The automotive industry is a unique industry in many ways. One major difference between most industries is in the culture at the dealership and how the staff work with each other.

You will waste all of your time giving demos or pitching to non-decision makers at the dealership. Salespeople should really get least amount of your time, and general sales managers will rarely help you get to the decision makers.

The thing is, the general manager at the dealership is manning the ship of a very complex and chaotic environment. Staff quickly learn to feel shame and judge themselves for bringing dumb things to their management, and management doesn’t mind creating a culture like this because it does limit them from being pulled into every fire at the store.

Management also tend to want to create a form of top-level pressure that everybody feels, and that makes the staff and the sales people actually do their job or risk facing the wrath of management. This culture becomes entrenched at most stores and you don’t want to swim upstream. Rather, you want to accept this culture and work with it.

As such, salespeople will often not bring you to the dealership general manager. A recommendation that starts from below management will always be soured by the relationship that the salesrep or sales manager has with the general manager. Salespeople often aren’t even able to get you an inventory feed properly.

When communicating with a sales rep or a sales manager, ask lots of questions but don’t do a demo or a pitch if you are aiming to sell to the store. Save your time on an outreach to the actual management, but use the answers and information you’ve gathered from staff justify your outreach. Explain to the general manager that after conversations with some staff, you really feel that you can help the dealership with XYZ and for XYZ reasons.

Never directly reach out to a sales rep or a sales manager for a demo. This is the worst place to start the sale at the dealership and could hurt you when it comes to actually getting your services working there.

If you’re unsure, always ask if the person you’re talking to is the final decision maker. If they refuse to make an introduction to the general manager, it usually means you’ve gone too far with this sales rep or sales manager, and they have taken ownership of the decision now. You actually don’t want this to happen as it puts you into a tough spot and you now have a wall between you and the general manager in the form of a salesrep or sales manager that wants to be the “hero” at the store. You’re job is not to make a staff member feel like a hero, your job is to sell your product directly to management.

Gather information that helps you understand the store and then reach out to the general manager or the dealer principal with the specific information you know and how your process or system can uniquely help the store because of similar dealerships you’ve helped or because you have a solution that solves the problems you already know that dealership has.

Go for the throat here on this one or you won’t get into the hot seat at all.

Decision Makers at the Dealership