Sell This Man A Car!

David Cushman is doing a little experiment in being a connected, active customer.  Here’s the skinny.  David:

“There’s a prize at stake, of sorts. The winner gets to sell me a car.

I
want to buy a Toyota Yaris – and I’m going to blog about this fact (and
twitter a bit) to see if this simple piece of disaggregated content
gets picked up by someone savvy enough to sell me one.

It’s also a
test of word of mouth because it’s possible that the dealer (owner?)
with the car I want isn’t clued up… but he might know a friend, or a
friend-of-a-friend who is.

So let’s begin.

I’m in the UK.

I am looking for Deals on a new Toyota and I
want a low mileage Toyota Yaris in either T3 or TR spec, registered
late 2006 onwards (new shape one). Must have aircon of some form.
Ideally 1.3 petrol but will consider 1.0. Probably go for the five
door. My wife prefers silver (and it will be her car). Ex-demo would be
ideal.”

Now, again, there are some basic channels through with customers and vendors typically interact.  From the customer’s perspective they are:

• Search – Research and look for a solution
• Shop – Engage in commerce
• Help – Fix something you already have

Here’s the vendor view of these three items:

• Market (as a verb, the converse of Search)
• Sell (the converse of Shop)
• Support (the converse of Help)

Key point: I feel the friction in this process is a result of the transactional mindset that most vendors are in today.  For if vendors were truly engaging in “customer relationship management,” David would already be connected to them.  Instead, we’re trying to mesh the customer and vendor gears, each of which is spinning at a different speed, and rotating in a slightly different plane.

So, going back to the model…David has already nailed the “Search” part of his process, and is moving into Shop.  So, is there a vendor out there who is either (a) actively listening or (b) is connected through a reasonable number of hops to someone who is?  Let’s find out…