There are two rooms in every car deal. You are the only person who has been in both.
Your customer is in one room. Your manager is in the other. They will probably never meet. Everything each of them knows about the other, they know because you carried it.
Most new salespeople never figure this out. They treat the desk like a courtroom, walk up to receive a verdict, and blame the manager for a deal they lost before they left their chair.
Bruce Huddleston spent thirty-five years in the car business, a good stretch of it at that desk as a used car manager and general sales manager. He knows what a manager is thinking when a salesperson walks up, because he was the one thinking it. He also knows what it is like to be humiliated in front of your own boss for asking a fair question, because it happened to him first.
This book teaches the trip. How to walk up prepared, how to present so the desk wants to work your deal, what to do with the customer you left in a chair, and how to carry an answer back without apologizing for it.
Inside you will learn what a desk manager is doing all day and why a short answer is rarely personal. The six things that have to be true before you walk up there. Why leading with what is wrong guarantees a conservative answer, and how to hand the desk the whole customer instead of just the numbers. What to say when a competing dealership calls your customer in your waiting room. How to present a number you did not choose without your face saying it is bad. And how to stand your ground when the answer will not work, because a first no usually means not like this.
Six rules, four stories from Bruce's own floor, and one idea underneath all of it. You are not a runner carrying paper between two people who decide your income. You are the professional in the middle, and the deal does not happen without you.
Book 3 of the Working the Deal series. Short, focused books on the negotiation and closing phase of the sale, written to be read in an afternoon and used the same day.
