Flada Blog

In 2003, I left one of my favorite jobs that I’d ever had in Illinois to move with my new wife to Virginia. She had joined the Navy, so she didn’t have much choice about where she was going to be. To save our relationship and build our future, leaving that company was the only possible decision.

There were almost immediate financial problems, however, because my pay had been considerably more than a new sailor’s. After a few months with no luck finding work in my field, I decided to try my hand at selling cars. So for about 4 months, I worked as a “Sales Consultant” for a Hummer dealership.

I managed to gross an average of about $1600 each of the 4 months I was selling, which is quite bad considering the number of hours that a car salesman puts in. But it was a lot better than nothing.

Very early in my time there, I realized that I wasn’t working for the right dealership because their sales philosophy and my business philosophy were at odds. Twice per week, every salesperson and the managers had to attend a sales meeting. The meetings usually consisted of one of the managers giving a “pep talk” to the sales staff.

A sample talk would go something like this, “You can’t think of the customers as people. You have to envision them as wallets full of money, and your goal is to get as much of that money as you can.” Time was also spent on roll playing to develop techniques to deceive customers, steer them away from discussions of price, and introduce them to our manager. Working on perfecting our handshakes was a primary lesson.

The problem with this approach is that your customers are people. Your customers want value and are happy to make an exchange (of their money for your value) when they believe that they are getting enough for their money. The dealership philosophy involved an attempt to extract more value from the customer without actually increasing the value that they were providing to the customer. However, the ideal trade is one where the values being exchanged are equal.

To make the values equal, it requires that both parties have a complete understanding of what the other is offering. Anything other than that is a form of fraud. Even though I worked in an environment where the policy of fraud had become institutional, I made an effort to provide an equal value by offering my customers as much after-sale value as I possibly could. However, the dealership even put roadblocks in place to make that more difficult.

In an effort to change the mindset of the dealership, I gave a copy of U Will Be Satisfied, a book by Bob Tasca, to the General Manager. Bob Tasca is one of the most successful Ford salesmen of all time. He owns several dealerships in New England and his philosophy is simple–satisfy your customers at all costs. Too bad I wasn’t working for Mr. Tasca. I’m pretty sure that the guy I was working for quickly skimmed the book and tossed it into the round bin.

Eventually, I found a job doing similar work to what I had done before my wife joined the Navy, and put the memory of the car dealership behind me. Over my next few years living in Virginia, I heard from many local sources about the terrible reputation of the dealership where I had worked. I was not surprised.

Simply put, if you want to build loyal customers it is imperative that you provide them with values that are at least equal to the money they have given you. That is how you will prevent your name being attached to a reputation similar to the one that dealership has.