If You Know Their Rules ... You Can Play Their Games

l. lntroduction
To be a smart car, van, or pickup buyer you need three things:
1. An understanding of the automotive selling business:

• How a dealership operates
• Their selling strategies
• Their ploys and games

2. A basic strategy designed to help you buy the right vehicle at the lowest price possible
3. The determination not to be intimidated by the process

We can help you with the first two, but the third you're going to have to supply. Hopefully, once you've read this book, your knowledge of the car business will give you the confidence to take charge of and remain in control of virtually any car, van, or pickup truck buying situation.

Buying Is Negotiating
Unless you plan to walk into a dealership and pay the asking price for a vehicle, every buying situation is a negotiation. And, as with most negotiations, there are different phases or steps.

Step 1. Assuniptians
Every negotiation begins with assumptions, even before the two parties meet. In car sales it is not uncommon to find many customers entering a dealership assuming that the salesperson and the.Dealership are going to do their best to "take" them in one way or another. On the other hand, many salespeople in the dealership assume that customers are going to try to "beat them up" on price and lie about anything from the number of places they've shopped to the condition of their trade-in. The trouble with assumptions is that they are just that: assumptions. Left untested by facts, they can make a negotiation very difficult for both parties.

Step 2, Fact-Finding and Information Gathering
Good negotiators always make an effort to get all their facts before the negotiation. In the car business this means that you should research the vehicle you want to buy, determine the real cost of that vehicle, know the actual wholesale value of your trade-in, and shop for the best financing.This process begins before you walk into a showroom and continues throughout the sales encounter.On the dealership side, good salespeople begin by knowing their product thoroughly-obviously before the customer walks in. Once in front of the customer, good salespeople conduct their fact-finding and research by asking questions, listening, and observing. Their objective is to learn as much about the customer's needs, wants, and purchase ability as possible.

Step 3. Confrontation
Once the sales process begins to focus on price, the lines are drawn and the issue becomes: your money and how much of it you're willing to pay in exchange for the desired car. There are two possible outcomes to the confrontation phase:

1. You do not come to an agreement on price and leave.
2. You come to an agreement and buy the car, van, or truck.

Step 4. Agreement
There are three kinds of negotiated agreements:
Win/Win:This is an agreement in which both sides feel that they've gotten a good deal.WinlLose:An agreement in which, from your point of view, you've won by getting a great price and the dealership has lost. Be warned: Sometimes salespeople will act as though they have lost when, in    have won. However, to make you feel good, they pretend to have taken a "beating" on the price.

About Buying New Cars
LoselLose: This is an agreement, of sorts, in that you have "agreed" not to buy the car and the salesperson has "agreed" not to sell it to you because you simply could not agree on the price. In this case the sales¬person has invested time but earned no commission (very much a loss). You have invested time but not managed to purchase a car. (Sometimes this might be construed as a loss since it means you're going to have to continue shopping. Other times, it may well be a "win" in disguise because your refusal to give in may lead to a better deal later on.)

Of all these steps there is none more important than number two: fact-finding and information gathering. In "About Buying New Cars" we're going to focus on the kind of information you should have before you enter the dealership. It is our belief that the more you know about how dealerships and salespeople think and work, the stronger and more secure you'll feel when it comes time to negotiating the price. To put it another way, the better you understand their rules, the better equipped you'll be to play their games.