When Busy Isn’t Better: Rethinking Sales Activity in Heavy Vehicle Markets

In heavy industrial and commercial vehicle businesses, “busy” is often treated as a proxy for “effective”.

Salespeople race between depots, quote requests stack up, demos are booked, and call logs are full. On paper, the team looks active. But the numbers don’t always move in the same direction.

I see the same pattern in OEMs, dealers and component suppliers:

• Lots of activity,
• Not enough impact.

The problem usually isn’t that the team is lazy or disorganised. It’s that the business hasn’t clearly defined what “good” activity looks like – and is quietly rewarding the wrong behaviour.

Let’s look at a practical way to shift from activity for its own sake to activity that actually moves revenue and margin.

The illusion of full calendars

A full calendar feels reassuring. It suggests momentum and demand. But in many sales organisations, the calendar is full of:

• Repeating catch-ups with low-potential accounts
• Quote requests that will never close
• “Relationship visits” with no clear purpose
• Internal meetings that multiply as results flatten

None of these activities are inherently wrong. They become a problem when they crowd out time for the work that really changes outcomes:

• Deepening relationships with high-value fleets
• Understanding the economics behind a customer’s decisions
• Working proactively on renewal, replacement and expansion plans
• Partnering with service, finance or operations to solve real problems

The first step is to accept a simple truth: not all sales activity is equal.

From volume to value: three questions to ask

Before you launch another incentive or campaign, sit down with your sales leaders and ask three questions.

1. Which accounts truly drive our performance?

Most teams know their top customers by revenue. Fewer have a clear view of:

• Which accounts deliver sustainable margin, not just volume
• Which fleets or operators offer room to grow (more vehicles, more locations, more services)
• Which customers shape your reputation and influence in the market

Segment your accounts into simple buckets:

• Strategic – critical to revenue, margin and positioning
• Core – important, repeat business with solid potential
• Transactional – useful, but price-sensitive and easily lost

If your calendar is dominated by transactional accounts, you already know where the problem starts.

2. What behaviours do we actually reward?

In many businesses, the unofficial message to sales teams is:

“More quotes, more visits, more calls.”

So that’s what they deliver.

Instead, consider what you say you value:

• Long-term customer relationships
• Healthy margins
• Penetration of services, parts or ancillary products
• Reliable forecasting and pipeline quality

Then check whether your incentives, scorecards and praise match those values.

• Are reps celebrated for winning the right deals, or for winning anything?
• Do they get recognised for walking away from unprofitable work, or quietly penalised for lower volume?
• Is pipeline judged on quality and progression, or just on how many lines it contains?

Where there’s a mismatch between story and system, the system always wins.

3. How much time do we spend on proactive versus reactive work?

Heavy vehicle and industrial sales will always involve a level of reactivity – breakdowns, urgent requirements, tenders with tight deadlines.

But if your team is 100% reactive, you are living at the mercy of the market.

Track, even roughly, how much time is spent on:

• Responding to inbound queries and quote requests
• Putting out fires
• Admin and internal reporting
  vs.
• Planned visits to strategic and core accounts
• Joint planning with customers (renewals, fleet changes, projects)
• Building relationships with new stakeholders and decision-makers

Your goal isn’t to eliminate reactive work. It’s to make sure proactive, high-impact work has a reserved place in the week, not just the leftovers.

A simple weekly reset: “Impact Hours”

One practical tool I like to introduce is the idea of Impact Hours.

Here’s how it works:

1. Ringfence a block of 4–8 hours per week for each salesperson.
2. Agree that these hours are dedicated exclusively to high-impact activity, such as:
   • Meetings with strategic accounts
   • Joint planning sessions with customers
   • Deep discovery calls with new opportunities
   • Internal collaboration to solve specific customer problems
3. Protect those hours from low-value meetings, admin and “drop-in” activity wherever possible.
4. Review how those hours were used in your weekly one-on-ones or team huddle.

You’re not dramatically changing workloads. You’re simply making sure the most important work happens on purpose, not by accident.

Over time, this creates a culture shift:

• Reps start asking “Is this the best use of my Impact Hours?”
• Managers stop equating busyness with performance.
• The team sees that thoughtful, focused work is expected and valued.

What to measure instead of “more”

If you move away from raw activity counts, what do you track?

A few options that tend to resonate in heavy vehicle and industrial contexts:

• Meetings with multi-level stakeholders
  – e.g. operational, commercial and executive contacts within strategic accounts
• Opportunities created in target segments
  – not just any opportunities; the ones that match your ideal profile
• Margin and mix quality
  – are you selling the right configurations, services and parts, or discounting to chase volume?
• Progression through critical stages
  – such as technical validation, site visits or joint planning milestones
• Retention and expansion in key accounts
  – renewals, upsell and cross-sell across your product or service lines

You can still keep an eye on core activity metrics, but they become supporting data, not the scoreboard.

Where leadership needs to be brave

Shifting from “busy” to “effective” requires leadership courage.

You may need to:

• Say no to some low-margin, high-effort customers
• Tighten qualification so not every enquiry becomes a full-blown pursuit
• Change incentive plans so they reward profitable, strategic wins – not just volume
• Tolerate a short-term dip in visible activity while the team adjusts

Without that commitment, the system drifts back to what feels comfortable: countable, high-volume tasks that are easy to measure and easy to praise.

How Sea Green Advisory can help

This isn’t about layering on more dashboards or launching another slogan-laden initiative. It’s about carefully aligning:

• Your customer segmentation
• Your expectations of sales behaviour
• Your incentives and internal narratives

Sea Green Advisory works with OEMs, dealers, transport operators and component suppliers to:

• Audit where time and effort are currently spent
• Clarify which customers, products and segments truly drive performance
• Redesign sales rhythms, scorecards and coaching so activity and impact match

If you suspect your team is working hard but not always on the right things, a short, focused review may be all that’s needed to reset the course.

A good starting point is a simple conversation about your current reality and where you want to be in the next 12–18 months.