Never physically stepping foot inside a dealership until you have worked out a deal and want to take delivery.
Start by doing your research first, you’ll need to know the MF and RV and available rebates on the car you want. You can go to the Edmunds forums for that information. When you have that, you can start with Truecar.com and basically shotgun a bunch of inquiries out to local dealerships or you can visit their pages individually and pick a stock number that interests you the most.
Once you have the stock numbers, just email their internet sales department, ask for the sales manager if you can, and ask them for their best price on the stock number you provided and for the mileage and yearly term you desire. Tell them what rebates you qualify for.
After they come to you with a sale price and if there’s no dealer discount baked in, ask for at least a 10% dealer discount before rebates. More if you feel bold.
Honestly, this is the most up front and direct way to do it that I can think of. You’ll need to find like 6 to 10 dealerships in the area to do this with because 3 or 5 of them will ignore what you ask for and say “please come in and we can talk about it” and the other 3 to 5 may say that they can’t do dealer discount. I promise you, one or two of them will play ball with you. This is a patient buyer’s game, primarily.
You may never find the best deal the same day and physically going to a dealership, email is the way to go. Don’t give a dealership your business of they say they can only give you figures if you go to them, they’re trying to get you to grow an emotional attachment to the car so you make a poor decision.
Does any of this make sense?