Car Salespeople ARE Aggressive and Obnoxious. Let’s Stop Blaming the Victim.

Enter the phrase car salesmen are in a Google search window, and the application dutifully completes the phrase with four suggestions: scum, crooks, liars, and losers. If you want to finish off the expression with a more positive adjective, you’ll have to get creative. The only choices Google offers are pejorative. To some, this might appear as evidence of self-selection, where a peculiar subset of dishonest male social misfits shows an innate tendency to pursue a career selling cars.

Searching on the expression managers are tells a different story. The top results: viewed as planners concerned with, responsible for, and often referred to as. In this instance, Google serves up only one negative word – useless. Considering the merciless caricatures of management stupidity in the comic strip Dilbert, I find this an extraordinarily weird dichotomy. In heaping our scorn on sales practitioners, we exonerate the people behind the scenes. The ones who are directly responsible for their reviled behaviors.

The same myopia exists elsewhere, as Jeff Toister described in a recent blog, Comcast Botches Customer Service Failure Apology. Do people actually believe that a recorded service debacle involving a customer’s request for a cable disconnect was “not consistent with how [Comcast] trains [its] customer service representatives,” as the company stated in its public apology? Or, was the acrimonious conversation caused by a deliberate Comcast edict, suffused into its corporate culture, and written into its policies? As Toister writes, “this situation was failure by design.” From listening to the call, it’s clear that an employee’s role dictates his or her behavior. And for every company hellbent on minimizing customer churn, a thin line separates customer retention and customer intimidation.

Role dictates behavior is a phenomenon that exists in automotive sales, as well. To understand why we persistently harbor negative stereotypes of car salespeople, we must consider the economics of automobile manufacturing. We need to understand how those realities permeate every decision executives make, and how those actions flow right onto the showroom floor. What we most despise about the car buying experience wasn’t engineered in the showroom trenches, but rather, at the tippy-top of the corporate org chart. Directing our angst at salespeople only blames the victim.

First, since the earliest days of auto manufacturing, achieving sustainable economies of scale has required monstrously large everything – from machinery, to production capacity, to quantities of raw materials and output. That has meant incurring monstrously large amounts of risk. So, from the very beginning, manufacturers recognized they needed a distribution network that provided hegemony over the retail channel. This necessary imbalance enabled manufacturers to transfer inventory risks to dealers, which included the obligation to sell less desirable vehicles that would inevitably roll off assembly lines. “Our planners back in Detroit screwed up. If you want the hot-selling Mustang, you must accept your quota of slow-selling Granada’s.” So in 1974, when your grandma wandered into the Ford showroom looking for something new to drive to her weekly bridge game, the rapacious salesperson who greeted her guided her straight to the Pottery Beige wagon model that had been parked in the same spot for over eight months, baking in the hot Florida sun. “Ma’am, this lovely color will always look clean, and the fold down rear seat will come in so handy!” According to script, the salesman got Grandma to say “yes” three times, and the deal was done. “Such a nice young man!” Little did Grandma know that her salesman received a tidy spiff from his boss for moving a car off the lot that nobody else wanted.

Second, auto executives recognized the crucial importance of holding a large share of the consumer market. In pursuit of their strategy, a questionable retail model emerged. Rather than offering dealers protected sales domains, manufacturers reasoned that saturating geographic territories with retail outlets offered a fast-track to market domination. Under this model, new dealerships were free to open near established competitors. But the industry quickly discovered that consumers did not care much about where they purchased a car. Instead, prospective buyers honed in on a single differentiator: price. To sell off the inventory they were obliged to accept, dealers engaged in cutthroat discounting, which decimated profits.

Customer experiences deteriorated as dealership managers learned that tired buyers became weak negotiators – sales prey, in every sense of the word. Sales managers embedded buyer exhaustion right into the transaction process. The de rigueur tactic required a prospect (or “up,” to use car-sales vernacular) to remain in the dealer’s premises as long as possible, to endure grinding tag-team “negotiations” designed to wear them down, and to starve them of time. The kiss of death for a salesperson was when a prospect left the showroom, checkbook in hand, to visit another dealer just down the road.

It’s hard to find a person who can’t recall an unpleasant anecdote or two about a personal car buying experience. But rarely do the names William Durant, Alfred Sloan, Henry Ford, and Lee Iacocca enter the conversation. In theory, these visionaries should receive the full fury of customer contempt, the same way GM’s Mary Barra has for the Chevrolet Cobalt’s fatal quality defects. After all, they – and thousands of white-collar managers working behind the scenes – developed the retail sales model that salespeople are tasked with executing every day.

Not every person who goes to work selling cars or conversing with callers in a support center is stamped from the same personality mold. Over time, people exhibit the behaviors that are asked of them. In 1971, an experiment was conducted at Stanford University that involved 24 male college students from the US and Canada. Eponymously named the Stanford Prison Experiment, the study arbitrarily grouped the subjects into two roles – guards, and prisoners. The experimental design called for the subjects to adapt behaviors congruent with their situation. What the researchers discovered was that the subjects, who had no prior background as prisoner or guard, quickly became immersed in their assignment. “Guards” began to abuse prisoners with unrestrained cruelty, and “prisoners” felt traumatized, becomming angry and depressed over their dehumanizing conditions. The planned two-week investigation was terminated after just six days for fear of furthering the psychological damage that had already been created. “The experiment shows how ordinary people who should know better and who are better, easily get swept-up into playing ‘games’,” Graham Hill wrote in a 2007 blog, Are You Ready to Break out of Customer Service Jail?

The Stanford Prison Experiment has been criticized because the findings were considered subjective and anecdotal. Others diminished its value because it was impossible to exactly reproduce the experimental conditions. But the experiment does support the conclusion that situations, rather than an individual’s personality, may be most influential in determining a person’s behaviors in his or her job.

The next time you’re asked to complete the phrase, Car salespeople are . . ., you might want to consider choosing kind, intelligent, shy, or congenial. We just can’t be certain about which behaviors they brought to the job, but found out they had to leave at the door.