In Praise of Car Salespeople

Special to the Star-Telegram

It’s hard to pinpoint the date when Americans stopped thinking highly of the people who enable our freedom of travel. Certainly the public’s attitude toward those who sell us our vehicles has been less than admiring as long as I’ve been around the automobile industry, and that goes back to 1973. Then again, for the last 30 years we’ve been surveying customers’ satisfaction with the process of acquiring their last automobile. And, year after year, 85 percent of those surveyed say that the handling of their last car purchase was either satisfactory or very satisfactory.

That other 15 percent? It seems that one out of every six people can and will find fault with anything. They never like the way their car deal is handled. They go to the finest restaurants and invariably are disappointed. They don’t like their job; their new home wasn’t built without flaws, and so on. And most of these individuals aren’t bad people — it just seems that they go through life geared to the "let down" position, prepared to overlook the joy even in things for which the rest of us are grateful if not delighted.

And, to be fair, even the best salespeople in the automotive industry can have bad days just like the rest of us. And on those days, the nicest customers can end up disappointed with their treatment by someone who, ordinarily, would have given them an exceptional buying experience.

Selling cars is not an easy job. It never has been. The great outdoors is where the cars are parked, so a salesperson’s workplace is out in the rain, snow and ice or in the broiling sun and/or wind. More than half of all potential clients come in skeptical, distrusting most in the automotive industry. And this is not because their last vehicle purchase was a bad experience, but because it’s been drummed into the public’s heads that dealers inevitably plot to extract all of a customer’s money in exchange for a new set of wheels. (Fact: The few dealerships known for brutal sales practices are the exception, not the rule.)

Finally, contrary to popular belief, from 1979 to 1995 and again over the past four years, the average car dealer actually lost money selling new cars to the public. That alone suggests that the nation’s obsession with how profitable new car sales are is at best misguided. Some readers may never be convinced, but that’s a financial fact.

Transportation Consultants to the Nation

The dealers who have survived did so by expanding and improving their used car operations, body shops, parts and service departments. All the time, they know that those departments are only profitable because the less profitable new car sales feed them a continuous flow of customers. Which takes us back to the individuals that make that possible, new car sales people.

It’s more than that. It is a truism that the only real difference between our federal republic and those of many other nations is our incredible ability to move about freely, and it’s our personal automobile that enables that mobility. There are close to 250 million cars, trucks and SUVs on the road in America. Look around the next time you’re on the freeway; for every vehicle you see, a salesperson once convinced someone that there was value in acquiring that ride. And in most years, counting new car sales and used, one out of very four or five vehicles on the road has changed owners, and more often than not some salesperson was responsible for that transaction.

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