WORKING THE NUMBERS IN CAR SALES

The seven steps of the sale take you all the way to the desk. Then they stop. Every training program covers the meet and greet, the test drive, and the four boxes on the worksheet. Almost none of them cover what happens next. You walk back to that table holding a number that is not the number your customer gave you, and you have to say something. That is where deals actually die. Early in his career, Bruce Huddleston was handed a starter figure of one thousand dollars on a garage-kept Chevy Step-side. He delivered it flat, across a table a foot and a half wide. The customer reached over, took him by the necktie, and pulled him halfway across it. That truck eventually appraised at nine thousand dollars. Thirty-five years later, this is the book nobody handed him. It covers the part the seven steps leave out. How to work the four square as four questions rather than four boxes to fill in. How to deliver a starter figure so that being wrong costs you nothing. How to explain to a customer why their vehicle is worth less than they still owe on it, and what rolling that difference into a new loan will actually cost them. How to work the payment box, which moves more money than anything else on the page, and how to talk about term without misleading anybody. How many trips to the desk are too many, and what should change on each one. What to concede, in what order, and the one thing you never give up under any circumstances. How to hold a customer honestly while somebody else decides their approval, and how to let a deal walk in a way that brings it back. There is no script here for talking anybody into anything. There is arithmetic your customer does not have, and a way to use it that lets you sleep at night. Most of the deals in these pages are ones Bruce lost or got wrong. The man who would not come off ten thousand dollars for his pickup, and walked. The couple who walked over twenty-seven dollars a month. The floor mats he bought out of his own pocket because he tried to solve a problem without his desk. And the widow who had never bought a vehicle in her life, who came back six years later and bought another one, and who brought pastries to the service drive for years afterward. Bruce Huddleston spent thirty-five years in the automotive business, working every job from green salesperson to general sales manager, across new car franchises, independent lots, and buy here pay here operations. This is the straight version, no theory and no fluff, built from real deals and real mistakes, including his own. Written for the salesperson nobody trained properly.