Nissan is reorganising its fleet sales department in a bid to ensure the new Leaf is a success with business buyers.
The revised all-electric Leaf is expected to hit 3500 units in 2014, the car’s first full year, and half of these will go to fleets, according to Nissan MD Jim Wright.
The outgoing Leaf sold 900 units last year with under 50% going to businesses.
Nissan has changed its fleet sales team so that staff are selling to certain types of company, rather than specific staff selling certain types of car.
The move is designed to “normalise” the Leaf within the Nissan range, according to Wright.
“Some companies are possible Leaf buyers because of a particular green thinking within the business, through their corporate social responsibility or because of usage patterns – for example, estate agents.
“We’ve put in a filter for these customers on our database.”
As part of the changes to boost the Leaf’s sales total, Nissan has also introduced three trim levels (rather than one) and is now offering a Renault-style battery lease to lower the initial price of the car, which now starts from £15,990 when the Government’s £5000 EV subsidy is accounted for.
The fleet team changes will also impact on other areas of corporate sales, said Wright.
“Our fleet market share is about 5%, where retail share is 5.5%. We have an overall target of 6% market share by the end of 2015. So the fleet objective is stronger due to the lower start,” he said.
“We’re strong in Motability and contract hire, but we’re weak
in large corporate.
“Our major fleet share is just 2-3%, and most of these customers are user choosers and behave like retail, which is at 5.5%, which is why 2-3% isn’t good enough.
“We need more people visiting these customers, more profiling of these people and more marketing.”
Wright added: “We’d stopped picking up the phone to these people when things were good because we’d concentrated on the areas we were better at. As a result we weren’t on the shopping lists.
“We’re increasing the absolute numbers and moving people over to that area from where we’re good.
“The team’s now at 10 from about four or five. There won’t be an immediate effect, but in 18 months there will, due to long fleet cycles.”
Nissan has also announced some management changes.
Former fleet boss Jon Pollock, who only joined the company late last year from Toyota, moves up to become sales director and Barry Beeston has assumed the fleet boss role.
