Fleet Sales Teams Are Being Asked to Deliver More Than Ever
Across the fleet industry, expectations placed on OEM sales teams are increasing. Fleet customers want faster responses, more consultative engagement, stronger operational understanding and higher levels of ongoing support. At the same time, many OEM account managers are covering increasingly large and complex customer portfolios. The challenge is that delivering this level of engagement takes time, and too much valuable sales capacity is still consumed by routine coordination and lower-yield activity.
Routine Requests are Consuming Valuable Sales Capacity
Across our conversations with OEMs and fleets, one frustration comes up repeatedly. Fleet customers often need quick access to relatively straightforward operational information, whether that is lead times, agreements, availability, programme updates or pricing clarification. Yet resolving these requests can still create significant workload for account managers and support teams.
The issue is not that these conversations are unimportant. In fact, responsiveness is increasingly the part of the customer experience fleets value most. The problem is that highly skilled sales teams can quickly become consumed by administrative coordination, leaving less time for the consultative engagement, relationship development and commercial progression that genuinely drives long-term performance. As competition increases, many OEMs are therefore becoming more deliberate about how sales resource is used and where field teams create the greatest value.
Self-Serve Access Is Creating More Time for High-Value Engagement
One area where this is changing is through greater use of self-serve digital tools. Fleet Gateway currently helps 1,500 fleets self-serve critical operational information directly, without relying on manual back-and-forth communication with account managers for routine requests.
For fleet customers, this means faster access to the information they need. For the 25 OEMs currently live on the system (rising to 35 by year-end), it reduces friction across the buying process while freeing account teams from large volumes of repetitive coordination activity. Importantly, this is not about reducing customer engagement. In many cases, it actually improves it. When fleets can self-serve routine operational information quickly and easily, conversations with account managers become more valuable, more strategic and more commercially focused.
As Matt Thomas, Fleet Director, Bill Plant put it: “With self-serve, I can save time and quickly rule options in or out. That means OEM meetings are more meaningful and less about basic information”.
OEMs Are Rethinking How Fleet Customers Are Supported
At the same time, many OEMs are also rethinking how they structure coverage across different customer types. One of the consistent pressures facing corporate sales teams is that mid-sized fleets still require high-quality support and relationship management, but field resource is finite. Senior account managers are therefore often forced to divide time between highly strategic opportunities and broader portfolio coverage.
Virtual Account Management Is Creating Scalable Customer Coverage
Increasingly, OEMs are addressing this challenge through scalable engagement models that combine field sales teams with Virtual Account Management (VAM). Within this model, VAM teams provide proactive engagement, relationship management and operational support for mid-sized fleet customers, ensuring those fleets continue to receive strong levels of service and regular contact. This allows senior field teams to focus more heavily on larger, more strategically complex or commercially significant opportunities where direct senior engagement creates the greatest impact.
Chris Clayton, Fleet Sales Director at Omoda, Jaecoo and Chery, explained why the business uses ROI’s VAM team: “As a new brand, one of the biggest challenges is building relationships and credibility quickly across the fleet market. We needed a scalable way to engage a broad range of fleet customers while still delivering the responsiveness and level of support fleets expect. ROI’s VAM model has helped us achieve that, contributing towards achieving 6% market share within only 18 months.”
Importantly, the objective is not simply efficiency. It is improving how sales time is allocated across the customer portfolio while maintaining, and often improving, the customer experience fleets receive.
The Strongest OEMs Are Redesigning How Sales Capacity Is Used
What’s becoming increasingly clear is that successful fleet sales organisations are not simply asking sales teams to work harder. They are redesigning how sales capacity is used. By reducing routine coordination, enabling faster self-service access to information and scaling customer engagement more effectively, OEMs are creating more time for high-value conversations, stronger customer relationships and better long-term commercial performance.
As fleet expectations continue to evolve, the ability to free-up sales teams from low-value workload while improving customer experience is increasingly becoming a competitive advantage in itself. Many OEMs are now actively rethinking how sales resource, customer engagement and operational support are structured across the fleet customer journey.
