SALES TRAINING SUCCESS STORY
Bruckner’s Truck & Equipment Builds a High-Performing Sales Team
See how Bruckner’s Truck & Equipment partnered with The Brooks Group for hiring assessments and guidance to streamline its selection process.
Results at a Glance
New Hire Assessments
1,000+ completed
Shorter Onboarding
From one year to 90 days
Stronger Team
Decreased turnover
Savings
$100,000 for Every Mishire
Overview
Founded in 1932, Bruckner’s Truck & Equipment is one of America’s largest and oldest dealers of Mack and Volvo trucks and equipment, with locations from Arkansas to Washington.
Bruckner’s is a third-generation family-operated business based out of Amarillo, Texas, with deep roots in the agricultural trucking industry. Over the past decade, the company has grown rapidly from nine locations to 45 and from 220 employees to 1,400.
The Challenge: Find, Hire, and Onboard the Right Candidates Quickly
The expansion made it imperative for the company to find the right candidates, hire, and onboard quickly—in all roles including sales professionals, regional sales managers, corporate sales managers, and sales coordinators. It also became even more important to reduce turnover so the company could keep the employees they were hiring.
“We’ve grown our feet on the street about 14% throughout the last year. We’re hiring an average of one new salesperson every week.”
–Brian Murphy, VP of Sales, Bruckner’s Truck & Equipment
Bruckner’s partnered with The Brooks Group in 2016 for hiring assessments, tools, and guidance to streamline its selection process. Since then, the company has conducted over 1,000 assessments. With the help of The Brooks Group, Bruckner’s has improved hiring decisions, shortened onboarding time, and decreased turnover rates.
“The assessment tool is powerful because it saves us time. We’re not chasing the wrong candidate too long in the process. We figured out it cost us $100,000 for a bad hire. You can do a lot of Brooks assessments for a hundred grand”
–Brian Murphy, VP of Sales, Bruckner’s Truck & Equipment
Brooks Talent Index® Hiring Assessment Identifies Top Performers
Bruckner’s hiring process includes initial resume submission, online application, one-on-one interview, Brooks Talent Index® hiring assessment, assessment debrief, executive review, reference check, and background check.
The core of the process is the Brooks Talent Index® assessment. This comprehensive evaluation combines multiple peer-reviewed, validated tools to measure and analyze a candidate’s ability to sell, interpersonal skills, resilience, and goal orientation.
“We view the Brooks Talent Index as a third of the decision. We have to have a good interview and a strong assessment. The references close the gap for us. The assessment shows where somebody is strong in their knowledge of the sales process and where they can improve. It measures different aspects of the individual and gives us a whole picture of how someone will perform on the job.”
–Brian Murphy, VP of Sales, Bruckner’s Truck & Equipment
Assessments Shorten and Streamline the Selection Process
Using the Brooks Talent Index assessment has dramatically shortened the hiring process and enabled the company to hire top performers quickly.
One of the main benefits of using an assessment is it takes the emotion out of hiring. The tool reveals sales professionals’ selling skills, working styles, communication preferences, job competencies, driving forces, and sales acumen.
“I can look at the assessment and, in about two minutes, determine if the candidate is a definite yes or a no. You have to have velocity in this. Your big producers are going to move fast, and you will lose them if you can’t move at the speed they expect you to.”
–Brian Murphy, VP of Sales, Bruckner’s Truck & Equipment
Job Benchmarks Show What Good Looks Like
To fully deploy the assessments, The Brooks Group created job benchmarks that identify the most important characteristics of the roles Bruckner’s is hiring for. Hiring managers compare each candidate’s assessment to the benchmark to make sure they’re a good fit.
“What we’re looking for is the best person for our organization—somebody who’s going to have the highest chance of succeeding. It’s different for a manager, a salesperson, or a sales coordinator. It’s not one size fits all to us”
–Brian Murphy, VP of Sales, Bruckner’s Truck & Equipment
Knowing what “good” looks like and focusing on role-specific profiles and team fit gives Bruckner’s confidence that they’re choosing the best candidates.
“If you’re hiring somebody straight out of college who doesn’t have a strong resume or experience, it’s a lot harder,” said Murphy. “Incorporating the assessment into our process gives more certainty. It’s less of a complete leap of faith. You’ve got some information about how the person is hardwired and the raw material that goes along with it.”
A Career-Long Guide to Training and Coaching
The Brooks Talent Index has allowed Bruckner’s to shrink its onboarding time from a year to 90 days. The assessment gives new hires an awareness of their strengths and helps them understand where they need to develop. The company builds onboarding from there and uses the assessment as a guide to improve ongoing training and coaching.
“We used to bring new hires into corporate for three days to learn about product and our processes. Now, with a newly onboarded person, we talk about how they’re built, their training opportunities, as well as their strengths. We set them up to be able to analyze themselves and use this as their own coaching guide—without me sitting in front of them several hours a month.
The Brooks Group assessment is a career-long document that you can always keep and learn from. It’s continuous, starting as a new hire and going through quarterly or annual reviews. We work on product and process after they really know who they are.”
–Brian Murphy, VP of Sales, Bruckner’s Truck & Equipment