My manager crashed the trade during a car deal

the only thing I heard him say was oh no are you all right back in 2009 when I started selling cars at motorcars to Georgia it didn't take very long to learn that it was immeasurably easier to sell someone their second third or fourth car than it was to sell them their first they start to build rapport with you they trust you they find out that the things that you say generally come true and the process just becomes a lot more easy honestly it becomes a lot more fun because you're dealing with people who you like and in most cases that you've reached back out to to kind of invite them to continue doing business and I had a few dozen customers that I would sell to three four or five cars a year too and by the time I left in 2015 I would say 75 to 80 percent of my business was from repeat customers so it's really what allows you to have consistency and be able to predict any kind of income and a hundred percent commission based pay plan and it just made the job a lot more enjoyable and one of the customers that I sold a lot of cars - I mean I'd sold him Gardo a 430 a couple Aston Martin's and you also buy his daily drivers from me in most cases he'd had a couple Jaguars and a BMW and c63 AMG and he had come in because he was interested in a Nissan GTR that we had and the Nissan GTR was kind of new at the time but I'd imagine this was probably sometime in 2011 or 12 and he came in to look at one he'd read all the magazine articles and all the reviews and seeing all the videos about the GTR and he was excited about having a higher performance daily driver and at the time he had a guy or two and he'd been putting a lot of miles on it and this was gonna be a big step up for him in his daily driver game you know he generally liked 30 to $40,000 cars and this was gonna be like a 70 to $80,000 car at the time he came in to look at the car and we'd spoken about it and he was kind of on the fence but I was like look just come in test-drive the car let's see what you think and so he came in and he had the c63 at the time and the general practice at car dealerships when you're negotiating a deal that involves a trade is for the sales manager and used-car manager or general manager to test-drive the trade both to learn about the options and make sure that everything's functional but make sure that there's no lights on and things like that it also separates the customer from their car so you'll hear old-school car business jokes about throwing your keys on the roof and you know you'll what you'll want to leave and the salesperson will say well my manager was driving the car but we can't find your keys so we're looking for them but you know you just went out on break or just went to lunch in it it keeps you in the dealership it's one of those things that incrementally commits you to a car deal even if you don't realize that you've agreed to it we were not like that but certainly we did test drive the cars to make sure that they were functional and didn't need anything and so our general manager had taken the car out and we while I had gone with the customer to test-drive the GTR and we'd come back a little bit sooner he was really nervous about you know kind of doubling his investment in his daily car and you know it's my responsibility as a salesperson to sort of help impose a logic on the customer so that they can become comfortable to make the decision that they probably already want to make they're just looking for reasons and so we talked about the fact that his AMG car was about to go out of warranty and as I sit here during a week where my CL 55 is gonna cost me more in maintenance than the last six years of owning for lp640 sis cost me I can assure you that telling someone that it's not a good idea to own an AMG car out of warranty or at least not financially responsible is certainly valid advice so we had gone through that and talked about the fact that you know if he's driving this car that's a little bit more exciting on a daily basis he might not accumulate so many miles on his Guyardo and the fact that he was buying a car that was going to have a good residual value and that there were a lot of precedents in the marketplace to say that it was gonna hold its value well meant that I could say look I can manage your ownership cost in this car to make your car buying hobby a little easier and make your money go further if we're in a car like this more so than if we're in an aging you know AMG or M car so he was generally buying into it but you know was still really on the fence and you know we wanted to look at financing options and things like that because money was so cheap it still is that it really rarely makes sense to pay cash for a car if you can finance it because you're making so much money elsewhere it might not be returning Bitcoin numbers but at the end of the day is usually in your best interest to finance a car and invested the same amount of money somewhere else and make money on essentially the interest spread and there's a difference when you're trying to sell someone a car that you've got a good relationship with and that you've sold a lot of cars versus somebody just walks into the showroom and you're trying to sell them the first car that you've ever sold to them you're less forceful you're not trying to move the transaction for it as aggressively it's a much more friendly exchange where you're learning more about each other and you're continuing to enjoy the hobby and the enthusiasm for interesting cars so I wasn't using a lot of hard or assumptive closing words because it really wasn't that type of environment you're not saying you know yeah it won't be here tomorrow we'll sell it right out from under you you know this deal is only good till today things like that that you'll hear car salesmen say because they really need to compel you to make a decision immediately another thing about this customer you know he's a nicest guy in the world but he's a little bit hard of hearing and so he wore hearing aids but if you didn't stare directly at him and project your voice a bit he really couldn't hear what you had to say and in the course of discussing this GTR with my customer I heard the showroom line ring and another salesperson picked up the phone the only thing I heard him say was oh no are you all right and I said who we are about to have some fun because it was clear that the general manager that was now 10 to 15 minutes longer on his test drive route that he normally might be had somehow damaged the car and so I continued to speak to the customer sort of said all right we need to probably start moving a little bit more towards commitment here so I walked into my managers office and met the other salesperson in there as he was walking in that direction the customer still none the wiser and asked what's going on and apparently he's crashed the car at a nearby intersection so I asked you know do we know anything about the severity I mean are we talking about we need to park it in a different direction so he doesn't see a side of it when he comes back or we sending someone to get things out of it and he said it sounds like we're sending someone to get things out of it apparently there was an ambulance in route so I walked back over to my desk and sat down in front of the customer and at the time I'm starting to see traffic slow down in front of the dealership and I see an ambulance go by in the center lane and this is 200 yards from the place where I would crash the event that or a couple of years later and just up the street from where the owner of the dealership would crash a Bentley super sports not long after that so we had a difficult string of accidents on the dealership insurance policy for a little while in the course of this deal I have to get this guy to buy the car very quickly really in the matter of 10 or 15 minutes before he discovers that his car is not back and he may have a tremendous amount of leverage to get us to give him just about whatever he wants for his trade so any hope of you know what little gross profit might exist in the deal was going to evaporate very quickly if we didn't get to a point of commitment and so I do kind of start to lean on him and say well let's go ahead and try to make a decision here and even though he was kind of nervous we just sort of went on through the financing and making payment estimates and my sales manager was obviously saying you know II D get it done I know the banks are probably closing but we're just gonna Street him which means the basement is great credit and the fact that we'd financed a bunch of cars for him in the past we would just assume what interest rate he would get and then send it to a bank next morning I do finally get the customer to say alright this sounds good this makes sense I can afford it let's go ahead and do it I want the car and of course at that point he says all right well while you go get everything written up I'm gonna go clean some stuff out of the Mercedes I said well hold on let's just have a porter do that and you just hang out here and I'll go make you a coffee the Lamborghinis showroom corporate identity stipulated that we had to have a thirty five thousand dollar espresso machine and I was the only person in the showroom that knew how to use the machine and so I said I'll go entertain this customer while everybody else deals with the paperwork and we'll have everything inked before he realizes that he's gonna have to never see his Mercedes again and as it turned out the general manager had been driving back to the store and he had seen something in an intersection that he'd gone through thousands and thousands of times that made him think that the light was either green or turning green just blew right through an intersection and t-boned a BMW and so he was being ambulance away as was the person in the BMW and it all turned out okay but it was it was quite a nightmare for daily in that moment because everybody was on such high alert there was sort of a circle of spectators around the showroom watching to see if I could get the deal closed just in time so that he would agree to things before we realized that you know what mess this was just about to become and so he wanted his garage door opener and everything out and his golf clubs that were in the trunk and of course the accident had pretty well wallop to the c-class and so the the trunk wouldn't open and everything was gone off and the airbags had deployed it was it was a proper accident he ended up loving the GTR he did get a good deal and I think when we got it back from him into whatever his next daily driver was he did fine on it but it was a definitely a crazy crazy day at motorcars of Georgia

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,246,519

Rating: 4.7365842 out of 5

Keywords: Nissan, GT-R, GTR, Mercedes, Mercedes-Benz, Mercedes Benz, Benz, German, C63, AMG, Car Buying, Lamborghini, Bitcoin, Gallardo, Spyder, Mountain Drive, Blu Fontus, Atlanta, Lamborghini Atlanta, Motorcars of Georgia, Ed Bolian, VINwiki, Car Story, Dealership, Negotiation, Car Crash, Car Accident, Intersection, Ferrari, F430, Car Sales, Car Salesman, Cryptocurrency, Investing, Interest Rates, Car Financing

Id: e0XDQMdrp9w

Length: 9min 23sec (563 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 16 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/TheRealMeatloaf]

The title is fairly inflammatory considering the contents of the video, if we're being honest.

It sounds as if the customer was buying the car and trading the Benz anyways, he got fair value from his trade and the dealership took a major hit to the wallet and watched their insurance premiums go up.

Accidents happen. We've had customers crash our cars while on test drives, and some of them have even had the nerve to ask us for substantial discounts because the car was damaged, or even ask for a substantial discount on a brand new unit, because their lives had been endangered!

But you won't see me posting a vlog about it under the heading "This is why car buyers have the reputation they do"

[u/MuffinRacing]

I would say that this story isn't so bad. They gave the customer the value for the trade in that he was agreeable to. Whether or not the AMG was drivable after the transaction didn't really matter to the customer. If he had decided to not buy the GT-R, that's when there would have been a problem.

As is, he got a deal that he was satisfied with, and all of his stuff returned, so it isn't really a "dealers have bad reputations" story.

[u/VicBossZero]

Shit post title