How to Sell More Cars

My name is Marv and I sell cars for a living as well as run a website called www.CarSalesAssistant.com that specializes in software specifically for car salespeople. Our main product is Car Sales Assistant 2007, a follow up software program that I designed and programmed for my own use in the car business as well as a product that I sell to car salespeople all over the world. If you want, visit my site and download a free 14 day trial and see if it will work for you! If you like it, I only sell it for $79.99 per copy. Well, enough of the advertisement--down to business.

I have decided to share my thoughts on the selling game--especially how it concerns the car salesperson. Of course, a lot of these techniques that I am going to share are universal and can be used in other sales-related fields.

A little history about me. I have been selling cars for almost 12 years. I currently sell new Chevrolets in what has to be the worst economy in the universe--that being the state of Michigan. I actually got my start in Tennessee and being a yankee from the North, most people would look at me as if I had the plague when I tried to sell them anything.

When you are done reading this article, you will have had more training than I had in my first year in the car business. My training consisted of, "Here's how you fill out a buyer's order. You write down the sticker price and if they don't take it, you say If I could sell it for $1000 less, would you take it today? If they say no, say What if I could sell it for $2000 less? If they say no, What about $3000 less? If they say no, do a T.O. to me and catch another one. Oh yeah--you need to build value first so tell them everything about the car. I want you to tell them every feature. Huh? You don't know all the features--then go outside and drive one of each car. The keys are hanging on the wall."

No shit--that was my training. Even with that, I sold 2 cars my first day but I'll be honest--they were both lay-downs and I was very enthusiastic and enthusiasm is very catchy.

Having an inquisitive mind, I like to learn things. I am a self-taught computer programmer so I figured I could teach myself how to sell cars. There are a couple of good books on selling cars especially Joe Girard's How to Sell Anything to Anybody but as good as it is, it was written in the 70's when they didn't even have MSRP prices on the cars! There are also some good sales trainers that sell their products--you know the kind--the fill-in-the-blank workbooks that have scripts that sound too good to be true but besides that, there really isn't much for car salespeople out there. So, I bought a few generic books on selling (my collection has probably reached around 50 books since then) and got to reading.

I started getting better and better and sooner or later, I was consistently in the top 3 or 4 in sales in the dealership. In the late 90's, I decided that the follow-up card that the F&I printed out wasn't good enough for me so I wrote what became Car Salesperson's Assistant 1.0 (I later changed the name to Car Sales Assistant and abbreviate it as CSA. Someone at the dealership saw it and said, "Marv--you should sell this program." I took his advice, put up my website, sent a few emails to dealerships (OK--I didn't know about spam back then) and started selling a couple of copies here and there.

Eight years later and here I am. I was #1 in sales last year at my dealership and most of it I can attribute to the use of my follow up software as well as the techniques I will share with you if you choose to check back from time to time. Please contact me through my website if you ever have any comments--I would love to hear them.