The Secret to Car Sales Is Becoming an Expert in the People Business

The following is adapted from Frictionless.

Car salespeople know that a large part of success comes from repeatable processes, but in most dealerships, there are none for us to follow. We get minimal training, few resources, and whatever support we’re lucky enough to latch on to. Relevant, belly-to-belly sales training has never been more important, and it’s just as hard to get as ever.

The good news is that the true secret to car sales isn’t found in a list of steps in your company handbook; the secret lies in becoming an expert in the people business. If you want to guarantee your current and future success in car sales, you need to know how to deliver an exceptional customer experience every time. 

As I’ll explain in this article, if you can set the right attitude and master your people skills, like sharing your enthusiasm with a customer and negotiating a deal that makes everyone involved feel like a winner, you’ll have all you need to succeed in this industry. 

Adopt a Winning Attitude

You can’t have great people skills if you don’t first have the right attitude to interact with customers, so you need to put yourself in the mindset to win. What does that look like? Imagine that you’re at a dealership and are about to approach your next customer. 

Before you talk to the customer, you want to make sure you’re ready for the conversation. That means believing that the customer walking onto the lot is ready to buy a new vehicle, now. We don’t get to prejudge whether someone is “serious” or not. They drove all the way over, fully expecting to invest two, three, four hours of their life in us. We owe it to them to give them all we’ve got.

As salespeople, our emotions start off just as high as the customer’s, if not higher. While there’s always going to be some level of nervousness involved, we can’t have high emotions that are also negative. 

Maybe you just spent three hours with someone on a Saturday morning, and they were a jackass and left without buying. Now you’re left on the lot pissing and moaning about how ridiculous he was, transferring that negativity to the next customer and costing yourself money. If you want to succeed, you cannot let past losses get in the way of future wins.  

A bad attitude will blow customers off the lot and cost you potentially thousands of dollars in commission. To combat this, ask yourself a few questions before you approach your next customer. Where is your mindset? What kind of emotions do you have? 

If your attitude isn’t positive, take a minute to reset. Negative energy will rub off on everyone you talk to and will waste all of your time. We’re in the people business before the sales business, so you need to adopt a positive attitude, and then you can work on your people skills.

How do you master your people skills? The unglamorous but necessary work of practice. 

Perfect Practice Makes Perfect

As Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach famously said, “Any spectacular achievement was preceded by a bunch of unspectacular practice.” 

Everyone wants to be great, but only the truly great are willing to pay the price for that greatness. If we want to make this industry work for us, we have to first work on ourselves, even when it feels tedious.

I won’t lie: practice is boring. I can’t even compare it to sports, because hitting golf balls and shooting free throws is fun. At least then you can see the results and get some instant gratification. Practicing a sales script out loud by yourself is boring, mundane, repetitive work and not at all rewarding in the moment. In fact, it doesn’t come with any result or reward until it’s been mastered. But if you want to be great, you have to have the intestinal fortitude to power through that boredom of practice.

We’re living in the most educated and most distracted society that has ever existed. We have to work that much harder to set the phone down, tune out the world, and do the unrewarding work in between customers. 

If you can do that, your knowledge will turn into valuable, instinctual skills that will ultimately raise your confidence and change the way you interact with everyone on your lot.

Make People Skills Second Nature

Knowledge alone doesn’t make sales. What I tell every class I’ve trained is that when you think, you stink—it needs to become your instinct. Your people skills need to become second nature so you can handle customer interactions smoothly and without thought. 

Vince Lombardi said, “Amateurs practice ’til they get it right, pros practice ’til they can’t get it wrong.” That’s what we’re going for. We need our knowledge and skills to be so ingrained that they become our reflexes.

When a customer says, “We’re just going to think about it,” that’s a ninety-mile-an-hour fastball coming at your bat. You don’t have time to think about whether you should swing or not. You have to just know. Only real confidence shows up to respond in those cases.

When you’re confident, you’re enthusiastic, and enthusiasm sells.

The only way to internalize your people skills is to, as I described earlier, practice them over and over again, by yourself or with your coworkers, until your message comes out sounding natural, like you’re just having a conversation.

Knowledge doesn’t become a skill until it’s just what you do without thinking about it. It’s not you closing. It’s not you negotiating. It’s just what comes naturally to you right when you need it, like a reflex.

People skills are the true secret to car sales, and by adopting a positive attitude and practicing, you’ll be able to effectively negotiate and persuade your customers to buy in a way that feels like second nature to you. 

For more advice on car sales, you can find Frictionless on Amazon.

Tim Kintz is the president of The Kintz Group, the automotive industry’s premier sales and management training company. Tim started The Kintz Group after re-entering the retail side of the business as a general manager and seeing the need for up-to-date training. A graduate of the NADA Dealer Academy, Tim has worked in just about every position in the dealership and can still be found on the showroom floor working deals alongside salespeople and managers. Tim has delivered hands-on coaching, workshops, and presentations in large cities and rural communities alike. His strategies are relevant and proven to work everywhere cars are sold.