Leadership Teams Increasingly Suspect More Performance Exists
Across the fleet industry, pressure on OEM sales organisations is increasing. Competition remains intense, customer expectations continue to rise, and leadership teams are under growing pressure to improve both sales performance and operational efficiency. At the same time, most OEM sales teams are already working hard. The challenge for many leaders is not a lack of activity, but a growing suspicion that there is untapped performance sitting within existing sales operations.
In many cases, leadership teams can sense inefficiencies exist but struggle to clearly identify where they sit, how significant they are, or what practical changes would create the greatest commercial impact.
OEMs Are Under Increasing Pressure to Optimise Sales Effectiveness
That challenge is becoming increasingly important because modern fleet sales teams are balancing far more than simply winning new business. They are also responsible for protecting existing revenue, growing current customer relationships, managing increasingly complex fleet requirements, and maintaining high levels of customer engagement across large account portfolios.
The result is that sales resource has become one of the most valuable and constrained assets within the fleet sales operation. The key question is no longer simply how to generate activity, but how to ensure finite sales time is directed towards the right customers, opportunities and commercial priorities.
Creating Visibility into How Sales Resource is Really Used
At ROI Automotive, this is an area we are increasingly supporting clients with through structured sales effectiveness diagnostics and operational reviews. The objective is to help leadership teams identify where operational inefficiency, inconsistent processes or resource allocation challenges may be limiting sales performance, forecasting accuracy or customer experience.
Operational Reviews Often Reveal Hidden Inefficiencies
Across these reviews, a number of common themes often emerge. In one recent example, introducing structured utilisation and activity analysis across a field sales team quickly demonstrated that the issue was not a lack of effort. The team was highly active, but the analysis also created much clearer visibility into how sales resource was actually being allocated across customer management, opportunity development, administration and internal activity. That visibility allowed management teams to identify several immediate operational improvements.
- Existing customer bias – Some account managers were spending the vast majority of their time managing existing customers, investing little or no time developing new customer relationships or prospect opportunities.
- Excessive internal/admin allocation – In some cases, a significant proportion of available sales capacity was being consumed by internal administration, coordination activity and non-customer-facing workload.
- Major variation in engagement models – Some account managers operated almost entirely through virtual engagement, while others maintained a much more blended model across virtual and face-to-face activity.
- Inconsistent activity and portfolio patterns – Significant variation existed in activity focus, customer mix and engagement models across comparable roles, leading management teams to redesign performance expectations, customer coverage models and measurement frameworks to better align sales capacity with strategic priorities.
CRM Discipline Remains a Major Operational Challenge
We also frequently find significant variation in how consistently account managers record activity, manage follow-up actions and progress opportunities within CRM workflows. While many organisations have invested heavily in platforms such as Salesforce, the commercial value of those systems is ultimately determined by how effectively they support day-to-day sales activity, opportunity management and forecasting visibility. Without consistent CRM adoption and workflow discipline, leadership teams struggle to create the visibility needed to optimise performance effectively.
Customer Experience Is Increasingly Influencing Commercial Outcomes
Another area increasingly shaping fleet sales performance is the direct commercial impact of customer experience. Several fleet managers interviewed described situations where poor operational support or aftersales experience directly influenced OEM recommendation, supplier preference or even temporary removal from fleet choice lists.
Jennie Platt, Fleet Coordinator at ERIKS, explained: “After multiple issues, I told the OEM directly that if things didn’t improve, I would remove them from our options list – and we did.”
Despite this, many OEMs still operate with relatively limited structured visibility into how customers experience the day-to-day reality of doing business with them, while also lacking clear strategies to proactively protect customer relationships and future revenue when operational issues arise.
The Strongest OEMs Are Becoming More Deliberate About Sales Optimisation
Importantly, the diagnostic process is not designed to criticise existing sales teams. In most cases, the underlying issue is that sales organisations have evolved over time in response to market pressures, customer demands and internal operational changes. The result is often highly capable teams operating within processes or structures that are no longer fully aligned to today’s commercial environment. Our role is to provide leadership teams with clearer operational visibility, practical recommendations and an external perspective grounded in the realities of modern fleet sales.
As fleet sales becomes increasingly competitive and resource-intensive, the strongest-performing OEMs are becoming more deliberate about how sales resource is prioritised, deployed and managed. In many cases, the greatest commercial opportunity is not necessarily adding more activity but improving how existing sales effort is directed across the customer portfolio. Increasingly, the challenge for leadership teams is how clearly they can see where operational inefficiencies, inconsistent processes or capability gaps may be limiting performance.
