Tales from Sales: The Snow Sale
If the profit margin is high enough, or if bountiful customer referrals are evident, dealerships are often enticed to follow through with ridiculous customer requests.
If the profit margin is high enough, or if bountiful customer referrals are evident, dealerships are often enticed to follow through with ridiculous customer requests. In the depths of winter when snow banks are high and bank accounts are low, the customer is often in the driver’s seat.
Savvy customers are wise to this, taking full advantage of the situation. I can hardly blame them; if the roles were reversed, I’d try the same thing. The most novice customers jockey for a couple of free oil changes. Hardened veterans beat us up on everything from the price of the car to the terms of the finance contract. All of these pale in comparison, however, to the customer who asked for his truck to be delivered to a third party location. Three hours away. In a snowstorm.
The sale itself was an “up” that I earned over the phone. The paperwork was routine, handled by an archaic fax machine that jammed like Bob Marley. I knew it was all too good to be true; when the customer dropped the delivery request, I was partly elated to be getting a paycheque and partly deflated at the prospect of driving three hours southeast with the forecast calling for heavy snow right into next week.
I thought the request was out to lunch. For the Dealer Principal to even be considering it, I figured he must have been flying high on Elvis-grade prescriptions and I expressed as much. His response was instant and predictable.
“You will drive the truck to the customer on Sunday and you will like it,” he groused, his strained voiced sounding like a belt sander grinding asphalt. That day of the week was chosen so as not to interfere with normal Monday-Saturday selling.
Sunday morning rolls around and I arrived at the dealership in my demo which, at the time, was a higher end sedan. Must have been a good month. I had roped a friend into accompanying me on the trek; I would take the lead driving the newly sold full sized truck and he would follow in the sedan. Following a night of hard partying, the road ahead looked bleak.
I recognize now that even the promise of a free lunch and the pleasure of piloting a near $60,000 luxury car was not enough compensation for my friend on this torturous journey. Snow had been falling – well, not so much falling as blowing sideways – for several hours by the time we left. At about the halfway point, we ran out of dual carriageway and started on B roads. If the snowclearing efforts were poor initially, they were nonexistent from this point forward. As I was in the 4x4, I started making runs at snow drifts in order to clear a path for my comrade in the sedan. At least there was no other traffic.
We entered the destination town about five hours after our departure, wrung out from the drive and hyped up on Red Bull. When the realization struck that we now had to turn around and drive home, meaning the journey was only half over, I buried my face in my hands. My friend crawled into the back seat of the sedan and did not surface for another six hours.
After all that, I never did meet the customer face to face. My instructions were to leave the truck with the third party broker representing the customer. It turned out that he would ship the truck to its final destination, wherever that was. I was just glad to get clear of it. Profit or not, odd requests make for an interesting day.
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