With tough times upon the auto industry many people feel dealers should be giving the customer whatever they want or need. While this may sound good in theory, for the automotive industry you have to consider that many different things come into play that makes theory not always feasible.
Most of the time automakers are the ones that don’t meet those need or wants of customers, not the dealers. Inventory orders are a very prominent problem when it comes to this step in the process. Dealers will order on time, but those makers don’t always come through with the deliveries quickly.
So, instead of getting what the customer wants at times, dealers are left getting an inventory they don’t want or need for their customers. This creates the situation where they have inventory that will be hard to sell. Due to that situation, customers are left with looking at vehicles they don’t really want, but for which they will have to settle.
Sure, they can show you those vehicles, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be what you want. You may agree to it eventually, because they don’t have what you wanted, but you always leave the dealership thinking they were trying to push something on you.
Those vehicles that sit around for a while become a “brown banana”. A vehicle that is sitting around and will be losing the value as it continues to be on the lot.? This leaves the dealer with a problem they aren’t sure how to fix.
Sure, they could get rid of the vehicles at a lower cost and that would thrill the customer. But many of those dealerships will then suffer the fate of possibly being closed down by the automaker when they don’t make enough profit. Short of reverting back to hard sale tactics, it can be very hard for the dealer to be able to make the customer happy.
Of course dealers could head back to the days when hard sells were being used all the time. However, that isn’t going to make a customer happy in any way. Many people hated to see a salesperson walking up them in those days.
Once there was actually a system that they used to make these hard sells. Asking a customer for the keys to their car so they could look at it for a trade-in value. This tactic would leave the customer stuck at the lot and at their mercy.
It was a process that earned many people a bad reputation in the past. They would wear you down over time, until you would finally agree to the sale. Not only would you get a car you weren’t really sure you wanted, but you may have put yourself into too much debt.
Hopefully this Global Automotive Industry News has allowed you to see that it can be a complex situation between the automaker, the dealer and the customer.? Automakers need to work with their dealers so that all benefit, and everyone needs to pay more attention to News On The Automotive Industry.
