For Lee, the dealers are the ONLY CUSTOMER of Ford, not the end user of the automobile. Ford’s business model relied heavily on key partners such as dealers who were franchised out. Sales representatives, such as Iacocca, would directly interact with dealerships for that purpose. Making sure that the dealers felt needed as part of the team was very important. Bringing them in as part of the ‘head table’ was one thing other managers did not grasp at Ford. Iacocca knew that happy relations with the dealers = greater profits and responsiveness to demand. Dealers were the guts of the car business in the 20^th century and were the quintessential entrepreneurs according to Lee.

Since the dealerships manage the relationship with the customer, Iacocca had only a passing exposure to those interactions but a simple dealer sales tip to remember is that anybody who buys a car will rationalize the purchase for at least a few weeks, even if it was a mistake. Buyer’s remorse is always an issue when the product is a large purchase such as a home or automobile. One of Lee’s mentors was a sales guy who would phone a recent buyer 30 days after completing a sale and ask “how did your neighbours like your new car?” By asking about friends instead of directly asking about the car, the sales rep could get new leads + the customer will want to justify that it was still a smart buy in the face of social status.

This is a synopsis & analysis based on Iacocca: An Autobiography and other miscellaneous research sources. Enjoy.

According to Iacocca, if you have only financial analysts (bean counters) in your company then you tend to have a defensive, conservative and pessimistic organization. Sales and marketing people are more aggressive, speculative and optimistic; they are always pushing to go forward regardless of the macro-context of the company. A good company will have natural balance between the two. If the bean counters are too weak then the company will go bankrupt. Conversely, in the 1970s, Ford needed to have wild-eyed dreamers as the company was dying in the market place. Some so-called bean counters would cross the divide like Robert McNamara who helped develop the Falcon (one of the first compact cars selling over 417,00 units in the first year). Unfortunately, the Falcon was simply a vehicle to help people get from A to B, and it was not a major seller for long but it is worth mentioning as a case where someone crossed the divide between theses two groups. Robert McNamara was a true visionary and quoted a truth in 1967 to which many managers can agree that “Management is the gate through which social and economic and political change, indeed change in every direction, is diffused through society.”

This is a synopsis & analysis based on Iacocca: An Autobiography and other miscellaneous research sources. Enjoy.