Talk the Talk

How to Sound Like A Car Salesman and Walk Away With Your Dream Car

Car dealers have a pretty bad reputation. The good news is that you can manage them with a few strategic moves. Imagine yourself walking on to a car dealership. You see a few salesmen hovering around. “Who’s up?” you say, and everyone jumps to attention.

All the salesmen are watching you, wondering now whether you are an experienced salesman. You find as you go about the dealership, test driving and reviewing your options for financing, that you are treated with considerable respect. The dealers are wearing kid gloves and it shows.

You have no problem walking away and transferring all of the information you learned to AutoBidsOnline, placing an offer for competitively priced cars that meet your exact needs.

No matter your method for buying a car – searching online or offline – dealers will treat you differently if you present yourself as someone who knows the game. Even auto mechanics will pay attention to you if you drop a few keywords of car salesman lingo.

You shouldn’t exactly be trying to trick people. You’re goal should never be to present yourself as something you are not. On the other hand, you can communicate indirectly and do enough to imply your level of knowledge.

So what words can you drop in conversation? You can start by pointing out that you may be a “be-back”, the type of customer who leaves a lot only when they have made a promise to return.”Bumping” is the process of raising an offer and you can drop this around. “I’m not interested in “bumping” my budget.

You might like to say “I’m interested in getting the info from F&I”. F&I is the finance and insurance office, the place in the dealership that most papers are signed.

Ask for the “first pencil”, which is the opening offer used by the sales manager. It will be written in pencil on what is called the “four-square worksheet”, used to establish the base price, the selling price, trade-in value and monthly payment for the car.

Here are keywords used by dealers that you need to listen out for. The first is the term, “full pop deal”. This is used to describe a vehicle financed at 110 percent of the sticker price, which his the highest price allowed by most banks.

The second is a “home run”, which refers to instances when a salesman is able to take advantage of a customer and squeeze out a profit on every element of a deal.

Then we have the “mini”, “packing payments”, “pounders”, and “ripping people’s heads off”.

The mini refers to the commission on a deal where the car is sold at the invoice price.

Packing payment is what happens when the dealer is able to add extra profits to the cost of a car. The pounder is a deal with a $1,000 profit, and finally, if a sales man “rips your head off”, it’s not a good thing because it means that they have taken you to the cleaners and charged you the maximum on everything.

So do your homework, incorporate the right language into your communication and by all means, never be a “laydown”!