The Professor
I was known as “The Professor”. During almost two years of selling Toyotas at a great dealership in Philadelphia, I earned the nickname because of the reading glasses permanently perched on the bridge of my nose and the notebook I always kept close by.
I took the job because, as a mature professional, after months of looking for other jobs, nobody wanted to hire me to do anything I knew anything about — anybody can get hired to sell cars. Not everybody can be good, but anybody can get hired.
The wild, wild west
I wasn’t a very good salesperson. To be good, one has to be able to look into a customer’s eyes, stretch the truth, manipulate and distort.
The environment in a dealership is fluid. There’s no way to predict, at 9 a.m., what an $18,000 car will sell for at 5 p.m. — sometimes $14,000, sometimes $17,999. Along the way, the list of things out of a salesperson’s control change by the hour. An ability to adapt is critical. Fail and earnings can be lost.
The people who work in dealerships are amazing. Carnies, wingnuts, true believers, thieves, chicken farmers, comics and idiots abound. Some are kind. Some are sharks because their only professional alternatives are digging ditches or stocking shelves.
And they bite.
Test drive
Prevailing wisdom holds that about seventy-five percent of the customers who take a test drive will purchase the vehicle. The incentive to get a customer into a car for a spin around the block is exceptionally high and no two customers are alike.
I hate snakes
I was the first to greet a twenty-something blonde woman in a ponytail. About 5’ 5”, she was athletic, weighed about ninety pounds and carried a giant smile.
Following a brief conversation, she said she wanted to test drive a Yaris, the smallest vehicle Toyota made at the time. We went through the formalities of copying her driver’s license and insurance card, then onward to find the blue color she wanted. It took three minutes.
I pulled the car around. She sheepishly leaned in the passenger window and asked to take her pet for the drive. Knowing the dealership frowned on granting these requests, I relented because I needed a sale. Delighted, she found her trade, reached inside and pulled out Tom — her five foot long pet python.
After she carefully set Tom in the trunk, we went out for a five minute trip that felt like five years. Satan himself was riding shotgun. The ride was uneventful but, as we pulled back into the lot, my door flew open and I shot out of the car faster than a bullet leaves a gun. Mary popped the trunk, wrapped Tom around her shoulders, came inside and signed the paperwork.
The other snake
Our dealership performed trade valuations while customers were on test drives and this experience was no different, with one exception. Mary didn’t expect the used car manager — the only guy with whom I didn’t get along — to pop the trunk of her car to look inside.
What happened next couldn’t have happened to a nicer shark.
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