Quote:
Originally Posted by extrashaky
Because their customers may ask about them. It's in the product line, even if a particular dealer won't get any of them. If I ask about a product in the salesman's product line, and he's never heard of it, I'm not going to have any confidence in his knowledge of his product. Then how can I trust anything else he says about the cars?
Furthermore, even if they aren't scheduled to get one of the Monograms for the showroom, can the customer not order one? And even if the dealer can't order one, there's no reason why they can't find one at another dealership that does have one and arrange to have it transferred. They lose out on that sale in either case if the salesman has no idea what the car is.
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That's not how salesmen are trained when a limited variant of a model (special edition) comes out though. What I'm getting from what you are saying in the first paragraph is that salesmen should know the whole product line, as if the Monogram was an optional higher trim that was indefinitely available for allocation throughout its product life cycle. But it's not. It's a limited edition.
Unless a very thoughtful manager trains their salesmen to learn the information of a limited edition car before it is allocated, most of the salesmen know nothing about the limited edition cars. The most common way they learn the car's info? By looking at the monroney sticker when it gets fresh off the truck. If they never get the car this obviously won't happen.
The problem with this is that some (a small amount) consumers will know about the product via car shows or word of mouth. This is problematic because dealerships are not parallel to the announcement of new cars or editions. Dealerships are more inclined to selling what's on the lot, and retaining the information of the current cars makes the salesmen more efficient and economical.
Also we can't leave out buyer responsibility. I think the most simplest thing to do would be to look up which dealerships have one in stock first, to avoid dealer trading and ordering--which are two aspects of selling cars that salesmen prefer not to do, due to the inclination of selling current cars on the lot.
Bottom line is that the dealership system is messed up and most have shortcuts for an efficient and economical point of sale experience.