June 2025 marks my 15th anniversary as a vendor. From 1989 to May 2020, I was a car dealer (21 years for those who don’t like math). One thing the car business teaches you is how hard it is to pay the bills on commissions from the general public. People are crazy! And they’re especially nuts when they’re buying a car.
Car buying is purely emotional. We do not need the car we buy unless we drive a 10-year-old base model, entry vehicle from a volume manufacturer.
The right car is a 2015 Hyundai Elantra. It is reliable, has a fantastic warranty, and always gets people from A to B. It can even carry a few passengers and haul groceries. Pickup truck manufacturers make base models typically reserved for fleets that can take care of the tradesmen.
To buy anything else is to become an emotional wreck. This is the key factor in why dealers are so misunderstood.
To sell to these emotional wrecks, one must also get emotional. The best salespeople play to the customers’ emotions to drive them to spend more. It takes a special human to flip a switch from an emotional high to a logical low. Getting down to business with a vendor is a logical low. Usually, things are complex. It requires logic and detail to sort through what the vendor says. If one has just finished working with a customer on a car deal and then is jumping straight into a demo, there are a lot of mental hurdles that dealer is trying to overcome to play the current role of the moment.
Vendors don’t deal with the general public. They have a steady day of working with others who are unhindered by the truly crazy folks out there: the car buyers. And like everyone who seldom buys a car, they forget how crazy they get in those purchasing times. Aside from the vendor sales teams, the rest of the company does not have monthly goals. Sometimes, they have quarterly ones, but the only deadline that matters in the car business is the NADA show. Urgency is a rarity.
In a dealership, urgency is the only thing. Everything is mission critical and must happen within the 28 to 33 days we call a month.
People don’t understand car dealers because they don’t understand themselves when they’re car buyers. Although this article is aimed at vendors, you can easily replace the word vendor with “OEM” and occasionally “Service Writer.” Service deals with an entirely different type of customer. It is the same person, but they’re angry, raving lunatics. At least salespeople get to see the euphoric side of our crazy.
Yup, dealers can be gigantic pains in the butt to work with. But it all comes from them catering to the biggest pains in the butt on the planet: the car shopper.
