Just loving those car salesmen at the moment…

Today’s SPOTD was the salesman at Preston Mazda who tried to take us for a ride and ended up losing the sale as a result. We were still undecided over the Mazda 3 vs the Dodge Caliber and had done the calculations on each to work out what we were prepared to pay and how one car offered advantages over the other. Each car forced us to make compromises so it was a matter of working out how much the price would move for us as to which we bought.

We showed up in the car showroom with a clipboard full of documents and calculations and initially struggled to get service. It seems no salesman wants to take on the more prepared customers… Anyway, we finally got one guy to deal with us and he attempted to dazzle us with all the “fancy technology we have here” - a laptop with a stylus pen so he could write on a simulated lined sheet of paper. Wow. We were underwhelmed, to say the least, since it was nothing more than a large PDA and made it actually worse for the customer because we couldn’t read the screen at all.

He asked what car we were interested in and since we’d done all the numbers ourselves and knew what we wanted, we advised him we just wanted the best price they could offer us. He wasn’t prepared to just do what we wanted though, starting at the top end.

SPOTD: This has a recommended retail price of $29,300. Would you be happy to pay that?

Us: No.

SPOTD: So what price do you want to pay?

Us: Better than that. Give us your best price.

SPOTD: Well, the best price is the one that is win-win. It’s the price you’re happy to pay and I’m happy to get. We run a business here so some people are happy to pay $29,300 and some people are not.

Us: We’re not.

SPOTD: So if I made it, say, $29,000 would you buy the car?

Us: I should imagine there’s more than 1% movement in the price. You can surely do better than that.

SPOTD: One per cent? It’s not one per cent. One per cent would be, like , oh. Well, yeah, it’s about one per cent. So what would you be willing to pay?

Us: Well, for starters, you have two of the exact cars we’re interested in outside in your yard. We can see them from here. Both what we want. Both the same colour. Both been sitting there for more than a couple of weeks. Both with a price of $28,300 on them so why would you think we’d pay $1000 more and be happy?

We went to leave and the manager suddenly materialised. Went through some of the same topics with him and said we were off to the competition. He told us to go there, get a number and come back because they could do better.

Us: How much better?

Manager: Better.

Us: So, give us an idea - we’re walking out the door to the opposition.

Manager: Come back and it will be better.

So we left and went to the opposition. The SPOTD at Preston Mazda started getting a bit frantic after a while, and called us seven times during our negotiations with the opposition. He kept offering to do better but we had to come back to their yard and so I asked for him to offer me something that would make me want to leave the opposition and come back to them.

SPOTD: I’m not talking $50. I’m not talking $100.

Us: I’m not interested in what you’re NOT offering. I want to hear what you are offering.

SPOTD: It’ll be worth it.

Us: So you know what it would be?

SPOTD: Yes. It would be good.

Us: So tell us what it is and we’ll come back. You have to work with us here. We’re in another dealer’s yard - give us some specific details to make us want to leave and come back.

SPOTD: No, come back and we’ll tell you.

And that’s why we bought the car from the opposition…

Categories: SPOTD