The sale is not over when they drive away.
A man came in from Alaska in the mid-eighties, working the oil pipeline, and bought a new work truck. Good commission. Clean deal. He was also rude enough that Bruce Huddleston never made the follow-up call. Six months later that man walked back into the showroom with almost eighty thousand dollars in cash to buy three more trucks for his coworkers on the pipeline. Somebody else sold them. Three commissions gone, plus three referral fees from the outfitter, and all of it lost because one salesperson did not want to make a phone call to a man who was short with him.
Follow-up is the only part of this job with nothing forcing you to do it. No customer is standing in front of you. No commission is on the line today. No manager is walking the floor asking whether you called your deliveries from Tuesday. Nothing bad happens the day you skip it, which is exactly why almost nobody does it.
It is also the difference between two salespeople who start on the same day at the same store. By year five, one of them is still living entirely on lot traffic, slow when the store is slow and broke when the weather is bad. The other has built a base of people who come back and who send their friends, and it belongs to him whether he stays at that store or not.
Drawing on thirty-five years in the automotive business, from a shoebox of index cards to software that could predict which customers were about to start shopping, this book teaches the half hour a day that nobody is watching.
You will learn to build the customer record that makes every later call possible, and to make the first call within twenty-four hours knowing exactly what it is for. You will learn to turn the customer who left without buying into a customer who comes back, and to talk to the people who were never in the building on the day the decision actually gets made. You will learn to build a customer bank that belongs to you rather than to the store, to ask for referrals at the moment a customer is happiest without any awkwardness at all, and to recognize the few people whose own network will send you business for years.
No theory. No scripts to memorize. No talking anybody into anything. Just the work that takes a few minutes and pays you months or years later, which is exactly why so few people do it.
Follow-Up That Actually Works in Car Sales is Book 4 of the Working the Deal series and completes it. Every book in the series stands on its own.
