I get that, however, then you have a permanently open opportunity.
Most of us, I am assuming, would like to have bought/sold opportunities closed, and have the processes work off that status, rather than have to implement a workaround/hack to get it to work the way we want.
Well, you could still easily create a separate status for 'In process of selling us their car' and 'Sold us their car', which would allow you to change the status to to match the current state of the customer. As far as 'hacks' in the automotive industry goes, this seems super minor and takes maybe 10 minutes to setup and implement, while also seemingly solving the problem.
I just can't really imagine them implementing a change that would perform better than that without some SERIOUS changes to their architecture. Maybe I'm having a hard time imagining exactly what the 'ideal' implementation would be.
When you add a customer to VIN, your available options are choosing the lead source and the lead type (walk-in, phone, internet, service). That's about all that's available. How would you like this feature implemented? Would you like an entire lead type created? That doesn't really seem appropriate given the current selection options. If you added it to that drop-down you would then be unable to segment those leads between phone/internet/walk-in if you were wanting to track their origin.
Our store does about 250 units/month, so not an absolute ton, and we maybe buy 2 a month from customers, if that. And that's with a $200 spiff per car bought for the salespeople.
So for us, that's an incredibly small portion of our transactions. I understand not everyone is in the same situation, but if you're buying 20-30 cars from people a month outright, then maybe you would be better off with a different system, as that's not the primary function of the 'Sales Department' at most dealerships.
With how crappy and poorly designed the rest of VIN is, I just can't imagine them putting in the required amount of resources to create this feature when it affects such a small portion of their customer base.
Oh well, I won't argue it further, just trying to put solutions out there that are likely to help you out while you wait for the feature request to be picked up. I guess if anyone wants help implementing the status/source/process changes I talked about, I'd be more than happy to help!