re: Negoiating with car dealership

last car I bought, didn't really have a strategy, just kinda dumb lucked into this.

I was in the market. I had gone to truecar.com where you can lock in your price, no hassle, but you have to go to a truecar.com dealer, which was about 100 miles away. Truecar also gives you an idea of what people paid for a car and what I should generally expect as a fair price or even an excellent price.

I guess I had to give truecar my phone number to get access to their site.

Decided to start local and see what they offered. Went to the first place. I was upfront about how I had gone onto truecar.com and had a good idea of what I wanted to pay and where we needed to get to.
We test drive, go into the back and start negotiations. He starts the old back and forth, "gotta run it past my boss" BS. So he comes back after the first pass. they could probably do it.

While I'm sitting there my phone rings. I looked, didn't recognize the number and sent them to voice mail. I was actually surprised when they left a VM.

So here we go again. I make a lower offer. He goes into his boss's office. While he's gone I listen to the voice mail. It was the true car dealer 100 miles away and he was ready to deal.

When the salesman came back he wasn't really wanting to budge. So I say, "you won't believe who that phone call was from. It was from the truecar.com dealer 100 miles away and he's ready to deal."

All of a sudden we were in business. He matched truecar's "good price" and offered me another 2k on my POS trade in.