Elegy for a Dream Weaver
It’s not what you do . . . It’s who you know and the smile on your face!
--willy loman, from arthur miller’s “death of a salesman”
*
I’m standing outside the dealership with another car salesman when one of those extreme SUVs that are so hot we “can’t keep ‘em on the lot” rolls in. I tell my friend I’m going to start calling my list of customers who are shopping for one of these babies. Then he stops me.
“It’s another [expletive] Internet sale,” he says, pointing at the sold sign in the windshield reading CarsDirect.com. “Why do they sell these things over the Internet? Give ‘em to us, we could get a grand over sticker. But no--they’ve gotta sell ‘em at invoice. Does that make sense?”
It doesn’t make sense to us, the car salesmen, because our lives depend on the difference between the invoice price and what we can sell it for. This is the profit. From the profit comes our lifeblood--the commission. I work on “straight commish,” and so does every other salesman on this Los Angeles-area car lot. If a salesman doesn’t sell, he doesn’t feed his family, or pay his rent. His life depends on his ability to move metal, to paint pictures with words, to sell dreams. And the dream is very simple: the right car will bring you happiness.
So salesmen position themselves between you, the buyer, and your happiness as embodied by a gleaming, freshly detailed, fully loaded, top-of-the line luxury sedan, or SUV, minivan or pickup. You want a car. We want your money. And, unexpectedly, I’ve become a part of this dysfunctional relationship.
I became a car salesman in the middle of a life of doing something very different. I arrived, it turns out, just in time to see the death of America’s most enduring antihero. The tragic figure of the new millennium isn’t Willy Loman. He’s the stereotypical car salesman we love to hate, the over-the-top huckster who used to wear plaid but now tends toward gold jewelry, goatees and combed-back hair. He’ll do anything to close you, then will hide in the service bays if you return to complain about the car. Soon salesmen will paraphrase Richard M. Nixon--”You won’t have me to kick around anymore.”
Most people would say that’s a good thing.
“Five years from now we’ll all be gone,” the Internet manager of our dealership told me one day as we wolfed lunch in the break room. “Dealerships will just be a place where people pick up cars they ordered from the factory. I hate it.”
The Internet manager used to sell cars on a lot in Universal City. Now he wanders our dealership wearing a telephone headset, answering Internet leads, jumping at the command of mouse-pushing shoppers. He’s cutting deals--and cutting out his commission. It’s all about price now. And the Internet, the new god of business, slashes prices by cutting the fat from the delivery chain.
*
IRONICALLY, I WAS SENT TO WORK AT THIS DEALERSHIP by the Internet. I was hired by the consumer auto Web site Edmunds.com to get a job as a car salesman so I could learn their ways. But then, just like in those movies about going undercover in the mob, I became friends with the enemy.
The car lot is a great collision of humanity. I was thrown in with people from all over the globe. My world as a novelist and freelance writer had become so safe I’d forgotten about the messy lives many people lead--the divorces and child custody, the bad credit and repossessions, drifting from job to job. Despite their chaotic lives, salesmen arrive at work each day hoping they’ll hit a home run, get a “pounder”--any deal with more than $1,000 profit for the salesman.
When you sell cars, you get to look professional when you’re often not. You wear a shirt and tie. You deal with large sums of money. You negotiate using psychology, work the numbers, tell corny jokes. Hell, you’d tap dance on raindrops to make a sale. Because, as I’m discovering, it’s a rush to sell a car.
A friend of mine who spent 20 years selling stereo equipment said that making a big sale gives you a sense of power. It’s a high of approval. In sales meetings they tell us: “Customers aren’t looking for a car to buy. They’re looking for a salesman to sell them a car.”
*
ON THE FIRST DAY OF SELLING CARS, MY ASSISTANT SALES MANAGER (a “closer” who is brought in to finalize the deal) begins training me. He assures me that selling cars is actually very easy, “as long as you’re right up here,” he says, tapping his forehead. He wants me to succeed because my success is money in the bank for him. So he teaches me his best tricks. The ones that always work when you have a customer “in the box” (the sales office).
“Oh, here’s a good one,” he says, glancing around, leaning over his desk and showing me how to work the four-square worksheet, the salesman’s tool.
The four squares are the most important figures of a car deal: purchase price of the car, trade-in value of your car, down payment and monthly payment. If the salesman loses ground on one figure--say, purchase price--he’ll make it up on another figure such as trade-in.
“When you give them the first pencil, you point at the price and nod,” my closer says. “Because if you nod, they’ll nod. You have to get them saying ‘yes.’ ”
First pencil is the opening quote the salesman gives a customer--usually a very high one. It’s like shoving another guy in a barroom hassle. Are they going to shove you back, smash you in the nose or give in? Every once in a while, the customer just gives in. Salesmen call that person a “lie down.”
One day a salesman sidled up to me and pulled out a voucher--a yellow carbon copy slip on which the dealership writes what our commission is from a recent sale. “Want to see a bomber?” he asked as he unfolded the voucher. “I had this postal worker on a minivan. We run a credit ap and she scores a 750 [out of a possible 900]. I gave her the first pencil and she lies down. Man, what a bomber.” His commission on that deal was $1,342. Not bad. But it was the only car he sold that week.
*
FORD IS TESTING FORDDIRECT.COM IN CALIFORNIA BEFORE IT GOES national. It’s a way for shoppers to buy via the Web. General Motors has GMBuyPower.com and DaimlerChrysler.com has its Web site. Once operational, shoppers at FordDirect will be able to choose features, price, finance and schedule delivery of their cars on the Internet.
All of those things used to be the job of the car salesman.
In the old days, the salesman held all the cards. He knew all the specs on the vehicle you were eyeballing, he knew how to get it delivered to you and--most importantly--he knew all the pricing figures. You had to guess at what price the dealer might part with it. You started low and had to endure the salesman’s theatrics as you increased your price and finally heard him say, “OK, we’ve got a deal.”
But then came the Internet, where shoppers can find the invoice price of new vehicles. All bets were off. Now customers can ignore the sticker price and consult online pricing systems such as those listed on Edmunds.com to determine a fair price.
That was bad enough. Now, with amazingly few clicks of a mouse button, your car can be headed to your house on a flatbed truck from, for example, CarsDirect.com. The salesman is left alone in front of his dealership, sipping coffee and watching new cars pass in the street.
*
CAR BUYERS WHO AREN’T ONLINE STILL HAVE TO STAND THE TEST of fire; they have to deal with me and my friends at the dealership. The salesmen at my dealership pounce on an “up” as soon as their foot hits the dealership asphalt. An up, as I’ve learned, is any customer who wanders onto the lot. And the order in which ups are taken is serious business.
“At this dealership I worked in the Valley, there were fistfights over ups,” my closer tells me. “We’d stand on the curb and call them before they pulled into the lot: ‘Incoming green Toyota!’ Or ‘Red Chevy pickup!’ If that car pulled in, that was our up.”
Here we mark our territory--our ups--by shaking hands. Then we lead the customer around the lot to find their car. Yes, we lead them. If the customer leads us, our bosses, watching eagle-eyed from the sales tower, will page us and give the customer to another salesman, a salesman who can control them.
Control is a huge word at the dealership. Control begins with the car-lot handshake, a slight pulling motion to send the signal that we are in control. It continues with commands such as: “I’ll work up some payments--follow me.” We turn and walk into the sales office knowing--willing--them to follow us. If they do, we know we can control them.
*
STUDIES ABOUT ONLINE CAR BUYING ABOUND, EACH WITH A DIFFERENT prediction for the future. Most show that Web buying is taking off. J.D. Power and Associates released a report this fall that showed more than half of all vehicle purchases involved the Internet--up 40% from last year. This means nearly 22 million people clicked their way to automotive information rather than getting a pitch from a salesman. (True, many of these people, once armed with data, eventually went to dealerships to buy.) Most significantly, consumers saved an average of $490 on a new car purchase, J.D. Power reported.
Another way to predict the future of car buying is to talk to shoppers who have done it. One man described it this way: “My wife and I just bought a used Explorer through the Web and it was the BEST car buying experience ever! We never had to even get close to a salesperson. Who needs sleazy salespeople when you can do it over the Web now?”
A tour through a consumer Web site’s car-buying forum finds this sentiment, usually including some variation of the line: “I’ll never set foot in a dealership again.”
I know what you’re thinking. You’re recalling the body count from last summer’s Nasdaq meltdown, some of which were car-buying Web sites. What you don’t see is that there are money people in boardrooms right now planning the second assault. They’re market savvy, determined and they still have capital. There’s a lot of dough at stake here. Why give it to a bunch of sad-sack Willy Loman types whose corny lines and craving for approval is as outdated as fins and tuck-and-roll upholstery?
*
THE DEALERSHIP HOLDS A SALES MEETING EVERY FRIDAY MORNING TO psyche us up for the weekend, when most cars are sold. The weekends are so busy my closer tells me they call it the “tuna run. You know--so many fish you just pull ‘em into the boat.”
The sales meeting starts at 8:30 sharp. I arrive about 10 minutes early and find all the salesmen gathered outside the meeting room. They’re smoking cigarettes, shaking hands and checking out each other’s ties. Ties are a big thing here and the preferred color is--you guessed it--gold. Every week or so the “tie guy” shows up and sells us ties out of the back of his shiny German luxury car. “Ten bucks each--real silk,” the tie guy assures me. I pick out two and hand him $20. He checks out the tie I’m wearing, then inspects my selections. “You’ve got this pattern thing going. Cool.”
The door to the meeting room bursts open and our general manager steps out into the sunlight. “All right, guys. Get in here!” As we run into the room, like athletes taking the field, we hear pounding ballpark music: “We will, we will, ROCK YOU!”
It’s a small room with a low ceiling, and, packed with 85 salesmen, it’s stuffy and oppressive. There’s only one saleswoman “on the floor” at the dealership. Two other women from the fleet department nervously hang out in the back of the room. They know this sales meeting is a guy thing. The music dies and a sales manager runs out in front of us, pumping his fists and yelling, “Killer, killer, killer weekend!” We all cheer. He’s a spiffy little guy with a big, toothy smile.
“What are you going to do this weekend?”
“Sell cars, boss,” someone answers.
Boss is how we address superiors at the dealership. Salesmen call each other man, bro or baby. I saw two salesmen passing in the hallway of the dealership one day.
“Hey, bro. How’s your deal goin’?”
“Got ‘em in the box, baby!”
Now the sales manager begins today’s motivational speech. He tells us that to sell a car you have to create a sense of obligation in the customer, like the salesman who runs around laying out shirts and ties across a suit you’re considering at Nordstrom. “Do you think you could say ‘No’ to that salesman after he busts ass for you? No. You are obligated to buy from him.”
Next comes the GM with the real business of the meeting. He’s a big guy, goatee, gray hair slicked back. His speech always starts the same way. Sales are down because we’re weak. We’ve got to be strong to sell cars. Now that he’s slapped us down he holds out the carrot--weekend bonuses. He outlines our sales goals, specifying how many cars we each need to sell to hit the bonus levels, then adds: “Sell five cars you get a grand. It’s that simple.”
His speech has the rhythm of a career gambler.
I walk out of the sales meeting with a friend who came to the U.S. in 1973 from war-torn Lebanon. He’s got a wife and two kids and he’s only sold 1 1/2 cars this month (salesmen sometimes split commissions).
“I’ve sold Fords, Chevys, Hondas,” he says. “It’s always the same: sell more cars or you’re fired! Only here we have the music. Big deal.”
His luck changes later that day when a retired couple walk in and he gets them into a “full-pop” lease (a lease at 110% of the sticker price, the max allowed by the bank). Now, his walk has a spring in it. I picture him opening the door at home and calling out to his wife, “Sold a car today!” It’s like Willy Loman’s refrain: I’m very well liked in Hartford.
let’s make one thing clear: the dealers aren’t going gently into the dark night. They are aggressively lobbying to make sure the manufacturer doesn’t bypass them entirely. Because of state franchise laws and car makers’ policies, Internet services can buy cars only from dealers. While FordDirect uses the Web to interact with the consumer, the car will be delivered by the dealer.
But what of the salesman? Why should consumers listen to a pitchman when they can sit in the comfort of their home and read cold facts off the screen? Some people feel the salesman is a necessary part of the equation. Philip Lebherz, president of Lebherz Insurance Services Inc. in San Mateo, often buys cars for his company. He started his career as an insurance salesman in San Francisco, and he considers selling an art.
“When people are making a big purchase, it’s scary and they need someone to hold their hand,” Lebherz says. “The salesman becomes that person, like a friend who helps you and shares your excitement. Sure the salesman makes a commission, but it’s worth it to the customer for the support they provide.”
A recent study backs him up. A survey by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young found that more than 80% of car buyers are satisfied with their experience purchasing cars through the dealership network. The same survey also found that satisfaction with online car purchases has increased 70%.
“It is wrong to look at the Internet as purely a substitutional channel for traditional car sales methods,” the study states. “Rather, it should be seen as becoming an integrated part of a consumer buying process . . . .”
In reality, the car salesman may survive in reduced numbers, for a while to assist those who aren’t comfortable with the Internet, eventually to assist upscale customers or those, such as a BMW buyer, who want a salesman to describe every nut and bolt on the car. As the ranks are thinned, only the strong will survive--a frightening thought in itself.
*
AFTER A FEW DAYS OF TRAINING, I GET TO TAKE UPS. MY FIRST WEEKEND arrives and it’s time for the tuna run. I help a middle-aged woman interested in buying a 4X4 for weekend trips bird watching. We go for a test drive and I get her talking. She likes me. I start thinking I’ve got my first sale. Then she drops the bomb: “I’m just going to do the test drive here. I’ll probably buy on the Internet.”
She probably thought I’d respect her honesty. But it’s like telling me she is taking $600 from my wallet. No, it’s worse. I haven’t got a sale on the board yet. I need this sale--a mantra uttered by car salesmen whose commission-based income differs wildly, depending on the type of car they sell and their own skill, luck and determination. The top salesman at our dealership is probably making $10,000 a month, while the lowest is earning, well, nothing.
“Come inside for a few minutes and I’ll show you we can beat the Internet prices,” I say, holding the door open for her. She’s about to step over the threshold into the cool, dark, seductive interior of the dealership. But she hesitates. And then I see it--the fear on her face. This is why the Internet will sell cars while the sale of other things may fail: fear of the car salesman. Fear of being tricked, cheated, swindled, bullied, jerked around and suckered. She leaves, heading home for a wild session with her mouse and modem.
*
ALL TOLD, I SELL 5 1/2 CARS IN MY THREE-MONTH CAREER AS A CAR salesman, earning a grand total of $2,200. Then the day comes for me to write about what I’ve learned. I give notice at the dealership and my closer is damn nice about it. He shakes my hand and wishes me luck. What he doesn’t know is that I’m leaving with another nail for his coffin. I know his secrets. I know something of how it’s done, and I’ll write about it.
On my first day back in the offices of Edmunds.com, I can’t believe how nice the working environment is. They have free coffee here. And we don’t have to hide our cups in the bushes when a customer comes. I keep forgetting where I am and expecting someone to give me a motivational lecture. But everyone is mellow. No one tries to control me. It’s about information here. We give you the information, you decide.
“What was it like out there?” my co-workers ask me.
“Bizarre,” is all I can say.
How could I ever explain that there was excitement and passion in moving metal? How could I describe the energy that filled me as a stream of words flowed from my lips describing--of all things--cars. Maybe that was because I was, as they said, selling dreams. The American dream. A new car.
*
One way to predict the future of car buying is to talk to shoppers. One man described it this way: ‘My wife and I just bought a used Explorer through the Web and it was the BEST car buying experience ever! Who needs sleazy salespeople when you can do it over the Web!’
