Tesla has begun the process of merging the roles of its sales and delivery employees, four current and former employees told Business Insider. The employees asked for anonymity due to a fear of reprisal from the electric-car maker.
Announced internally in October, the initiative, called One Motion, is designed to give each customer a single point of contact when buying a vehicle, the current and former employees said. That means one employee would handle sales, paperwork, and delivery. (At Tesla, a delivery can involve driving a vehicle to a customer's home, or guiding a customer through the final stages of the buying process at one of the company's delivery centers.)
Screenshots of an internal website viewed by Business Insider that include information about One Motion list the following six steps sales and delivery employees should take with potential customers: "connect & understand," "build value," "ask for the sale," "checkout," "support," and "delivery."
"You are the primary owner of the customer's experience up to and beyond the moment they become an owner," a video published on the website and sent in a text to Business Insider says.
The merger between Tesla's sales and delivery departments was in its beginning stages as early as July, when a former salesperson said delivery employees at his location were receiving training to sell cars.
"We've been told in no uncertain terms that we are one team and we will all be doing the same job," he said at the time.
But the transition is not yet complete. A current delivery employee said she has not yet received formal sales training, and a current sales employee said she has yet to deliver any vehicles this quarter. Both employees said they aren't sure how One Motion will be implemented.
One current and one former salesperson expressed skepticism about One Motion, saying it's better to let employees specialize in the tasks that are best suited to their skillsets.
"In practice, it took half, if not more of my productive time and tied it up in paperwork, scheduling, vehicle walkthroughs, customer complaints," the former salesperson said. "Essentially, they took somebody that could have dedicated 100% of his time to selling cars and basically chopped that time, effectively, in half."
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
Unlike other automakers, Tesla owns and operates its own stores, rather than outsourcing sales to third-party dealerships. The demands placed on the company's delivery department have grown over time, as Tesla has set quarterly delivery records in eight of the past nine quarters, and expects to do the same in the fourth quarter of this year.
Tesla has in the past recruited employees from a variety of departments to deliver vehicles at the end of a quarter, suggesting that the company's delivery staff has at times not been large enough to handle peak workloads. In one case, CEO Elon Musk even asked for assistance from Tesla customers.
Combining the roles of sales and delivery employees is just the latest change in what has been a tumultuous year for Tesla's sales operation. In February, the company said it would close most of its stores, though it partially reversed that announcement a few weeks later when it said it would close only low-performing locations.
Tesla has also changed the compensation structure for its sales employees multiple times and shifted from Salesforce to a proprietary customer-relationship-management system.
Are you a current or former Tesla employee? Do you have an opinion about what it's like to work there? Contact this reporter at mmatousek@bjinnox.com. You can ask for more secure methods of communication, like Signal or ProtonMail, by email or Twitter direct message.
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