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By the end of the year, more than half of the 15,000-member Olds sales force will have spent a mandatory and intensive week of 12-hour daily classes here, rooming and boarding together and drilling on such subjects as "building T.R.U.S.T. with warp speed." One of their instructors, or "facilitators" in Vision Center terminology, is Ken Winkelman, 30, who has been borrowed by Oldsmobile from a Saturn dealership in Orlando, Florida. Winkelman admits that most of his recruits are not, at the outset, happy campers: "The general feeling among people who arrive is that they don't want to be here." Accordingly, he divides his captive audience into "prisoners, vacationers and learners." Under Winkelman's enthusiastic guidance, most of them soon turn into happy collaborators.
During a recent class, he asked his pupils to list some of the bad old tricks of their trade. They eagerly volunteered, coming up with:
Lowballing. Setting a price ridiculously below dealer costs, knowing that a customer will not find anything cheaper elsewhere, and then "uploading" the package with piffles when the buyer returns.
Double Dipping. Billing again for services such as shipping and lot charges that are already included in the sticker price.
Grounding. Making it almost impossible for buyers to leave the lot, employing ruses such as fictitious waits for sales managers to arrive to dicker or the temporary "loss" of vital car keys.
Flipping/Turning Over. Rotating customers from one sales representative to another in order to confuse them and break down their resistance.
As this litany grows, so does the excitement among class members. The atmosphere begins to resemble a 12-step program; they are recovering car salespeople, and these are the habits they are trying to kick. Winkelman skillfully steers them toward repentance and "the new, soft, soft, soft sell. It's not about being wimpy. It's about building your future. It's about professionalism and earning the customer's right to ask for the sale." He then quotes a maxim: "You can shear a sheep many times in its life, but you can only skin it once." Apparently converted, a thirtyish salesman from Chicago blurts out, "That's how we were taught. If you teach us to be nice, we can be nice."
Not everyone in the business shares in the warm glow emanating from such sessions. Ed Mullane, 82, a Ford dealer for 40 years, argues that the Big Three created the conditions they now deplore by saturating their markets with dealerships: "There are too many of us. By crowding us in like Dairy Queens, you cannibalize the price, cannibalize the service, cannibalize the reputation of the dealer. That's why we're rated with pirates and bank robbers and lawyers, and all we end up doing is swapping dissatisfied customers." And not all the converts remain converted. Los Angeles consultant Rikess admits that as many as one-third of his dealer-clients drop out of his programs.