills automotive research firm.
“Typically, what happens is, as dealer inventories increase and other pressures increase on the dealer, management will indirectly communicate this to the sales department,” said Morris, a former salesman and the son of an automobile dealer.
“ ‘Things aren’t great,’ is what is communicated to the sales department. They’re pumped up one day and yelled at the next,” he said. “They’re working in an atmosphere in which there really isn’t a strong sense of stability.”
The average salesman has been on the job two weeks to six months and is not well schooled in the product being sold, according to information compiled by J. D. Power.
Dealership training of salesmen is “dismal,” Morris said. The extremely high turnover accentuates the problem because some dealers will wait to train a salesman to see if he is going to stick around, he said.
Every manufacturer has some kind of formal training, including manuals and seminars, but “we feel it’s about a six-foot jump across a seven-foot ditch,” Morris said. “We feel there’s a need for a standard,” especially now that cars are so complicated by computerization and other features.
Salesmen are selling an average of about eight cars a month and are earning $1,800 to $2,400 a month, he said. But, depending on the franchise, “there are some people who will make $8,000 to $10,000 a month.”
Salesman usually are paid a percentage of the profit that the dealership makes on a car. Dealers aim for a typical profit of 10% to 12% of the sticker price, but they don’t often get that much, according to Miller.
“Every car is different,” said Sophia Lentini, who sells Dodge cars in Glendale. “If (the customers) grind you down to nothing, you might make $50. If you sell 12 cars a month and you make $150 a car, you’re doing OK. That’s just an example.”
Morris said salesmen are working long hours, sometimes 10 hours a day with 12 days on and two days off.
Spencer Goldfield, a Culver City Mazda salesman, said he frequently works 10-hour days on weekends and six hours on weekdays.
“It’s a lot of hours,” he said. But, he added, the job lets him take several weeks off each year to go to Europe.
But with the job comes a certain amount of hostility from customers.
“The American public really doesn’t like car salespeople,” said Oora Baworouski, who sells Cadillacs, Subarus, Legacys and used cars at Vreeland Motor Group in Ventura.
“They come in and expect to be treated a certain way,” she said. “It’s hard not to take that personally.
“It’s not an easy business,” she said. “It’s . . . what you make of it.”
“People are terrified,” said Banos, the Acura salesman. “They always come through the door and get the cross out--’They’re going to suck my blood.’ ”
Banos said he tries to use humor to disarm customers. At his last job, he sometimes sported a lab coat and stethoscope and called himself “the car-o-practor.” His current employer prefers that he use other gimmicks.
“I tell them, ‘I’ll give you that price, but here’s the deal. You have to pick it up in Japan and clean it up yourself,’ ” Banos quipped.
Time for Questions
Baworouski became interested in the business four years ago partly because she had a bad experience buying a car. The salesman didn’t take her seriously, wouldn’t answer her questions and suggested that she come back with her father or boyfriend, she said.
Because she takes the time to answer questions about the product and is less pushy than some of the other salesmen on the floor, “I get people who may not buy now, but will buy in six or seven months,” Baworouski said.
“I try to treat people friendly,” said Podell, the Mercedes salesman. “I think the same thing applies if you sell Yugos or Mercedes or anything,” he said. “If you treat people right, they’ll respond.”
The trick to making it in a down market, salespeople agree, is staying upbeat and learning to keep selling even when the customer initially says no.
“There are people here who have sold 200 or 300 cars a year for 10 years running in good times and bad,” said Baworouski. “I know I have a lot to learn.”
“As bad as business can get, I’ve seen--and it works with me and it works with other guys--if you can get out there and stay positive, you can make things happen,” Podell said. “I still see people who make things happen when things are bad, and I see people who see things are bad and get swallowed up.”
At Glendale Dodge, the evidence was out in the open on a salesman’s desk in the showroom: a worn copy of Dale Carnegie’s book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
