It All Adds Up to Sales!

Wabash National Corporation

As the leading manufacturer of over-the-road trailers for the freight industry, Wabash National enjoys a pre-eminent position among America's largest carriers. So when the company introduced a revolutionary new type of trailer, utilizing a foam-reinforced steel construction that dramatically reduced repairs and downtime, these major customers were willing to test them to see for themselves how, despite their significantly higher initial cost, these DuraPlate trailers would save them money and more than return the price premium in a very short time.

DuraPlate trailers quickly achieved a dominant position among the top carriers. But communicating the same message to other, smaller carriers…who still might have hundreds or even thousands of trailers in their fleets, but often lacked the time, resources and sophisticated information systems and costs data that the major carriers utilized to analyze the DuraPlate proposition…proved difficult.

So LMG developed a sales presentation that the Wabash representatives could use to explain the economics of the DuraPlate trailer to a prospective customer. Designed to resemble a PowerPoint presentation, a highly complex program let the customers provide their own cost data (with suggestions to guide them) and then, using their own numbers, provide a detailed analysis of the Total Cost of Ownership, including net present value computations and the payback period…which generally runs less than two years, and sometimes as little as six months!

Finally, each customer’s responses are saved in a special file, so the salesperson can utilize a separate program to automatically generate a customized written follow-up report in Microsoft Word.

Armed with this program, the Wabash sales force has been able to substantially penetrate the next tier of the market, resulting in not only increased sales, but valuable new customer relationships, as well.

One indication of the success of the Wabash Total Cost of Ownership calculator is the growing number of fleets that have made the switch to DuraPlate trailers.

TO SEE THE WABASH NATIONAL "TOTAL COST OF OWNERSHIP" CALCULATOR IN ACTION, CLICK HERE.

Note: You may change the values in any input field, and these changes will be reflected in the final calculations, but you must have a value in every input box.