13 ms·

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience. I sold cars for almost a decad

PGs take on why early stage VCs gain so much experience reminds me of my opinions on why car sales is the best sales experience. I sold cars for almost a decade and was pretty good at it averaging 30 cars a month. That means every year I helped people sign for $16 million of products. In the end I probably sold 3000 cars for over $100 million. (Note, I stayed in it way too long. I think most of these benefits would come from 2 years) I made close to 50,000 phone calls, leaving probably 20,000 voicemails. I closed atleast 1000 deals purely on the phone. I've heard excuses, stalls, lies, promises and objections over 10,000 times. I've seen thousands of married couples discuss if they should go ahead with spending $30-100k. I've seen how they interact while waiting. (Nothing pains me more than couples, or moreso one party, playing games on their phones ignoring each other). While there is a lot more to modern tech sales than just closing incoming leads, I think car sales is an accelerator course for interacting with, reading, and closing people.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
This is interesting because as a car buyer, the only experience I want is car sellers quoting me prices until I get the lowest one. All via email.
- arecurrence 4y ago
  Bought a car via carwoo back when it was in business. The service let you message dealership salespeople and get quotes back. I met the guy that sold me my car for about 15 seconds total in the entire process. By far the swiftest and best large product purchasing experience I ever had. I was sad to see them close.
  - Scoundreller 4y ago
    I think Costco used to have a service like this, but it’s on hiatus because it doesn’t really work with the supply chain issues.
- phpthrowaway99 4y ago
  I would get many of these type leads. The better you are, the more of these you can close. They're not anyone's favorite, but if I have a car we can't sell because it's an ugly color, or weird options configuration, or in general we need to move some cars, I'd play along. I'm just kidding a bit. In reality, even very desirable cars can have this game played on them. I once sold a car $25k over MSRP, and the customer was thrilled because that was the lowest markup he could find. When it comes to used cars, finding the lowest price is usually a terrible plan I could go into for longer than a PG blog post.
  - foobarian 4y ago
    Sir I wish to subscribe to your newsletter (or blog or youtube channel or what have you).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
lnwlebjel 4y ago
Interesting. I rank buy a car from a new car salesman as the worst consumer experience of my life. So much so that I've since bought used cars and in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience. I understand that it could greatly benefit the salesperson in understanding the social psychology of the consumer ... but never again will I subject myself to that process.
- xapata 4y ago
  Used car salespeople are even worse! Are you buying from individuals or from a dealership?
  - copperx 4y ago
    What do you mean? Buying a used car from a dealership is about 5x worse than buying a new car. Of course they're buying from an individual.
    - xapata 4y ago
      > Buying a used car from a dealership is ... worse than buying a new car. Yes, that's what I said. > Of course they're buying from an individual. That was not clear.
- tenpies 4y ago
  > in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience And see Tesla knows this, which is why the margin on their cars is higher than most. You may have disliked that sales experience with a dealer or used car salesperson, but it quite likely got you a slightly better deal than had you tried to negotiate yourself.
  - christophilus 4y ago
    The margin might simply be from cutting out the middleman while keeping the middleman price. So, the buyer is not necessarily better or worse off. But not having to go through a pushy salesman is a big win. It’s why I love Carmax (and would probably like Carvana).
nuclearnice3 4y ago
It sounds like a heck of a training course. What are some of the things you learned?
sgustard 4y ago
One thing I learned about the industry is that dealership salespeople are hired from the same pool as, say, McDonalds employees. These are not college graduates who have white-collar job offers. They join with no existing skills at low wage. Turnover is massive, the average sales agent leaves within a year. Meanwhile, the whole industry is pushing hard to adopt Tesla's model of fixed pricing and replacing people with software.
- phpthrowaway99 4y ago
  I went to a top US university in a stem degree. My coworker was a med student that couldn't pass the Mcats, but wasn't a bozo. Basically everyone had a degree, and everyone made atleast $100k. I personally made about $225k but as I said, I was pretty good. I know a person in Bay area car sales making $300k+. I assume there are many others. I assume you agree a McDonald's employee is not going to close accountants and doctors and lawyers and programmers on a car as often as an engineering grad would... And if that's true, why would a car dealership hire McDonald's type employees instead of slightly failed but still intelligent university stem grads? They don't cost more, since it's all pay for performance.
  - skue 4y ago
    > My coworker was a med student that couldn't pass the Mcats That’s not a thing. The MCAT is used for admission into med school (equivalent to the LSAT or GRE).
  - vl 4y ago
    It looks like it was luxury brand dealership?
    - yitianjian 4y ago
      Roughly $45k/car could be luxury depending on what years, yeah. A decade of car selling likely puts it in the 2000's at the earliest.
    - phpthrowaway99 4y ago
peterkos 4y ago
I recognize that it could be a helpful and rigorous experience in sales, but most car people I've gone to across dealerships have tried to guilt trip and lie to me to get me to spend more money than I have. As a student paying full in cash, I was pushed ruthlessly despite firmly saying no, and ultimately I got my car somewhere else. It reminds me how Best Buy used to have horrible customer experience, it was all commission-based, and you would be hounded when first walking in the store. Then Apple came along with the model of "don't force someone to do anything, and the right product for them might not be in the store, and that's fine". (Notably, Best Buy seems to have gotten better since.)
- phpthrowaway99 4y ago
  I was about top 1% in the country. So buying from me would be a different experience. Maybe you landed on someone in the bottom 50%, at a bad dealership too. The owner of our dealership was a Cal grad, the sales manager was a Jewish accounting major, I had an engineering degree, my favorite coworker completed medschool but couldn't pass the MCATS, and everyone else had a degree too. When I went to work for a Penske dealership (a public company), corporate was in town one day and had a meeting with me to ask how the owner at my previous dealership did things. So maybe it wasn't your typical car dealership.
  - Khoth 4y ago
    Different experience how? > I've heard excuses, stalls, lies, promises and objections over 10,000 times. Sounds like you were also trying to guilt trip people who then struggled to find a socially acceptable way to disengage
  - m-ee 4y ago
    The MCAT is for admission into med school. How did they complete it without passing?
    - PNWChris 4y ago
      Likely they mean one of the step exams. Med school and residency are a brutal game - the exams don’t stop till you pass the boards at or around the time you become an attending!
geph2021 4y ago
In my experience[1], interacting with the salesperson and agreeing on the cars' price is about 25% of the sale process (and hassle). The salesperson nails down price, model/unit, with the customer, which already involves all manner of sleazy games on pricing. After the "sale", there's a much longer gauntlet of pitfalls and traps to navigate: extended warranties, add-ons (roof racks, floor mats, etc...), financing, trade-in value, anti-theft, pre-paid maintenance, etc, etc... (it goes on and on, it's exhausting). I'm going to guess, just based on the amount of manhours the dealership spends on the initial sale agreement, versus all the other crap, that the true money is not made by the dealership on the actual car sale, but on all these add-ons after the sale. [1] - fairly limited, bought 3 cars over the ~15 years, 1 used, 2 new, and it's been about 8 years since my last purchase, not sure how much its changed since then.
- phpthrowaway99 4y ago
  I agree, the "finance person" that technically does your paperwork and pitches you all those aftermarket products is the biggest crook in the industry (right next to the service advisors that tell you what service your car needs and the price). I would sometimes fill in for finance on a rainy day, and even though I was top 0.3% in the country when it came to car sales, I Couldn't sell that garbage even with a gun pointed at me. I just can't lie like that.
  - shard 4y ago
    It seems somewhat simple to just stand firm with the finance person and refuse all the add-ons, but how does one figure out what services are actually needed when the service adviser comes to you with a list of issues?
    - toast0 4y ago
      > how does one figure out what services are actually needed when the service adviser comes to you with a list of issues? As a basic set of rules: a) say no to everything. b) look at the service intervals in the book (or what the maintenance minder in the car says). c) ask them if the factory service plan would cover it d) ask them if it's critical to safety, and if so, explain what would happen if you didn't do it, how you would notice it was an issue, and how you should respond while it's happening on the road. e) as soon as you run out of factory service, and maybe factory warranty, use an independent mechanic Now, sometimes the factory service intervals are wrong, and sometimes there's stuff you probably should do that the factory doesn't say to do ever; but for the most part, the factory schedule is a good baseline, and dealer service wants to do extra frivolous stuff. Some independents do too, I have never seen a next oil change sticker printed with factory intervals.
asah 4y ago
best podcast ever: https://www.google.com/search?q=this+american+life+129+cars https://www.google.com/search?q=this+american+life+129+cars
tchock23 4y ago
Alex Hormozi was on a podcast recently talking about how you should learn high volume sales skills in a scenario like a gym chain, car dealer, etc. Do that for a few years and then take those skills to sell the most expensive thing you can to make “real” money with better quality customers. Seemed like reasonable advice and aligned with your experiences...
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Selling stuff is an extremely outward-focused career though, and it's its own thing. You have to be really careful due to the creeping boiler room effect. You can lose track of who/what you are inwardly very easily, due to almost no attention given your own values, and in effect a strong counter-incentive for attending to your own stuff. I have career-coached a lot of top sales people and most of them have been very clear that time spent convincing other people is exactly that much less time spent on personal goals, education, etc. For introverts, the #1 complaint is that it focuses you on your weakest side as your career foundation. Most also ended up gradually substituting sales education for specialty education, without realizing what they were doing, or that they had a choice. So you get people with tremendous, but less-interesting people skills hitting their '40s and going to tech boot camps because that's where their heart was all along. I had similar experience myself and if I could go back in time I think people skills learned in basic IT work were plenty. Let sales people be sales people, hire them to do sales, and stick to one's own favorite things...otherwise yeah if you like sales, knock yourself out.
  - throwaway2037 4y ago
    "creeping boiler room effect" -- I never saw this phrase before. I like it. This is the reason that I personally avoid sales people (outside of work / socially). To me: Sales is fundamentally about upselling -- selling you more than you need. How can people do this 8 hours per day, then go home and pretend they are not a sales person? Every GOOD sales person tells me they are "only like that at work". No, they are not. As a result, I try to avoid them! In social settings with sales people, before you know it, they are trying to manipulate you. It is so tiring.
baxtr 4y ago
Super interesting. Super stupid question from someone not really versed in sales: what’s your key takeaway about how to be good at selling something?
- ghiculescu 4y ago
  It’s in the comment: > an accelerator course for *interacting with, reading*, and closing people (Emphasis mine)
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  Same as with how to be good at coding: perform a lot of it, in as many different contexts as reasonably feasible. The finance arms of sales teams however, like the teams that assemble “no interest” parts of the deals, I was no fan of. There ain’t no free lunch, and the linguistic gymnastics they went through were a waste of my time to parse.
paxys 4y ago
While what you are saying is historically true, the internet has made the car salesman role pretty much irrelevant. I expect the job (and dealerships themselves) won't exist a decade or two from now. There are enough pictures, videos, spec sheets, expert reviews and forum discussions available online that the word of a sleazy salesman is worth nothing. More and more customers today walk into dealerships only because they have to by law, but know exactly what they want and what price they are willing to pay.
- phpthrowaway99 4y ago
  People have been saying this for 20 years. Yet car salespeople are more important than ever from what I've seen. But let's ignore that because you could argue it's just opinion. My favorite example/rebuttal to this is: Imagine a car sales evolves to basically vending machines. You walk up to the box, pick a car, swipe your card, and a roll-up door opens and your car pops out. Amazing! No salespeople needed. Every town just gets a few vending machine! Then one day, one vending machine owner decides to pay a bright kid to stand next to the vending machine in case the people have questions. Sales would go up at that vending machine. Soon all vending machines have a salesperson standing next to them helping people. And we're back to where we started. (Unless you think a smart helpful person standing next to the vending machine would make sales go down I suppose... But this is against everything I've seen selling thousands of cars)
  - paxys 4y ago
    Who was saying this 20 years ago? eCommerce was barely a thing back then. Smartphones, YouTube and Twitter didn't exist. The only people who knew about new cars and their features were enthusiasts who got a dozen magazine subscriptions. The difference is that today there are actually companies successfully following this model, Tesla being the most prominent example. All other manufacturers want to cut down on the mandatory middlemen fees (and have publicly said it - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629075106/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/21/business/tesla-online-sales-dealerships.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220629075106/https://www.nytim...). It's a matter of when, not if, they will get to it.
suzzer99 4y ago
Similarly I waited tables for 5 years. That experience has been a massive boost to putting myself in end users' shoes when designing systems.
- phpthrowaway99 4y ago
  I think any work that puts you in direct personal contact with thousands of people is going to be valuable. I sometimes used to think how fun being a waiter could be compared to car sales, because the interaction in nowhere near as tense and adversarial. In the best of sales, you quickly become and stay friendly with people, but the bottom 25% are mini wars and that beats on you after a while.
  - suzzer99 4y ago
    Yeah waiting tables almost always ends well. And there's something satisfying on a primal level about feeding people and watching them leave happy and full.
  - zamfi 4y ago
    100% agree here -- and you don't necessarily need to "work" such a job! I volunteered at a farmers market for a couple years and it gave me a fantastic view of people outside my bubble.
conductr 4y ago
Bought a new car recently and it was a joy, the market being what it is you go in knowing you’ll pay MSRP. Yeah it feels expensive, and is, but removing the negotiation was great UX Also helped that the dealership was pretty empty. A few of the dealerships I went to were madhouses and I just wanted to leave immediately as it was a chaotic environment
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Fortunately our local dealership is no-commission. So the folks are honestly trying to help you figure out what's right for you.
- phpthrowaway99 4y ago
  To be honest, so was I. Selling you something stupid is a lot more work, and riskier, than selling you what you want and works well. I personally had more leads than I could handle, because I didn't burn my leads. So if you came in wanting a vehicle for the snow, and all I had was SUVs with the sports package and performance tires, I didn't lie to you or try to downplay it. Sure I mentioned you could have a winter set of wheels and swap, and get the best performance year round, but I didn't say "don't worry, these tires work just fine in snow". It burns leads that know better. Thus if I couldnt really help you, I'd make the best of the situation if possible and move on. I had enough people to email and call back waiting on me, that spending an hour lying in hopes of a sale really wasn't worth it.
mannymanman 4y ago
For someone employed in tech, does anyone have recommendations for how to improve sales skills? Assuming I can't leave my current job.
mizzao 4y ago
Early stage founders also have to sell something (a hope and a dream) that's harder to move than used cars, so maybe that selling experience translates!
throwaway2037 4y ago
You must have been a top seller. These are incredible stats! That means your average car price was about 45K (I assume: USD). Wow. What brand of cars were you selling? Did other dealers try to buy you away... or did your own dealership give you huge bonuses for these revenues? About buying a car: As I understand, it is the most expensive "consumable" product that most people buy in their life. And they buy at least one every 10 years, so about 6-12 in their life. Compare a house: Many people only buy one or two in whole life. When selling cars, you are seeing the pinnacle of retail sales. I agree: The experience must be incredible. What do you do now? I hope you are doing B2B sales in software or pharma (where the markup is crazy)!
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tlogan 4y ago
Interesting. On the other hand, I learn that working in car sales might teach you about wrong sales "skills". At least, one does not learn skills needed for companies which want to have relationship with their customers. But you also learn a lot right skills (follow up, tick skin, read people, etc.)
sammalloy 4y ago
> I think car sales is an accelerator course for interacting with, reading, and closing people. There’s a lot of truth to this, but you could easily switch out "car sales" with any other kind of client and customer interaction. When I worked closely with users many moons ago, I quickly realized that most of them weren’t getting their needs met and were super excited to have me work one on one with them, and a very small percentage were actively hostile to any interaction at all. This kind of thing has held true for every job I’ve ever had. 1% of the customers cause 99% of the problems.
- phpthrowaway99 4y ago
  Yes that's true about any sales really working, but I thought car sales was an interesting mix of volume and high dollar sales. Obviously selling a $1M Saas enterprise contract is even higher dollars, but you probably don't get to try and close 5 of those in one day like you do in cars. You'd be lucky to get 5 in a month I assume, if not quarter. You could get more sales practice selling items at an electronics store, but the stakes are lower than a $50k car so you won't learn the reading people part because few people totally shut down when discussing buying a stereo.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

This is interesting because as a car buyer, the only experience I want is car sellers quoting me prices until I get the lowest one. All via email.

arecurrence 4y ago
Bought a car via carwoo back when it was in business. The service let you message dealership salespeople and get quotes back. I met the guy that sold me my car for about 15 seconds total in the entire process. By far the swiftest and best large product purchasing experience I ever had. I was sad to see them close.
- Scoundreller 4y ago
  I think Costco used to have a service like this, but it’s on hiatus because it doesn’t really work with the supply chain issues.
phpthrowaway99 4y ago
I would get many of these type leads. The better you are, the more of these you can close. They're not anyone's favorite, but if I have a car we can't sell because it's an ugly color, or weird options configuration, or in general we need to move some cars, I'd play along. I'm just kidding a bit. In reality, even very desirable cars can have this game played on them. I once sold a car $25k over MSRP, and the customer was thrilled because that was the lowest markup he could find. When it comes to used cars, finding the lowest price is usually a terrible plan I could go into for longer than a PG blog post.
- foobarian 4y ago
  Sir I wish to subscribe to your newsletter (or blog or youtube channel or what have you).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

lnwlebjel 4y ago

Interesting. I rank buy a car from a new car salesman as the worst consumer experience of my life. So much so that I've since bought used cars and in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience. I understand that it could greatly benefit the salesperson in understanding the social psychology of the consumer ... but never again will I subject myself to that process.

xapata 4y ago
Used car salespeople are even worse! Are you buying from individuals or from a dealership?
- copperx 4y ago
  What do you mean? Buying a used car from a dealership is about 5x worse than buying a new car. Of course they're buying from an individual.
  - xapata 4y ago
    > Buying a used car from a dealership is ... worse than buying a new car. Yes, that's what I said. > Of course they're buying from an individual. That was not clear.
tenpies 4y ago
> in the future hope to buy a Tesla in large part to avoid that experience And see Tesla knows this, which is why the margin on their cars is higher than most. You may have disliked that sales experience with a dealer or used car salesperson, but it quite likely got you a slightly better deal than had you tried to negotiate yourself.
- christophilus 4y ago
  The margin might simply be from cutting out the middleman while keeping the middleman price. So, the buyer is not necessarily better or worse off. But not having to go through a pushy salesman is a big win. It’s why I love Carmax (and would probably like Carvana).

nuclearnice3 4y ago

It sounds like a heck of a training course. What are some of the things you learned?

sgustard 4y ago

One thing I learned about the industry is that dealership salespeople are hired from the same pool as, say, McDonalds employees. These are not college graduates who have white-collar job offers. They join with no existing skills at low wage. Turnover is massive, the average sales agent leaves within a year. Meanwhile, the whole industry is pushing hard to adopt Tesla's model of fixed pricing and replacing people with software.

phpthrowaway99 4y ago
I went to a top US university in a stem degree. My coworker was a med student that couldn't pass the Mcats, but wasn't a bozo. Basically everyone had a degree, and everyone made atleast $100k. I personally made about $225k but as I said, I was pretty good. I know a person in Bay area car sales making $300k+. I assume there are many others. I assume you agree a McDonald's employee is not going to close accountants and doctors and lawyers and programmers on a car as often as an engineering grad would... And if that's true, why would a car dealership hire McDonald's type employees instead of slightly failed but still intelligent university stem grads? They don't cost more, since it's all pay for performance.
- skue 4y ago
  > My coworker was a med student that couldn't pass the Mcats That’s not a thing. The MCAT is used for admission into med school (equivalent to the LSAT or GRE).
- vl 4y ago
  It looks like it was luxury brand dealership?
  - yitianjian 4y ago
    Roughly $45k/car could be luxury depending on what years, yeah. A decade of car selling likely puts it in the 2000's at the earliest.
  - phpthrowaway99 4y ago

peterkos 4y ago

I recognize that it could be a helpful and rigorous experience in sales, but most car people I've gone to across dealerships have tried to guilt trip and lie to me to get me to spend more money than I have. As a student paying full in cash, I was pushed ruthlessly despite firmly saying no, and ultimately I got my car somewhere else. It reminds me how Best Buy used to have horrible customer experience, it was all commission-based, and you would be hounded when first walking in the store. Then Apple came along with the model of "don't force someone to do anything, and the right product for them might not be in the store, and that's fine". (Notably, Best Buy seems to have gotten better since.)

phpthrowaway99 4y ago
I was about top 1% in the country. So buying from me would be a different experience. Maybe you landed on someone in the bottom 50%, at a bad dealership too. The owner of our dealership was a Cal grad, the sales manager was a Jewish accounting major, I had an engineering degree, my favorite coworker completed medschool but couldn't pass the MCATS, and everyone else had a degree too. When I went to work for a Penske dealership (a public company), corporate was in town one day and had a meeting with me to ask how the owner at my previous dealership did things. So maybe it wasn't your typical car dealership.
- Khoth 4y ago
  Different experience how? > I've heard excuses, stalls, lies, promises and objections over 10,000 times. Sounds like you were also trying to guilt trip people who then struggled to find a socially acceptable way to disengage
- m-ee 4y ago
  The MCAT is for admission into med school. How did they complete it without passing?
  - PNWChris 4y ago
    Likely they mean one of the step exams. Med school and residency are a brutal game - the exams don’t stop till you pass the boards at or around the time you become an attending!

geph2021 4y ago

In my experience[1], interacting with the salesperson and agreeing on the cars' price is about 25% of the sale process (and hassle). The salesperson nails down price, model/unit, with the customer, which already involves all manner of sleazy games on pricing. After the "sale", there's a much longer gauntlet of pitfalls and traps to navigate: extended warranties, add-ons (roof racks, floor mats, etc...), financing, trade-in value, anti-theft, pre-paid maintenance, etc, etc... (it goes on and on, it's exhausting). I'm going to guess, just based on the amount of manhours the dealership spends on the initial sale agreement, versus all the other crap, that the true money is not made by the dealership on the actual car sale, but on all these add-ons after the sale. [1] - fairly limited, bought 3 cars over the ~15 years, 1 used, 2 new, and it's been about 8 years since my last purchase, not sure how much its changed since then.

phpthrowaway99 4y ago
I agree, the "finance person" that technically does your paperwork and pitches you all those aftermarket products is the biggest crook in the industry (right next to the service advisors that tell you what service your car needs and the price). I would sometimes fill in for finance on a rainy day, and even though I was top 0.3% in the country when it came to car sales, I Couldn't sell that garbage even with a gun pointed at me. I just can't lie like that.
- shard 4y ago
  It seems somewhat simple to just stand firm with the finance person and refuse all the add-ons, but how does one figure out what services are actually needed when the service adviser comes to you with a list of issues?
  - toast0 4y ago
    > how does one figure out what services are actually needed when the service adviser comes to you with a list of issues? As a basic set of rules: a) say no to everything. b) look at the service intervals in the book (or what the maintenance minder in the car says). c) ask them if the factory service plan would cover it d) ask them if it's critical to safety, and if so, explain what would happen if you didn't do it, how you would notice it was an issue, and how you should respond while it's happening on the road. e) as soon as you run out of factory service, and maybe factory warranty, use an independent mechanic Now, sometimes the factory service intervals are wrong, and sometimes there's stuff you probably should do that the factory doesn't say to do ever; but for the most part, the factory schedule is a good baseline, and dealer service wants to do extra frivolous stuff. Some independents do too, I have never seen a next oil change sticker printed with factory intervals.

asah 4y ago

best podcast ever: https://www.google.com/search?q=this+american+life+129+cars https://www.google.com/search?q=this+american+life+129+cars

tchock23 4y ago

Alex Hormozi was on a podcast recently talking about how you should learn high volume sales skills in a scenario like a gym chain, car dealer, etc. Do that for a few years and then take those skills to sell the most expensive thing you can to make “real” money with better quality customers. Seemed like reasonable advice and aligned with your experiences...

themodelplumber 4y ago
Selling stuff is an extremely outward-focused career though, and it's its own thing. You have to be really careful due to the creeping boiler room effect. You can lose track of who/what you are inwardly very easily, due to almost no attention given your own values, and in effect a strong counter-incentive for attending to your own stuff. I have career-coached a lot of top sales people and most of them have been very clear that time spent convincing other people is exactly that much less time spent on personal goals, education, etc. For introverts, the #1 complaint is that it focuses you on your weakest side as your career foundation. Most also ended up gradually substituting sales education for specialty education, without realizing what they were doing, or that they had a choice. So you get people with tremendous, but less-interesting people skills hitting their '40s and going to tech boot camps because that's where their heart was all along. I had similar experience myself and if I could go back in time I think people skills learned in basic IT work were plenty. Let sales people be sales people, hire them to do sales, and stick to one's own favorite things...otherwise yeah if you like sales, knock yourself out.
- throwaway2037 4y ago
  "creeping boiler room effect" -- I never saw this phrase before. I like it. This is the reason that I personally avoid sales people (outside of work / socially). To me: Sales is fundamentally about upselling -- selling you more than you need. How can people do this 8 hours per day, then go home and pretend they are not a sales person? Every GOOD sales person tells me they are "only like that at work". No, they are not. As a result, I try to avoid them! In social settings with sales people, before you know it, they are trying to manipulate you. It is so tiring.

baxtr 4y ago

Super interesting. Super stupid question from someone not really versed in sales: what’s your key takeaway about how to be good at selling something?

ghiculescu 4y ago
It’s in the comment: > an accelerator course for *interacting with, reading*, and closing people (Emphasis mine)
yourapostasy 4y ago
Same as with how to be good at coding: perform a lot of it, in as many different contexts as reasonably feasible. The finance arms of sales teams however, like the teams that assemble “no interest” parts of the deals, I was no fan of. There ain’t no free lunch, and the linguistic gymnastics they went through were a waste of my time to parse.

paxys 4y ago

While what you are saying is historically true, the internet has made the car salesman role pretty much irrelevant. I expect the job (and dealerships themselves) won't exist a decade or two from now. There are enough pictures, videos, spec sheets, expert reviews and forum discussions available online that the word of a sleazy salesman is worth nothing. More and more customers today walk into dealerships only because they have to by law, but know exactly what they want and what price they are willing to pay.

phpthrowaway99 4y ago
People have been saying this for 20 years. Yet car salespeople are more important than ever from what I've seen. But let's ignore that because you could argue it's just opinion. My favorite example/rebuttal to this is: Imagine a car sales evolves to basically vending machines. You walk up to the box, pick a car, swipe your card, and a roll-up door opens and your car pops out. Amazing! No salespeople needed. Every town just gets a few vending machine! Then one day, one vending machine owner decides to pay a bright kid to stand next to the vending machine in case the people have questions. Sales would go up at that vending machine. Soon all vending machines have a salesperson standing next to them helping people. And we're back to where we started. (Unless you think a smart helpful person standing next to the vending machine would make sales go down I suppose... But this is against everything I've seen selling thousands of cars)
- paxys 4y ago
  Who was saying this 20 years ago? eCommerce was barely a thing back then. Smartphones, YouTube and Twitter didn't exist. The only people who knew about new cars and their features were enthusiasts who got a dozen magazine subscriptions. The difference is that today there are actually companies successfully following this model, Tesla being the most prominent example. All other manufacturers want to cut down on the mandatory middlemen fees (and have publicly said it - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629075106/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/21/business/tesla-online-sales-dealerships.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220629075106/https://www.nytim...). It's a matter of when, not if, they will get to it.

suzzer99 4y ago

Similarly I waited tables for 5 years. That experience has been a massive boost to putting myself in end users' shoes when designing systems.

phpthrowaway99 4y ago
I think any work that puts you in direct personal contact with thousands of people is going to be valuable. I sometimes used to think how fun being a waiter could be compared to car sales, because the interaction in nowhere near as tense and adversarial. In the best of sales, you quickly become and stay friendly with people, but the bottom 25% are mini wars and that beats on you after a while.
- suzzer99 4y ago
  Yeah waiting tables almost always ends well. And there's something satisfying on a primal level about feeding people and watching them leave happy and full.
- zamfi 4y ago
  100% agree here -- and you don't necessarily need to "work" such a job! I volunteered at a farmers market for a couple years and it gave me a fantastic view of people outside my bubble.

conductr 4y ago

Bought a new car recently and it was a joy, the market being what it is you go in knowing you’ll pay MSRP. Yeah it feels expensive, and is, but removing the negotiation was great UX Also helped that the dealership was pretty empty. A few of the dealerships I went to were madhouses and I just wanted to leave immediately as it was a chaotic environment

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Fortunately our local dealership is no-commission. So the folks are honestly trying to help you figure out what's right for you.

phpthrowaway99 4y ago
To be honest, so was I. Selling you something stupid is a lot more work, and riskier, than selling you what you want and works well. I personally had more leads than I could handle, because I didn't burn my leads. So if you came in wanting a vehicle for the snow, and all I had was SUVs with the sports package and performance tires, I didn't lie to you or try to downplay it. Sure I mentioned you could have a winter set of wheels and swap, and get the best performance year round, but I didn't say "don't worry, these tires work just fine in snow". It burns leads that know better. Thus if I couldnt really help you, I'd make the best of the situation if possible and move on. I had enough people to email and call back waiting on me, that spending an hour lying in hopes of a sale really wasn't worth it.

mannymanman 4y ago

For someone employed in tech, does anyone have recommendations for how to improve sales skills? Assuming I can't leave my current job.

mizzao 4y ago

Early stage founders also have to sell something (a hope and a dream) that's harder to move than used cars, so maybe that selling experience translates!

throwaway2037 4y ago

You must have been a top seller. These are incredible stats! That means your average car price was about 45K (I assume: USD). Wow. What brand of cars were you selling? Did other dealers try to buy you away... or did your own dealership give you huge bonuses for these revenues? About buying a car: As I understand, it is the most expensive "consumable" product that most people buy in their life. And they buy at least one every 10 years, so about 6-12 in their life. Compare a house: Many people only buy one or two in whole life. When selling cars, you are seeing the pinnacle of retail sales. I agree: The experience must be incredible. What do you do now? I hope you are doing B2B sales in software or pharma (where the markup is crazy)!

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

tlogan 4y ago

Interesting. On the other hand, I learn that working in car sales might teach you about wrong sales "skills". At least, one does not learn skills needed for companies which want to have relationship with their customers. But you also learn a lot right skills (follow up, tick skin, read people, etc.)

sammalloy 4y ago

> I think car sales is an accelerator course for interacting with, reading, and closing people. There’s a lot of truth to this, but you could easily switch out "car sales" with any other kind of client and customer interaction. When I worked closely with users many moons ago, I quickly realized that most of them weren’t getting their needs met and were super excited to have me work one on one with them, and a very small percentage were actively hostile to any interaction at all. This kind of thing has held true for every job I’ve ever had. 1% of the customers cause 99% of the problems.

phpthrowaway99 4y ago
Yes that's true about any sales really working, but I thought car sales was an interesting mix of volume and high dollar sales. Obviously selling a $1M Saas enterprise contract is even higher dollars, but you probably don't get to try and close 5 of those in one day like you do in cars. You'd be lucky to get 5 in a month I assume, if not quarter. You could get more sales practice selling items at an electronics store, but the stakes are lower than a $50k car so you won't learn the reading people part because few people totally shut down when discussing buying a stereo.