It is barely 8:30 in the morning, but Timothy C. Gercke, auto industry educator and evangelist, has invoked Henry Ford, Moses and the Masai in trying to rouse the two dozen auto salespeople before him to the potential of their calling.
He wants to inspire them to resolve the bitterest feud in American commerce, between the people who sell cars and pretty much everyone else.
“What do we say about buyers?” he demands, big hands waving, big voice revving from a whisper to a roar as he paces the windowless hotel meeting room. “All buyers are-what?”
“Liars,” the salespeople chant, revealing the reciprocal perspective of many of their customers.
“Sure, they lie through their teeth,” Gercke says.
Then he urges his pupils to understand why customers might lie-about the condition of their trade-ins, for example, or the other cars they are considering-and prods them toward higher ground. Customers are frightened, he said, and salespeople must bravely take the first step by being honest with them.
Gercke, who lectures on behalf of the National Automobile Dealers Association, is an avatar of an industrywide effort to turn salespeople into “sales professionals” and buff the business’ greasy image.
The auto companies have inaugurated numerous training programs because they believe that as quality gaps narrow, the salesman is the key to keeping customers loyal in a market jammed with competitors selling what Gercke, with typical sweep, refers to as “this thing called a car.”
Part Tony Robbins self-esteem booster, part Gatsbyesque self-improvement exercise, the program offered by the dealers’ association educates salespeople on dressing (no dark glasses, no loud jackets), speaking (don’t call female customers “babe” or “honey”), and, most urgently, grappling with the ethical quandaries they confront daily.
But a few days of watching salespeople labor in their lots shows how hard it is to abide by Gercke’s injunctions on ethics, if not etiquette. Few professionals work under their kind of pressure.
Though a couple of automakers, notably Saturn, encourage their dealers to put salespeople on salary, salespeople still largely make their money by commissions. The more forgiving salespeople are in negotiating price, trade-in value, interest rate, floor mat cost and everything else, the less money they make.
“Buying a new car should be fun; why isn’t it?” the trade weekly Automotive News recently editorialized, giving the blame partly to “the antiquated commission system.”
Mix that with the suspicion, contempt and lies some customers heap upon them, and one is left wondering why all salespeople don’t metamorphose into sharks, rather than why so many do.
And many do not, including, it seems, most of Gercke’s audience. In fact, that is another obstacle the association faces: The worst sinners are unlikely to enter Gercke’s church.
“I’m not a sales slob; I’m a professional,” said one student, Nolan Burgess, a self-described sales consultant at Benson Motor Cars, a Mercedes-Benz dealership in Annapolis. While arguing that good salesmen get no credit, he acknowledged: “There’s a whole bunch of bad apples.” The course, he said, was renewing his sense of purpose.
Indeed, the course can seem like a pep talk for salespeople trying to do the right thing, despite the market forces arrayed against them.
“You’re not bad people,” Gercke says, sounding a poignant theme he and his pupils repeatedly revisit. “You can be proud of our business.”
To make it better, though, salespeople should not ridicule their customers behind their backs, he says, sizing them up by clothing or color and dismissing them as “roaches” (people with miserable credit) or “get me dones” (one slither above roaches on the credit scale). Instead, they should view them as “people with dignity and value who can make you a decent living, if you treat them well.”
The programs run by the car companies tend to have high-falutin names-Oldsmobile has its Vision Center, Chevrolet its Customer Focus Academy-but their goals, like those of the dealers’ association, seem basic: Persuading dealers to refurbish their showrooms or to keep their service departments open on Saturdays and teaching salespeople more details about the products and to be nicer.
The association training at times is so basic as to be alarming. “You are in dangerous ethical waters when you deliberately misinform or lie to customers,” warns the gravel-voiced narrator on one of the training tapes.
Improvements are slow in coming. The association has persuaded only 350 of its 19,400 members to sign up and pay the fee-$1,295 per dealership, plus $295 per salesman (no negotiating). The association created the program three years ago, but began aggressively promoting it only recently.
After at least 12 hours of studying with tapes and the 8-hour class, which travels to towns nationwide, the salespeople must score at least 70 percent on a multiple-choice exam. They also must have spent at least six months at their dealership and completed product training for the vehicles they sell. Only then can they be certified as members of the Society of Automotive Sales Professionals.
The association hopes that enough dealers will hang a certification plaque in their windows that customers will learn to look for it, gradually forcing other dealers to raise their standards.
Gercke tells his pupils the change starts with them. “People aren’t going to buy from you because you have a plaque on your window,” he says. “They’re going to buy from you because you have a plaque on your heart that says, `I am different.’ “
But consider the position of the average new-car salesman (he is a man), and you will see how hard it is to change.
Generally, a salesman will spend one to three hours with a couple of dozen customers a week. Many will promise to come back and never do. Frequently, they will make an appointment to return and won’t, leaving the salesman to pass up other customers as he paces and checks his watch or watches cars pull into the lot.
Once the negotiating begins, so does the lying. Customers swear they never damaged their trade-in, when it has more dimples than a golf ball.
They lie about deals they have been offered elsewhere, about what their neighbors paid for the model they are considering or about their credit histories.
One salesman attending the class told of selling 17 cars in a row only to discover when it came time for the paperwork that each person had such bad credit that not one deal was approved.
Meanwhile, every customer suspects the salesman of being slime.
Such experiences could make a man cynical. “It was so hard at first,” said Timothy S. Gulick, a salesman from the Bob Smith Automotive Group, the “GM Giant” on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. “It was: `These people think I’m lying. My God, what’s going on?’ “
At the end of the workweek, which often lasts six days, the typical salesman may have sold three cars. He generally receives 20 to 25 percent of the dealer’s gross profit, so he makes about $300 a car.
In 1992, according to the dealers’ association’s most recent data, the average salesman in a new-car dealership made $29,319. Almost all pay for their own health and retirement benefits.
The top salespeople averaged $44,788, and that kind of money is the job’s greatest appeal. Some salesmen also cite the thrill of closing a deal or of helping people.
“Once a kid gets his first car-that’s a good feeling,” Bob Smith’s David Shepherd said.
Of course, while salespeople resent their poor public image, customers have developed it from hard experience, as Gercke reminds his pupils.
In one remarkable case, a Texas jury found that a Tarrant County salesman trapped a deaf and mute customer for four hours, taking his keys and hiding them.
“Let me go home,” the customer pleaded in one note to the salesman, according to court documents. “I’m very hungry and if you mail me a good deal then maybe I come over here to buy!”
The jury awarded the customer almost $5.8 million, an award upheld last year by an appeals court. The court found that the dealer, George Grubbs Nissan, took advantage of customers “through the use of deception and psychological pressure in an effort to make as much profit as possible.” The dealer is appealing to the Texas Supreme Court.
The court’s words cut to the heart of salespeople’s quandaries. How, for example, can a salesman expect to keep up with the mortgage if he honestly answers this question: “What did the dealer pay for this car?”
As Gercke paces his classroom, he labors to convince his pupils that it is in their interest to answer such questions honestly, and not to “high gross” their customers. Sacrificing some profit now will yield referrals and repeat business, he says.
To be sure, even honest answers to these questions will not necessarily protect customers from profiteering.
Any salesman can build extra profit into a deal by playing with trade-in value, options and interest rates on the financing.
In the afternoon session of the class, Gercke explains that myriad state and federal laws make telling lies not merely unethical, but illegal. “I would suggest that none of you would look good in prison blue,” he booms.
Even exaggerations can cause trouble. Statements such as “this car will meet all your needs” create implied warranties, Gercke says.
Further, he says, today’s more sophisticated car shoppers are likely to detect any overpromising.
“The bad reputation of our industry has gone like a ripple on a wave into the future,” Gercke says. “It has to stop with us, in this room, here, today.”
