A car salesman has recounted the story of how somebody rang the wrong number when trying to buy a car from a dealership, and yet he managed to sell them two cars anyway. Doug Tabutt, founder of Switchcars and GoTrans, recounted the tale to Ed Bolian’s VINwiki YouTube channel from his time working for a Toyota dealership.
Tabutt opened the video stating he is not the best car salesman, compared to the likes of Bolian. But he is in the high-end car business because he loves cars and enjoys talking about them, but he couldn’t sell run-of-the-mill cars that we’d drive on a normal day.
He has, however, had his great sales moments, and one of those involved someone who had rang up his company, but they had called the wrong number. Incredibly, this is something he has experience with, from the likes of toll-free numbers, which is something Tabutt once had.
Tabutt recounted how a hospital system in Dallas, Texas, had a very similar number to his. In one of their publications, they got the number wrong and had actually sent Tabutt’s number out instead, and he ended up with around 20 wrong-number calls a day. Yet that ended up working in his favor.
How Tabutt Was Able To Sell the Cars
The number they were trying to ring was the Medicare/Medicaid claims line, so it was a specific demographic of people from Dallas who were trying to get claims for a wide array of medical reasons. He mostly ignored them and then set up a voicemail to direct people away from him, yet they still rang up, left their own voicemails, or managed to get through to Tabutt anyway.
Occasionally he would mess with them a bit with fake accents, which “in hindsight was probably kind of mean,” said Tabutt. One wrong-number call was incredibly entertaining, where he was left a voicemail from a lady in Boston screaming about a machine she had that didn’t work. Despite all of this, one day, when working at a dealership a few years before, the wrong-number calls to Tabutt actually paid off.
Two weeks into his work at a Toyota dealership, a similarly named dealership was in Michigan. A guy rang him up who had been looking at used cars and had been trying to reach Metro Toyota in Michigan. There were two cars that this customer was after, one of which was a second-hand Volkswagen Jetta station wagon, a car that is a unicorn now. But he didn’t realize that the dealership he had rung wasn’t the one he had thought it was.
Tabutt Was Still Able To Sell the Two Cars
Eventually, the caller realized his mistake and told Tabutt that he thought he had called his local dealership. Yet Tabutt told him, “Well, we have the cars you want; why don’t you come in and buy them anyway?” In the end, the customer did exactly that. He decided to just go to the dealer, and he ended up walking away with both cars, and Tabutt had completed a sale that, by all accounts, he should not have been able to complete.
Everyone at the dealership was stunned that he had been able to do that. At the time, the internet wasn’t the phenomenon it is today, so sales that weren’t local were incredibly rare. Yet Tabutt had been able to pull it off, and even managed to convince someone who had rung the wrong dealership to buy both cars and make a pretty big payday. That was the launching pad that Tabutt had to eventually set up his own business, although the wrong-number calls he later got were clearly a little bit less successful!