GM Combines Sales Operations For All Commercial Units Under GM Envolve

Over the past several years, General Motors like most other automakers has been trying to extend its reach into new areas beyond just building and selling vehicles in an effort to expand its revenue streams. In GM’s case that has led to the launch of several new business units including Brightdrop and GM Energy. While these new businesses that are focused on electrification are starting to gain some market traction, GM is starting to have a rather complex portfolio of products for its commercial and fleet customers to choose from.

In order to make all of GM’s various services easier to access for those customers, GM has created Envolve, a new business unit to handle the sales of products and services needed by this segment of the market. GM Envolve is intended to provide commercial customers with a single point of contact to coordinate whatever they might need. Those other business units including Brightdrop, GM Energy and OnStar will continue to exist but their sales operations will move into Envolve.

So why create another new organization within GM? It used to be that if a business needed to purchase some trucks, vans or cars, they would just go to their local dealer and buy them like any other customer. Larger organizations could go through GM Fleet to purchase directly. When those vehicles needed fuel, drivers would just stop at a gas station. Service and maintenance would be handled by the dealer and a manager at the company depot would track when that needed to happen.

But with the transition to electrification, things get both easier and more significantly more complicated. EVs generally don’t need as much maintenance, but they do need to be charged, in some cases more frequently and definitely for longer periods than a gas station pit stop.

Businesses with fleets of vehicles now typically rely on connectivity in the vehicle for fleet management whether they run on liquid fuel or electrons. The fleet management system can tell a company where vehicles are, how many miles are on them or how many hours they’ve been running, provide diagnostic updates and even enable scheduling for when they need to go back out.

Some businesses that rely on service staff to be on call 24 hours a day, send vehicles home with the staff. If those vehicles are electric, they may take care of installing chargers at those homes. For other companies like delivery and logistics, their fleet returns to a depot daily. Those depots need to be upgraded with enough chargers to support the fleet and minimize downtime. If a depot needs to install DC fast chargers, it may also need on-site battery storage to minimize added load on the grid.

GM’s various units have the capabilities to provide fleets with connectivity through OnStar, EV fleet management through Brightdrop and even charging infrastructure solutions through GM Energy. But for a fleet manager or purchaser, it would be a lot of extra work to coordinate all of those operations to make sure the infrastructure is ready when the vehicles are delivered and staff have been trained.

That’s the purpose of the Envolve team. An account executive from Envolve is assigned to each customer. The Envolve account staff will be trained by GM in all of the available services and products and is expected to guide the customer through the purchasing process. For GM, this means they may have a better chance of capturing a bigger share of the customer’s business by providing a one-stop shop for the GM EV ecosystem that also supports internal combustion vehicles. For customers, they will be order Brightdrop vans and Trace e-carts or Chevy Silverado EV work trucks, get charging and fleet management set up and go straight to work. Without something like Envolve, those customers might end up going to multiple vendors and assembling all of the pieces themselves.

Since 2021, GM CEO Mary Barra has talked of doubling GM’s revenues based on software and services. While it’s still very unclear how much extra consumers are going to be willing to pay for feature subscriptions on their vehicles, efforts like Envolve that tie GM’s various product offerings together could play a key role in expanding revenue. That’s why other automakers like Ford are following a very similar path with Ford Pro and it’s like others will do the same thing.