"We were selling 30 to 35 new Cadillacs a month, and I figured we'd do 10 to 12 Hondas," he recalls. "We did 25 in our first month, 30 the second, then 35." Although Honda provided the insurance he needed, Mancuso is convinced that other Cadillac dealers regarded him as something of a turncoat. "Before, I was the new kid on the block. Afterwards, I was guilty of a little bit of treason." Today, more than half of the Cadillac dealers in Chicago "dual it." The largest, Mancuso jokes, has more Japanese lines than the Tokyo telephone exchange.
Positioning Mancuso Cadillac-Honda required some delicate shifts. "We had to walk a fine line," says Mancuso, "between that of a prestige operation . . . and getting down and dirty." Mancuso succeeded by treating both cars as class acts: The glistening white Honda Civic-S sits beside a regal black Cadillac Cimarron in his showroom, and the classic script of the Cadillac sign out front plays off a restrained but eye-catching orange Honda logo. Occasionally, though, the novelty -- some would say the incongruity -- slips through, as when Mancuso ran a two-for-one sale: Buy a Cadillac at list, get a Honda for free. The campaign attracted national attention and sold cars, but it raised eyebrows even at Honda headquarters. "The head of the company cornered me at a party," Mancuso recalls, "and told me, 'Don't you ever do that again.' "
Although Honda gave him a much-needed shot in the arm -- and his active imagination continued to find new ploys like the two-for-one deal to tempt and satisfy customers -- Mancuso still wasn't making it. Free rust-proofing, picnic lunches, and private sales could accomplish just so much, and extra advertising -- a quick fix -- was becoming an unconscionable expense. "I was operating under a discipline imposed by my financial condition -- that of having no money," Mancuso laughs. And indeed, the bottom line remained intransigent. His business's continuing losses in 1979 and '80 were the sorry legacy of the untimely buyout.
At that point, six years into his dealership, Mancuso reassessed his strategy. His fundamental concern, after all, was not simply promotion, but also giving customers what they wanted. And since he couldn't buy any more promotion anyway, he had better be sure he was meeting the needs of the customers he had.
Many dealers, he explains, keep rather informal records of their traffic, often estimating what percentage of their "ups," or potential buyers, they sell. Industrywide, this closing ratio averages from 14% to 18%. Mancuso wasn't sure of his. So he hired a greeter to welcome arrivals, see that they were taken care of, and record the eventual outcome. His goal was simple: "We had to get our slippage down."
To the same end, Mancuso began to make regular use of "shoppers" -- counterfeit customers who come in to look at a car, then report back to him on how they were treated. He discovered that there was considerable room for improvement and that a host of small details, all of them having to do with customer satisfaction, were holding back sales.
It is not his favorite anecdote, but it makes his point. "The very first time I did it," Mancuso recalls, "after I'd had the shopper fill out a questionnaire, I asked him, 'Did you notice anything in particular about the salesman?' And this guy says, 'His breath -- his breath smelled like death; I wouldn't have bought a car from him if it was free.'
"It was something that we'd all noticed about this salesman, but we'd never considered that a customer might. And I thought, 'What have we found out here? What has this cost this guy? What has this cost the dealership?' "
The problem was solved with a 69 cent bottle of Binaca, and the close ratio inched up.
Shopping, Mancuso explains, has been around in a variety of guises for more than 50 years. Automotive Profit Builders Co., a sales and management consulting service he uses, sends in shoppers when it first begins working with a dealership. Both Ford Motor Co. and The Chevrolet Motor Division, General Motors Corp. use shoppers as well. But all of the programs, Mancuso felt, left something to be desired: They were expensive, sporadic, and generally geared to the manufacturer's rather than the dealer's needs. "I really didn't care whether a salesman told a customer about the Twilight Sentinel on the Cimarron," he explains. "I wanted to know what the customer thought about me, about my dealership."
As he developed his program, he learned more and more about these matters. Demonstration rides weren't being given. The quality of his service department wasn't being stressed. Cars weren't priced in accordance with his instructions. Gratified that he now knew enough to correct such situations, Mancuso decided to formalize his system -- and to sell it.
The idea for selling the system came to him, oddly enough, on a beach in San Diego. "About two years ago, I wasn't too happy with the business -- GMAC was pressuring me because of the financial condition of the dealership, and Honda, because I was selling so many of their cars, was pressuring me to put up a separate building." So he went on vacation, sat on the beach, and outlined a shopping service he called Consumer Concepts Ltd. Then, not one to procrastinate, he picked up a telephone and called Kent Allen, a dealer at Team Nissan-Datsun, in nearby Encinitas, Calif.
