TL;DR
- 100% employee adoption across ~400 people — tracked and visible in-platform
- 30–40 leadership hours/week saved, per location — time back from answering questions reps can now look up
- A consistent customer experience across all 16 locations — the same in Phoenix as in Houston or Lubbock
- Fewer first two-week mistakes from new hires, meaning more closed deals and more revenue
- Self-guided, day-one onboarding that lightened the load on a small HR team
- Faster iteration — a good idea can be built into a module and pushed to every store instantly
In the truck business, one deal can make or break your month. Now run that math across 16 stores in five states, ~400 employees, and a sales process that — for years — only really lived inside a few people's heads.
That was the tightrope Lifted Trucks was walking. And it's why Co-President James Pillor now describes the platform holding the whole thing together in three words he can't stop repeating: scheduled, measurable, and repeatable.
Built in Phoenix, grown into a national brand
Lifted Trucks has been turning factory trucks into custom builds since 1995 — "OG since '95," as the brand likes to put it. What started as a single rooftop in Phoenix is now 16 locations across five states, ~400 employees, and the title "America's #1 Custom Truck Dealer." James and his partners took ownership in 2015, and he's now starting his 19th year with the company.
The model sounds simple: buy high-quality trucks, bolt on the highest-quality parts, and give every customer a world-class experience from the first phone call to the last signature. Pulling that off in one store is hard. Pulling it off identically in 16 is a different sport.
"There's a lot that goes into a consistent customer experience," James says. "It starts with the build — high-quality parts on high-quality trucks — then a world-class in-store sales process, and then the after-sale."
That sales process is the secret sauce, honed over decades. James and his co-president learned it from their dads, who were partners in the car business before them: treat every customer like a buyer, treat them with respect, show them a world-class inventory, and work hard to meet their needs.
For years it lived in people's heads. Which worked fine — right up until the company started opening stores faster than it could hand that knowledge down.
The green-pea problem
Here's the thing about scaling a sales floor. Every new hire starts as a "green pea" — the industry's affectionate term for a rookie who's never sold a truck. Hire enough of them, across enough states, fast enough, and the process you spent decades perfecting starts to drift.
"Inconsistencies were a real problem," James says. "Our sales process is core to what we do, and as we opened stores across the country, it was getting diluted."
Onboarding didn't help the cause. New hires kicked off with a phone call or a Zoom to HR — and no two were the same. "It was jumbled. People were off. It wasn't consistent." Green peas weren't getting up to speed the Lifted Trucks way fast enough, and in this business the gap shows up exactly where it costs the most: at the table.
"One car deal can make or break your month," James says. "If a salesperson doesn't know the steps, the customer can lose interest fast."
So growth — the very thing Lifted Trucks was built to do — started to feel like a gamble. "Before Trainual, growth felt risky," James says. "We opened stores slowly, one by one."
From "one more login" to "we have to have this"
James found Trainual the way a lot of operators do: a Google search for a way to get what was in his head into something the whole company could reach.
"I liked what I saw." But wanting a system and getting ~400 people to actually live in one are very different problems. It took a couple of years to win buy-in — and he's refreshingly blunt about why. "We have username-and-password fatigue. One more piece of software — could it really be that valuable?"
Then the company scaled, the cracks widened, and the answer got obvious. "We saw the problems getting bigger and bigger, and we went back to Trainual and said: we have to have this."
His last holdout was adoption — he wasn't convinced everyone would actually use it. What flipped him was seeing what lived inside a module: testing, multimedia, tracking, assigning, and, more recently, AI and gamification. "I knew that would grab the attention of the most people in the organization."
The scoreboard today: 100% adoption. Not "most." Everyone. And because the data sits right in the platform, James isn't guessing — he can see it.
What Lifted Trucks actually runs on Trainual
Day-one onboarding that runs itself. New hires meet the company, the key players, and the boring-but-critical stuff — W-9s, clocking in, the how-tos — through modules and videos instead of a scattered handoff.
"You log in, everything's at your fingertips, and you find the answers yourself." It empowers the new hire and takes a real load off a small HR team.
Culture before paperwork. The most important part of onboarding isn't the forms. "Our core values guide everything we do. We use Trainual to introduce them in a creative, multimedia way, so people feel part of the organization from day one."
A 13-week sales cadence, running in every store at once. The sales program is a 13-week module — four quarters a year, one topic a week: customer interviews, test drives, trade evaluations, credit reports. GSMs meet with sales managers weekly; managers carry it to their teams.
"We want everybody doing the same thing the same way every time. If they don't, things get missed — and that costs money."
Training the trainers, too. The sales program is deliberately manager-led rather than self-guided — and that was a design choice. Trainual doesn't just teach the green pea how to sell; it coaches the sales manager on how to run the training session in the first place.
"It's very helpful for the sales manager, because it guides them on what needs to be done and how the training should go."
The payoff isn't only sharper reps — it's stronger manager-to-salesperson relationships and more productivity across the floor.
Retraining the veterans, not just the rookies. Not every new hire is a green pea. Plenty arrive from other dealerships, "trained one way" — and Lifted Trucks does things its own way. Trainual gets that message through fast, turning experience into an asset instead of a habit to unlearn.
Real-time updates, coast to coast. They sell every make and model, and every model year brings new trims and options. "We use Trainual to announce new makes and models and the features they carry. It shortens the time it takes to get that to our teams across the country, so they can talk to customers and close more deals."
Accountability you can actually see. This is the one James keeps circling back to. Managers were always supposed to train their teams. "They said they would. We hoped they would. But now we know they do — because we can see who's gone through the modules, who's gone through the testing, when and where."
Built for the lot, not just the desk. The information travels. Reps pull what they need on desktop and on the mobile app — whether they're at a workstation or standing next to a customer on the lot.
The results (a.k.a. the fun part)
Start with the number James was most nervous about: 100% adoption across ~400 people — with a little gamification keeping it spicy. "There's a healthy amount of competition in any sales organization," he says. "If there's a chance to win, our guys go after it."
Then the one leadership feels every single week: 30–40 hours given back per location's management team — hours that used to evaporate answering questions a rep can now look up in seconds.
"Trainual lets our team focus on revenue-generating activities."
The rollout move that made adoption stick: whenever Lifted Trucks opens a new store, they seed it with existing, already-trained employees at the management and sales level. New hires learn by watching people who already live in the system, so a brand-new location never starts from zero.
Downstream, it lands on the deal — fewer mistakes in a new hire's critical first two weeks, which means more deals closed and more revenue.
"People can lose a deal quickly because they don't know the process," James says. "Trainual has allowed us to close that gap."
The mistakes don't stop mattering once the truck is sold, either. A missed step on the paperwork, the title work, or a bad handoff turns into a dissatisfied customer and hours spent repairing the relationship on the back end. "This training eliminates all of those things," James says, "so we can be more efficient and save money." In a business where reputation is everything, that's the difference between a one-time sale and a customer who comes back.
And here's the compounding part: the company iterates fast. When someone spots a better way — like adding video early in the sales process, which pushed the appointment rate up — the loop is short. One person owns everything Trainual; improvement ideas surface on the weekly management call, and the winning ones go live for all ~400 people at once.
"We evaluate it, change the module, and blast the new version out to everybody instantly. With Trainual, we can take new ideas and put them into action much quicker — which is awesome given our size."
Underneath all of it is the thing the whole system was built to protect:
"I know our customers are treated the exact same in Houston as they are in Lubbock, Texas, as they are in Phoenix, Arizona. That consistency is incredibly valuable."
At Lifted Trucks, training stopped being a task. It became foundational — the thing that lets the company grow without holding its breath.
What's next
Lifted Trucks isn't tapping the brakes. The brand is heading east — the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida are next on the map — at a pace of four to six new stores a year. All gas, no brakes.
The difference now is confidence. "We have a lot more confidence opening stores, because we know the customer experience is going to be consistent," James says. "Now we can grow without the fear of an inconsistent customer experience."
Which brings him right back to those three words. "Before Trainual, we had no way to control when our training happened, whether they happened, or how. Now they're scheduled, measurable, and repeatable."
His pitch to any operator eyeing the same kind of growth is shorter still:
"If you're growing a business and you want your thoughts recorded so they can be transmitted broadly, use Trainual. It's the only tool out there with all the functionality you need to scale."
👉 Ready to make your process scheduled, measurable, and repeatable? Get a Trainual demo.
