Too many mooches. Have you ever run a direct mail sale that was overrun with non-buying gift seekers, also known as mooches? With that type of sale, your salespeople are sure to burn out going on test drives with lying mooches who are afraid to admit that all they really came in for was the gift.

After your sales people get a few mooches in a row, you might as well send them home. Their minds are so messed up they couldn't sell a pink Cadillac to an Elvis impersonator with a blank check and plans for a road-trip to Graceland!

A dealer told me the other day that he did a free turkey mailer in November. He said that over 650 people showed up to get their free turkey. I asked him, How many cars did you sell, to all those people? He said, six cars. If you totaled up all the money spent on that type of promotion, which included turkeys, direct mail, postage and staff, the results would be a significant loss-just to sell six cars!

With a mooch sale, you also run the risk of leaving a bad taste in the mouths of your current and future customers. Why? Imagine if they come in with the expectation of a great gift or prize and you give them a junk trinket, or worse, nothing. They will probably hate you for it, or at the very least, think youre repugnant.

If you, as a dealer, are going to hold a big mooch sale, make sure you have professional staff to weed out the buyers from the liars. Why go through all that rigmarole? If you correctly target buyers with a good mail piece, you will sell just as many or maybe more cars without all the hassle and potential degradation of your sales staff. If you cannot wait and would like to get the complete report of 13 critical errors and how to fix them all, go to www.mail-rite.com/reports.htm.

David Alan The Automotive Direct Mail Guru, is CEO of MAIL-RITE INTERNATIONAL Inc., a direct mail advertising company. David is also the author of the best selling book The $100 Million Dollar Playbook. He can be reached at 440-519-1515 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .