5 Lessons Any Busi­ness Can Learn From Car Salesmen

As a re­sult of movies and plenty of peo­ple who ac­tu­ally re­in­force stereo­types about their pro­fes­sion, car sales­men are in the run­ning with lawyers for be­ing the most com­monly stereo­typed and joked about profession.

Al­though it’s un­likely that those stereo­types will go away any­time soon, that does­n’t mean the peo­ple who ex­cel in this line of work ac­tu­ally fall un­der that um­brella. On the con­trary, the stereo­types they’re up against mean that ded­i­cated car sales­men have to work even harder to succeed. 

Be­cause they have to over­come some ma­jor ob­sta­cles, here are five lessons from suc­cess­ful car sales­men that you can ap­ply to your own business: 

It’s All About Re­la­tion­ships 

Ex­pe­ri­enced sales pro­fes­sion­als in the auto in­dus­try know that if they get re­fer­rals from ex­ist­ing cus­tomers, their suc­cess rate is go­ing to be much higher than if they had to start form scratch again.

But in or­der to get those re­fer­rals, they have to take care of their cus­tomers from be­gin­ning to end. That means striv­ing to max­i­mize re­fer­rals for your own busi­ness will re­in­force the im­por­tance of pro­vid­ing the best cus­tomer ser­vice possible. 

Lis­ten­ing is More Im­por­tant than Talk­ing 

The way great car sales­men op­er­ate goes against the biggest stereo­type about their pro­fes­sion. They un­der­stand that no amount of talk­ing can make up for what they can gain from five min­utes of lis­ten­ing to a customer.

Whether it’s through sur­veys or one-on-one dis­cus­sions, don’t ever un­der­es­ti­mate the value of in­for­ma­tion that comes di­rectly from customers. 

Em­brace Mo­bil­ity 

The best sales­men are happy to jump in a car or co­or­di­nate with a dif­fer­ent lo­ca­tion. You can gain a lot by build­ing the same type of mo­bil­ity into your business.

If you’re cur­rently us­ing a CRM but it does­n’t have any cloud func­tion­al­ity, switch­ing to one that does can no­tice­ably im­prove your sales team’s productivity. 

Sell Ben­e­fits, Not Fea­tures 

If you de­cide to buy a new or used car, a sales­man will have no trou­ble go­ing through all of its fea­tures. But they know that the best way to ac­tu­ally get you to buy is to find and fo­cus on ways that spe­cific car is go­ing to make your life better.

By keep­ing that ap­proach in mind when you’re writ­ing copy or do­ing any other mar­ket­ing or brand­ing ac­tiv­i­ties, you’ll be even more suc­cess­ful at con­nect­ing with prospects. 

Elim­i­nate Fric­tion 

Suc­cess­ful car sales­men know that the more fric­tion they elim­i­nate from the sales process, the more sales they’ll ul­ti­mately close. This phi­los­o­phy can ap­ply to many ar­eas of your business.

For ex­am­ple, if you add a form to your web­site so that vis­i­tors can sign up for your email newslet­ter, you don’t want to make them fill out five or more fields. In­stead, by sim­pli­fy­ing your form to only ask for a first name and email ad­dress or even just the ad­dress, you’ll elim­i­nate un­nec­es­sary bar­ri­ers that would pre­vent a sig­nif­i­cant per­cent­age of vis­i­tors from sign­ing up. 

Re­gard­less of your spe­cific in­dus­try, if you take a page from suc­cess­ful car sales­men’s book and fo­cus on build­ing re­la­tion­ships, lis­ten­ing to prospects and cus­tomers, be­com­ing mo­bile, sell­ing ben­e­fits, and elim­i­nat­ing fric­tion, you’ll be able to im­prove your own bot­tom line.

[rms] Ralf’s com­ment: Thanks, Craig, for this un­usual and in­ter­est­ing look at car sales men and what we can learn from them for our busi­ness. I hope you don’t mind me adding the su­per-clicheed used car sales man as fea­tured im­age. :-) Your third item, Sell Ben­e­fits - Not Fea­tures, re­minded me of a pre­vi­ous life, 25 years ago, when I was train­ing in­sur­ance sales peo­ple.

One of the hard­ships in sell­ing in­sur­ance is that it’s not a very sexy prod­uct and it does­n’t have im­me­di­ate de­sir­able ef­fects for cus­tomers. In my train­ings I fre­quently used car deal­er­ships as ex­am­ple for sell­ing benefits.

Sell­ing the ex­pe­ri­ence. A good car sales per­son won’t bore you with tech­ni­cal de­tails about the car (un­less you’re a bit on the geeky side). In­stead they will shove you right into the car and get you to en­joy a free test drive.

Imag­ine sit­ting at the sales per­sons desk read­ing the brochure com­pared to tak­ing a ride! It’s very ob­vi­ous how much eas­ier the sale is.

You can use this strat­egy in any business.

While many prod­ucts and ser­vices don’t of­fer an ex­cit­ing test drive be­fore pur­chase, as busi­ness ow­ers we can eas­ily cre­ate bet­ter sales pitches. Ei­ther in per­sonal talks, or in our brochures and web sites, we can put the cus­tomer (in his imag­i­na­tion) into the sit­u­a­tion of ac­tu­ally us­ing the prod­uct and en­joy­ing the ben­e­fits.

It’s not even hard to do. Ask your­self: How can you help your cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­enc­ing (in real or in imag­i­na­tion) the ben­e­fits of us­ing your prod­uct or service?

Just a few min­utes of think­ing about it will give you the right ideas. Then it’s only a mat­ter of test­ing your idea with real customers.