PRICE SELLS CARS!
I heard this blaring from the radio on my way home the other day, “We know PRICE SELLS CARS!” This reminded me of a few things.
1) I hate commercials that scream at you. I turn down the volume or change the station. Either way, I tune the loud commercial out thus making that advertisement useless and a waste of money.
2) The car dealership doesn’t get it- relationships sell cars and if all you can sell is price than the only thing you can do is lower your price and be beat by price. This dealership can not afford to offer their customers nice benefits because they can’t afford it. Again, this is what we’ve been talking about a lot lately – do you want more money or more customers? You can’t take care of more customers the same way you take care of less customers for the same amount of money. If you want to be the premium brand and offer your customers nice benefits, cutting edge technology, superior customer service, vast expertise, etc. than you can not sell on price. You should be competition, but remember the cream rises to the top.
3) I hate this dealership because they don’t get it. My mother bought a car from this dealership in 1985 and it is engrained in me to never buy a car from them because the way they treat people. When my wife wanted a car from this manufacturer, we drove across town to a dealership 3 times farther away to even look at the car. Recently, my wife’s car needed to go into the shop and we were just minutes away from this dealership that yells on the radio and we debated not going to them because their lack of relationships.
Think about #2 & #3. Sometimes people doubt us or don’t get the importance of relationship selling and value pricing over transactional price selling. The example of my family not trusting this dealership after over 25 years is not a stretch. This happens everyday in business. What is worse for this dealership is that my mother alone has probably told over 100 people how bad that dealership was to her in the past 25 years and she is not the only upset previous customer of theirs. (Don’t fret business owners, she did tell the owner personally of her troubles before bad mouthing them, but he just blew her off making it even worse.) The flip side of this is that I enjoyed the experience of buying my truck and I have referred no less than 5 friends to my sales person, Vincent, in the past 3 years.
Can that dealership ever get my mother’s business again? Maybe, but they’d have to be the last car dealership on earth and they’d have to be giving away free cars.