New Approach; Big Reward

No matter what they say, no one I’ve ever met actually enjoys purchasing a car. Shopping for cars, yes. But the actual act of negotiating and buying makes most people want to set themselves on fire just for the distraction. It should come as no surprise that I’m no exception.

I’m an expert test driver. So much so that I have, in my test drive arsenal, a variety of routes that makes the Gumball 3000 look like a Sunday drive. But when it comes time to step up to the negotiating table, my brakes lock. The ploy is always the same: the tentative offer followed by the salesman’s theatrical slog to the manager’s office, his return and rueful rebuttal, and then the dollars-and-cents shell game where the ball moves around so many times that someone – usually the buyer and usually with a nagging sense that he or she has somehow gotten the shaft – says Uncle.

So when the time recently came to buy a car, the words, “If you don’t like the rules, change them,” kept coming to mind. Change the rules…change the rules… but how?  I resolved to find a way to avoid the shaft and take the upper hand in a way that made sense with my personality. So I decided to approach the question of “how?” with the same attention I give to every other bit of work in my life – I’d research it to death.

Now, in regard to this situation I know three things for certain: I am a good communicator; I am scary-steely once I am resolved about something; and (thanks to that counseling psychology degree and a comfort with eye-contact) I am capable of staying present and making the other party feel heard. It was clear that the key to my success lay in these three traits.  I realized that I’d failed in the past because I’d been trying to negotiate on the car dealer’s terms – which rely on an ill-informed, gullible buyer who can be manipulated.  So, I reasoned, if this time I come in deeply, almost hyperbolically, informed and use positive reflective listening to communicate my unwavering platform, we might just avoid some of the shell game and end up with a positive negotiating experience.

A quick Google search in this direction turned up a “car-salesman-tell-all” website that counseled would-be buyers to try much the same thing and, instead of approaching the transaction as a last-man-standing face-off, approach it as a Richard Covey-style win-win-win scenario. You want the salesman to win by selling a car, you want the dealership to win by moving another car off their lot, and, oh yeah, you want yourself to win by paying a price that will make you feel like you got a good deal and like you can recommend the dealer to your friends. Anything less than that and the triangle dissolves.

Of course, the whole upside-down triangle balances on the point of non-attachment. You can’t want anything so much that you’re not willing to walk away. Clear-headedness must prevail. That absence of desperation, that non-attachment, provides the balance and the key to success.

Now, it would make for a more lively next section of this story for me to relay a comedy-of-errors romp in which I realized, with self-deprecation, that I am not cut out for horse-trading. But the truth is, the win-win-win approach actually worked. After driving everything from aVolvo s60 to the Honda Element, we settled on the Honda Crosstour (great car – who knew?). So, armed with a genial pleasantness, an armful (and iPhone full) of research data (online invoice),  and by applying reflective listening, clear friendliness, and a solid yet jovial platform we were able to talk the dealer down almost $5,500 and buy the car at the price we wanted to pay with only one round of negotiation.

The whole process was a revelation: I don’t have to play by someone else’s rules (a tack that fails every time, BTW). I could recast the game with my own winning formula and experience even more success just by nature of being positive, clear and authentic. A revelation  – but one that I guess I knew all along.

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