Wording Emails for the Deal? [How To Negotiate]

What I do:
Hi I am interested in stock # xxxx. I am looking for a selling price before rebates or incentives of xxxx. If that’s something you can do I will pick up this car today/tomorrow. Then get a quote and go back and forth. Also take that discount and shop it around to other dealers so they can beat it. When you get your lowest discount start working on the other numbers…MF, incentives, etc. Not the lease payment. That comes last and is just a by product of all the other numbers you have negotiated.

12 Likes

I usually give a brief bio of myself first. 27, single, looking for female. Enjoy long walks on the beach etc…

I like to let the dealers know who they’re messing with.

25 Likes

Apologies should have worded this better. I guess what I’m asking is after you know the car you want and it’s average selling price is how do I convey that into an email. Do i just say hey your car ___ sells for about 20k can you go lower than that? If they do go lower, how do I know how much I can push that. Maybe I’m making this harder than it seems lol.

2 Likes

I have this saved in my draft and just copy and paste to 10 different dealerships after I test drove the specific car/color/combo/trim I want.

Can you please provide your best 36/12K lease price on that vehicle? I would like the monthly payment based on a $0 drive-off (just first month’s payment), maximum MSDs (security deposit), with CA taxes and fees rolled into the payment. Please also provide a breakdown of dealer discount, incentives, rebates, and the MF and residual.

They usually don’t answer every question I ask but it gets the ball rolling.

21 Likes

Bennysee has the right idea

1 Like

Also…they will try to push your for an answer to if your leasing or financing. Just tell them your not sure yet and will decide after you have all the numbers worked out.

3 Likes

There’s multiple threads on negotiation tactics and email templates that can be found via search as well.

3 Likes

Hi . I am looking for XXX, preferably stock # YYYY . I’ve test driven the car and now I am looking for the best lease price in CA.

  1. Can you kindly tell what’s the best sale price/dealer discount I can get on the vehicle before incentives?
  2. What are the available incentives, the MF and residual for a 36m/12k lease. (prevents dealers fumbling around with the MF and rebates because I know what these are anyway)
  3. For taxes, please use XYZ zip code.
  4. What will be the total monthly with 0-down (only fees+registration). My goal is to be around the ~350/m mark. Let me know if that is do-able and we can finalize
7 Likes

I personally have never had much luck with asking the dealer to throw out their first offer. Usually if I let them set the price range, we are thousands apart. I have had much, much better luck with telling them what discount I’m looking for initially and going from there.

2 Likes

Read Leasing 101 and a quick search on negotiating will produce some good results as well, for example:

11 Likes

The reason you are being told to have a specific car in mind is so that you have an idea of what comprises of the payment. Using RV, MF, term, incentives, and MSD (if applicable)

I can go in and quote a payment if I want to but I’d rather walk my deal piece by piece than throw it out there for my salesperson to dissect on their own and decide it’s “impossible”

1 Like

I feel your pain. I wrote three dealers a couple of weeks ago about specific VINs, asking for specific pricing and incentive information. In one case, I provided a control number, hoping that would get me further. In zero cases did I ever get a direct answer. One dealer sent three separate emails from three different people within 10 minutes. And, they wonder why we won’t come in or give them our phone number? If they would just answer the freakin’ question straight off of the bat instead of acting like a damn puppy, I would certainly be more likely to share other means of contact or even come in and give them a treat!

1 Like

Sending out copy-paste emails to sales managers is one strategy I’ve tried and lots of times, like @Hawk, I didn’t get any response period. I think dealerships really want their sales managers and salespeople to “follow” their dealership’s “process”. What I mean by this is that they don’t see you as a “real” lead if you just send the sales manager an email with a lease proposal. The last lease I worked, I submitted the vehicle I was looking for to TrueCar with many different zip codes covering the area I was interested in. After their internet people sent me some vehicles, I would respond back telling them I’m interested in stock# XXXX. I then contacted dealers that didn’t pay for TrueCar leads and told them what I was looking for.

Because they’re responding to a TrueCar lead, they know that you’re getting other quotes. In some of my copy-paste emails, I think the dealerships just (correctly) presumed that the odds of them actually making the sale were very low because I would be contacting 15-20 dealerships. Of course we want the lease worksheet, MF, etc., but sometimes it’s good to start getting some monthly payment #'s. Once they start with that, you can start squeezing them down. Once you get to an area you’re pleased with based on the sale price, you can start squeezing on the MF. One bonus of using the various websites i.e. truecar, cargurus, etc. is that often you’ll get a generic email from a sales manager or the general manager offering their help. Sometimes I’ll add them into the email conversation once I’ve gotten a quote from the internet sales rep.

I think there are lots of ways to skin this cat. Some advise to “control the deal” from the beginning and others are willing to “walk it in”. Obviously controlling the deal requires a lot less contact, but I think the response rate is much smaller. Maybe this is dependent on the market you’re looking at, but I didn’t have much luck with this approach.

Generally, this community is looking for unicorn deals or the replication of them. Sending a dealership an email asking them to accept a unicorn deal on the first communication with them didn’t work well for me, especially when the dealership was far away and they knew they wouldn’t be getting any service business.

6 Likes

I have been unable to get dealers to agree to quote over email. Plenty of discussions. It’s not like I get no response, but they are flatly refusing to quote so that I can evaluate a deal unless I come in. Definitely don’t want the 90 minute dance with the dealer removing items from their paper in their office. Any advice on how to avoid such nonsense?

Move on to a new dealer. Also, make sure when you contact the dealer that you’re talking to the internet sales manager, not just some random salesman

1 Like

If you submit an offer/inquiry on the page of the car you want, you’ll get a response. Which car you trying to get?

18 posts were merged into an existing topic: Off Topic Landfill

If you can’t get email quotes on those cars after contacting multiple dealers, you’re doing something wrong. You might need to start calling, ask for the internet manager, tell them you’re ready to lease, you don’t want to waste their time or yours and you need a quote via email.

Unless you’re in some strange market, you should be getting something back, I assume you’ve contacted at least 9 dealers at this point, and if you’re really diligent I’d say triple that since you’re looking at three different cars, might want to narrow your target down to one or two cars. I’d say ditch the civic, won’t lease as well as the others

1 Like

Here is the email letter that worked for me:

We are currently nearing the end of 2 vehicle leases.

We plan to lease 2 Equinox LT’s.

Our plan is to lease both vehicles for 24 months/10k miles per year.

We are not interested in any extra equipment or services.

We have GM Supplier/Friends numbers for both leases.

Cash at closing = 1st-month payment, tax, and plate transfer.

The target date for completion 10/28/18.

One of our current leases is a GM Financial lease the other is a VW Lease.

There are no vehicles to be traded in for this transaction.

Thanks in advance for your interest.

Please reply to:

We leased 2- 2019 Chev. Equinox’ for $200/month, due at closing approx $450 each car.

I tell dealers that I’m out of town for work and need to have a deal worked out by the time I get back. Eliminates all possibility of ‘come in for our best deal’ games.

5 Likes