Yeah, run away Johnny, especially if you think the job isn’t what you want to do. I thought it was what i wanted to do, and i still hated it.
I sold new cars for a year back in my younger days, before i came to the United States. It was in Sydney, Australia. I was 20 years old, and had been working as a cellarman and bartender for a couple of years after dropping out of college in my second semester.
I saw an ad in the paper for trainee salespeople at Holden dealerships around the state (Holden is the Australian arm of General Motors). I had always been a bit of a car nut as a teenager, and i had no real career plans at the time, so i thought i’d give it a go. The ad was placed by the car company itself, not by a particular dealership, and the idea was that they would select a bunch of young trainees, and we would each be placed in a dealership as close as possible to where we lived. After an initial interview, there was a three-day training seminar (no charge to us). Of the hundred or so who made it to the seminar, about 25 were chosen.
I was placed in a dealership near Manly, on Sydney’s northern beaches, which was pretty close to where i lived at the time. It was a relatively small dealership, with a monthly turnover of about 50-60 new cars (some of the larger dealerships sold in the hundreds per month, and i’ll bet the newer superstores they have now probably even get into the thousands). There was the Dealer Principal (that’s the guy whose name is on the door, and who is essentially GM of the whole operation), then there was the New Car Sales Manager (my direct boss), and four salespeople including me. Outside the new car area, there was also a used car section, a spare parts section, and, of course, a workshop where maintenance and repairs were performed.
To cut to the chase, i hated just about every minute of it. This is not to say that selling cars must always be a horrible job; it just was at the place i worked. A lot of this had to do with the New Car Sales Manager, who was a complete asshole. He was what they called in the industry a “one-shot” guy, or a “burner.” That is, he was so focused on getting as much as possible out of each deal that he ended up “burning” customers and ensuring that he got very little in the way of repeat business. A good sales manager is willing to give up a little in order to maintain a good relationship with the customer and get them back in three years time when they’re looking to buy another car.
The thing i hated most was cold calling. As the most junior person in the dealership, i had to call businesses and private homes from a master phone list and try to sell them a car. You think getting telemarketing calls trying to sell you long distance telphone service is bad? Try getting calls from someone asking you to fork over 20 grand on a new car. I got roundly abused by quite a few people, and i completely understood their position. I loathed and detested every minute of that, and made any excuse possible to get out of the office and away from the phone.
I also spent quite a bit of time calling on businesses and seeing if they were interested in changing over any of their company cars. This wasn’t quite so soul-destroying, because many of these places had purchasing managers or fleet managers whose job it was to maintain the company’s vehicles and turn them over when they had outlived their usefulness. Most of these people saw me as just another salesman, and i got some decent business out of some of them.
Dealing with businesses was different from dealing with private individuals, because for the businesses the bottom line was the one and only key. They usually got quotes from three or four dealerships, and if your quote was the best, then you got the deal. With individuals, money was important, but it was also important to be friendly and receptive to their needs. I had more than one person who bought a car from me, even though i wasn’t the cheapest dealer they had been to, because we got on well.
The problem in cases like this is that it’s often the nice people who get screwed. I remember one couple who wanted to trade their old-but-well-looked-after car on a new Calais, which was the top of the line and, in 1989, cost about $A38,000 with a 5.0L V8 engine and leather interior. The used car people offered $6,000 for their old car, and the couple didn’t haggle at all, either over the price of their trade-in or the price of the new car. So the dealership ended up making a profit of almost $6,000 on that car (at a time when profit margins of <$1,000 per car were not unusual), and i made almost a grand in commission. And i felt awful, because they were really nice people, and it would have taken me very little effort to get a couple of grand knocked off the top of their deal or added to the price of their trade-in.
Of course, you can argue that paying list price for a car isn’t really getting screwed, but no-one pays list price, and everyone haggles over the price of their trade. I did feel somewhat better when i delivered the car to them, because they were obviously so happy with it. Also, we had initially told them that it would take a week extra because we had to make a special order on one with leather seats, but i moved heaven and earth to get one from another dealer so they could have the new car in time for their Christmas vacation, and they were extremely grateful.
But still, i think for me it was my asshole Sales Manager who made the whole experience such a nightmare. He would even insist that we hand the new cars off to their owners with no more than about a gallon of gas in the tank, basically enough to get them to a gas station. Now, i had always thought that, if someone spends $20-30,000 buying a new car from you, the least you can do is make sure that they drive away with a full tank.
In the end, i stuck it out for exactly one year. That year, i made $35,000* before tax. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot now, but to a 20-year-old with no debt and few expenses in 1989-1990 that was a pretty decent income, especially as the job came with a company car (or a “demonstrator,” as they are called) and free gas. It allowed me to put a few grand away, and as soon as a year was up i quit and left for Europe and North America on a two year working holiday.
- The job was wage plus commission. The commission rates were quite low, but the base wage was about $8 an hour, which meant that even if you had a bad month you still made enough to pay the rent. Of course, more than a couple of bad months would usually lead to dismissal. I sold almost no cars in my first three months, but that was sort of an extended training period where i was learning the ropes. I got some latitude because i had specifcally been taken on as a trainee; an experienced salesperson who sold as few cars as i did in those months would have been fired.