this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
95 points (92.0% liked)
Asklemmy
43995 readers
1265 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Step one: ask what the person’s use case is, then match it. It’s a standard interview trap to present this “sell this pen” thing as a test where the “potential customer” needs to prop up their window or poke a hole in a balloon or something stupid like that, just so they can turn down the people who hype up the writing capabilities. Always ask what they need first.
I sold cars for a year. During the initial onboarding we were asked to "sell a pen" to the trainer.
Everyone jumped right in to selling the qualities of the pen they had in hand.
At the end of the exercise the trainer said, "I'm looking for a pencil".
The point was, don't assume what the customer is looking for. Ask qualifying questions and identify 3-5 hot buttons, then based on what should be knowledge of the inventory and inventory of surrounding dealerships (yeah, they're all connected to some degree), make recommendations that fit their needs.
Then describe all the ways it could fulfill their wants using positive, yes questions. Don't ask a question you don't know the answer to. We were taught that it takes 5-10 Yes responses to offset the negative mental energy from a question asked resulting in a No - so we weren't supposed to mess that up. That was just one of numerous psychological plays we were taught and forced to use or get threatened with being fired or having bonuses taken away.
The whole training series was bullshit. And I say it was bullshit because it sucked playing all these games on people. Yeah, 1/5 of the time it didn't work because they caught on. But the amount of times it actually worked made me feel guilty and sad.
The amount of times you put someone into a car they couldn't afford because you successfully sold them on their wants and not their needs was awful.
I quit near the end of that year because fuck car sales and fuck car dealerships. This was 15 years ago, so who knows what it's like now.
Also, because I assume someone might ask (lol assuming, I fail), this was for a conglomerate that owned 5 used car lots, a Scion lot, a Toyota lot, a Lexus lot, and oddly a Ford & Chevy lot. Last I heard they're just down to a Lexus lot and one used car lot now. Apparently the mortgage bubble and COVID hit them hard. Fine by me.
I did not know this!