Ask any dealer principal which customer they most want walking through the door, and you’ll hear some version of the same answer: strong credit, ready to buy, minimal friction.
They’re not wrong. But they might be thinking about the wrong customer entirely.
Because the most loyal customer in many of the best-run dealerships in this country — the one who comes back, who refers friends and family, who tells their entire circle where to go when they need a car — often walked in the first time with bruised credit, a complicated story, and a need that most dealers would have turned away.
That customer is your Special Finance buyer.
The Special Opportunities Department
Dave Moore has been at Johnny Londoff Chevrolet in St. Louis for 17 years. He’s the Variable Operations Director and Special Finance Manager. He doesn’t call it a Special Finance Department.
He calls it the Special Opportunities Department.
That reframe isn’t semantics. It’s a philosophy that separates the dealers who build something lasting from the ones who treat subprime as a liability to be managed rather than an opportunity to be developed.
When I published my last article about Special Finance managers being given the worst leads in the building, Dave responded with something that stayed with me:
“They are the most loyal customer base out there and they bring in referral after referral which close at the highest percentage.”
Seventeen years in the chair will teach you things no training manual can. Dave has seen it enough times to know it as fact.
Why Loyalty Is Real
The prime customer — the 750-credit score buyer with three competitive quotes in his pocket — is shopping on price. You’ll get his business today if your deal is the sharpest. You may never see him again if someone else is sharper next time.
The subprime customer is shopping on something else entirely: trust.
When a dealer says yes to someone who has heard no from everyone else, something happens that doesn’t occur in a conventional transaction. The customer doesn’t just buy a car. They remember who believed in them.
That memory is incredibly durable. It shapes where they go next time. It shapes what they tell their sister, their coworker, their neighbor when those people need a car and don’t know where to start.
No advertising budget in the world can manufacture what a single handled-well subprime deal creates organically.
The Referral Math Nobody Is Tracking
Dave Moore was right about the close rates on subprime referrals. Here’s why.
When a subprime customer refers someone to your dealership, they’re not sending them blind. They’re sending them with a testimonial. “They helped me when nobody else would. Go see them.” That introduction arrives pre-loaded with trust that no internet lead, no social media ad, no direct mail piece can replicate.
The referral walks in already sold on the concept of doing business with you. The only question is whether you have what they need.
And here’s what dealers almost universally fail to consider: not everyone in a subprime customer’s life has subprime credit.
The Tesla
Oshae Goddard is a salesperson at Don Bulluck Chevrolet in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. He doesn’t have “Special Finance” in his title. What he has is something more valuable: the work ethic and the process to execute.
The sales management team — Ryan, Joe, and Tyler — selected Oshae specifically to work the store’s trigger leads. They knew what they were looking for — someone who would follow through. In this business, the right program means nothing without the right person executing it.
The customer who changed everything had already been to another dealership. That dealer had the opportunity. They couldn’t — or wouldn’t — help him. He left without a car, still actively looking. That’s exactly how he became a trigger lead.
Don Bulluck Chevrolet received him. Oshae got the lead.
What happened next wasn’t luck. Oshae worked the lead the way it’s designed to be worked — contact the lead, set the appointment, get the appointment to show, close the sale. The 70/70/70/70 plan executed exactly as intended.
The customer came in to sign the papers. He brought his girlfriend with him.
She had excellent credit.
While her boyfriend finished his paperwork, she walked the lot. She found a used Tesla. She fell in love with it. She drove it home the same day.
One trigger lead. Two sales. One subprime, one prime.
The other dealership didn’t just lose one sale. They lost two — and they’ll never know it.
Don Bulluck Chevrolet was ready for this moment because the store’s General Manager had built the foundation: she surrounded herself with the right sales management team, the right Special Finance inventory, the right lender relationships, and the knowledge to serve customers that other dealers turn away. When the opportunity arrived, everything was in place to capture it.
The Lifetime Value Nobody Is Calculating
Credit doesn’t stay damaged forever. Many subprime buyers are one or two years away from conventional financing — they just need someone to get them into a vehicle and give them the chance to rebuild.
The dealer who treats that customer right doesn’t just get one deal. They get:
– The repeat purchase when credit improves
– The referrals to family and friends — not all of whom have subprime credit
– The halo customer who walks in with the buyer and drives off the lot in a Tesla
– The word-of-mouth in a community where trust is the only currency that matters
The dealer who turns that customer away — or buries them in a bad experience — gets none of it.
And they’ll never know exactly what they lost.
The Irony
Here is the part that should keep every dealer principal up at night.
The customers with the highest loyalty potential, the strongest referral networks, and the most durable emotional connection to your store are walking through your Special Finance door every single day.
Some of them have already been to a competitor who couldn’t help them. They’re arriving at your store as a second chance — for them and for you. The question is whether you’re ready to capture it.
Most dealerships aren’t. Not because they lack talent. Because they haven’t built the foundation: the right inventory, the right lenders, the right process, and the right people working the leads.
The dealers who have figured this out — the ones running what Dave Moore calls a Special Opportunities Department — are building customer bases that compound over time. Loyalty multiplies. Referrals generate referrals. Communities remember.
The ones who haven’t figured it out yet are spending money on advertising to acquire customers they could be generating for free. Worse, they’re handing those customers to competitors who are ready to receive them.
If you’re a Special Finance Manager reading this, you already know everything I just wrote. You’ve lived it.
The question is whether the people above you know it too.
And if you’re a dealer principal or general manager reading this — the decision to build a Special Finance operation that serves these customers isn’t just the right thing to do. It’s the highest return investment on your lot.
The management team at Don Bulluck Chevrolet understood that. The results speak for themselves.
If this resonated with you, I’d love to hear your story in the comments. The more voices we have on this, the louder the message gets — for the managers who need to hear it, and the dealer principals who need to understand what they have.
