Internet sales grew at the speed of light

When Rick Patel got into the auto business 20 years ago, he got involved in a new-fangled venture called the internet. “The opportunity came by and I started out in internet sales — something called internet sales,” he said with a chuckle of his entry at Corley’s Albuquerque Lincoln Volvo, where he still works. “It was back in the dial-up days. People went and got a cup of coffee, came back and had to dial it up again. Believe it or not, that’s how I got my coffee habit.”

The auto business actually was something that seemed a natural for Patel, even though he studied management and technology in college in Los Angeles.

“Right out of college, I was in advertising and my dad was in the hotel business, but that wasn’t for me,” he said. “I loved meeting people and I loved cars, in that order.”

Still, for a guy interested in technology, internet sales was a great place to start but things have changed at dizzying speed.

“It was very slow to start,” Patel said. “The traffic on it was pretty good. But that was the old days where 100 percent of buyers still came into the dealership. A lot of information wasn’t online. It was mainly, ‘Hi, I’m so and so. This is so and so.’ We didn’t really have anything else. That was all you could do. It’s not like nowadays where you can sell a car without ever seeing the customer. We ship cars all over the country.”

It was an interesting way to break into the business, Patel said.

“They didn’t even have a business model for it,” he said. “Everything was just starting. The technology aspect was as a raw as dial-up internet. Everybody was figuring out the whole thing. We used to get the leads on the fax machine. Then for a while, they came over email. I remember I was the only one in the office with a color monitor. Everybody else had the green screen. I had that 500-pound monitor.”

A few years later when he got into doing regular sales, Patel said he benefited from the friendship and advice from veteran salesman Malcolm “Mac” Bryant. The two would spend many lunch times talking about the business.

“Mac always said, ‘You always want to offer the customer something they didn’t get before. Your competition is the sales person down the road, not other manufacturers,’” Patel said. “I learned a lot and I miss him.”