Ephiphany at 3 a.m.

Its early morning as I begin this newest entry in my blog. For whatever reason I've just had a revelation about the life of a new automotive salesman. It was so powerful that it moved from a dream in my unconscious mind to a full-blown, all-consuming epiphany crossing over into the arterial flow of my completely awake brain.

Whew!

As you know by now, I've been a "Personal Vehicle Advisor" for almost three months. In that time I've sold twenty cars to a wide variety of individuals and families from all income levels in my local area. To be exact this is my twelfth week of selling cars, which averages out to 1.67 units (new or used, car or truck) per week. At that pace I'll put about 86.67, lets call it 87, vehicles on the road in a full year. Not bad you might say. Sure, eighty-seven cars seems like a lot but our top salesman will probably put 180 units out in the same period, or about 3.46 per week. So I'm doing about 52% less gross than our top guy.

(Okay, stick with me here for the declaration of my ephiphany, its coming soon I promise!)

As I've said before in earlier posts, there is a lot of waiting in the life of a car salesman, especially in the life of a new salesman. I work an average of fifty hours in a five-day week, which includes every Friday and most Saturdays. Out of that fifty hours I probably spend about three hours with each car sale, so that is 5.01 hours or one-tenth of my week actually selling cars. Lets figure another hour to prep and deliver each car sold to bring us up to 6.68 hours for the week in the role for which I was hired: to sell cars. The other 43.32 hours of my average week are spent in a varierty of ways including: phone calls, meetings, parking new cars, lot duty, delivering chocolate-chip cookies to area businesses, and whatever else a F.N.G. (F***ing New Guy) is told to do. Which all leads me to say that for most of my working day I do nothing but wait for a customer to talk to--at least fifty percent of my day is spent staring out at the lot or walking the lot looking for customers to ply my tradecraft.

(Getting closer to my point very shortly.)

I do everything I can to turn lookers into buyers but if there is a lull in traffic onto our lot there isn't much I can do. Now we have sixteen full-time salesmen working for the company, of which only twelve are on hand at any one time because of their floating day-off. Just imagine: twelve hungry salesmen beating down the walls to sell you your next vehicle! Theoretically there should be a lot of help available to potential buyers, especially when you multiply the number of salesmen times the number of hours we each spend looking for someone to sell something to during the day.

Still with me? Good, because here comes the revelation in a round-a-bout way: with all this time on the collective hands of our current sales staff, our management decides that they need to hire more people to sell cars. Woah! I'm already wearing out shoe-leather (or whatever they make shoes out of these days) walking from one end of the lot to the other looking for ups (walk-ups, drive-ups, etc...) to talk to and now that is going to get harder with more people on our sales team. Sure, its old-fashioned competition but it strikes me as an interesting way of doing business: putting more sharks in the tank without increasing the size of the chum bucket? Hey, I'm not criticizing my management but it certainly seems counter-intuitive to an efficient operation by hiring more people to sell to an already tight flow of potential customers.

So, in my dreams this morning this question keeps popping into my head repeatedly, "why do we need more salesmen?" until it finally lands on my skull like an elephant dropped from a plane without a parachute: its all about survival of the fittest car salesmen. If one person can't sell enough cars to a finite crowd of potential customers then you just hire someone else to work the same territory without getting rid of anyone; that way, natural attrition will force some pissed-off salesmen to leave voluntarily when they realize that there is a lot more competition to sell their next car. Clever, eh?

Already, as a F.N.G. I am scorned by most of the senior sales staff for taking away their potential clients. Even though we qualify all of our ups ("who are you working with?") so as to not get involved with someone else's customers it only is natural that new salesmen will pull a portion of sales from the O.T.'s (Old Timer's) into their portfolio. Now you add even newer F.N.G.'s to the mix and it makes for some very happy salesmen. Ha.

But from a management viewpoint I suppose it makes sense: instead of spending money to increase traffic for the current sales staff you just hire new sales staff in the odd, but vain, hope that the F.N.G.'s will push up the sales by picking up some of the crumbs the rest of the sales force have somehow missed in their patrol through the car lot. Not very likely that trained salesmen would miss a chance to make a buck but hey, its worth a shot, right?

But, please, please, don't mis-understand my point here or think for a moment that I'm complaining about my job. No! I love my job as a car salesman. I really do. I get paid to talk to people and drive new cars that I could never afford to own. Pretty cool. No, instead, my issue is with the business model at work here and not the people behind it. I think what I'm saying in my own sweet pedantic way is that there seems to be a law of diminishing returns at work here but maybe there is something special about the car business that I'm not seeing.

Any thoughts?