How to Negotiate with Car Dealers - and WIN!

Are you dreading the nagging feeling you paid more than you had to for your newly-purchased ride? When you negotiate with a car salesman (or woman), you are going up against a trained manipulator who has undergone 80+ hours of training in the skills of negotiating, the art of persuasion, and obstacle elimination. You can negotiate with car dealers and win - if you properly prepare yourself with Fortune-500 negotiating strategies.

"What can I do to get you in a car today?" Yes, that is right at the top of the list of most-overused automobile sales pitches, isn't it? And, too often, the answer boils down to a combination of product and price. More specifically, you are willing to buy a suitable car at a great price.

Fortunately, many pricing sources exist throughout the Internet to provide you dealer invoice cost, rebates, holdbacks, incentives, special financing, etc. to use in your negotiations for a new car (as opposed to used). But - none of these sources explore the fine details of how to negotiate with car dealers when you sit down with the salesperson to hammer out the deal. To get the best deal, you must learn how to hold your own against the trained salesperson.

The first step is to burn one crucial and golden rule into your brain: You shall not, must not, will not, negotiate on a car the same day you first see it. You must embed that rule firmly, for the car salesperson wants the very opposite - he/she will employ a variety of strategies to move you toward purchasing right then and right there.

Now, go forth and window shop. Visit car lots, look over the different models. Take a number of test drives. Narrow the field of acceptable vehicles based on safety, ride quality, features, options, fuel economy, etc. Take note - and I really do mean to make notes on a notepad - of the features and options present on the vehicles you
are significantly interested in.

Try to find at least two, and preferably three or four vehicles that might suit your needs. The primary reason for selecting more than one is to prevent you from presenting an "I love this car!" impression for the salesperson to pick up on. Once you have found at least two suitable vehicles, leave the lot to do your homework. This is where the golden rule must be followed - the salesperson will encourage
you to go to his desk (for some hardsell ploys). But if you have readied a good excuse (I have an appointment), you should be able to break away rather easily if you have already offered him your name and contact information.

It is homework time! Identify one or more sources of pricing data. You can use Consumer Reports, Kelley Blue Book, or any similar source. Using your notes, determine the dealer's actual true cost for the car (this is X as used in the next step). You do this by subtracting dealer holdback, special incentives, rebates, etc. from the base cost.

Now determine a reasonable amount for dealer profit, and you have arrived at your target price. You should allow $200 for overhead costs + $75 for sales commission. Using this figure, and perhaps adding a hundred dollars or so, you have your "walk-away" price. This means that in the event the dealer holds firm at a price above your walk-away price, you WILL leave the dealership.

Now return to the dealership to negotiate. Your salesperson will almost certainly refuse to present an opening offer below their asking price. This is the common rule in play, "whoever mentions a price first, loses", and he/she is trained to encourage you to present your offer first. This is where you will set the tone. Open with an offer $100 above the dealer's true (after subtracting all incentives, rebates, etc) cost. You might open with something like "it looks like you've got a true cost of about $X on this car... I want you to make a profit, so I am willing to buy right now for $Y" (where Y = X + $100).

This is where negotiating strategies (including bluffing!) come into play. The salesperson has been trained to get you to move a lot on your offer while he gives little (and preferably nothing) back. The fact is, there are far too many car negotiating gambits to detail here. The most commonly-used ploys are the "meet me halfway" (which is, in reality, just a fake-out to urge you to move up while the dealer holds firm), the "four-square" strategy which relies on a special form to allow the salesperson to distract you from the true numbers, and back-end profit centers (employed in the finance manager's office) to recover any profit margin conceded to you in the front-end negotiations at the salesperson's desk.

Learn more about negotiating with car dealers in my 140+ page ebook, packed with 31,000+ words to teach you about the dealer's negotiation and persuasion strategies. You will learn how to turn many of the ploys back against the dealer - and how to formulate attacks of your own based on secret Fortune-500 negotiating strategies employed by huge corporations.

View the table of contents of my book, Outfox the Car Dealer, at:

http://www.OutfoxTheCarDealer.com