There are seven truck sales competitions underway at the 20th annual Rush Skills Rodeo at the Gaylord Opryland in Nashville this week, but there may no harder sale than the ones salespeople are facing in the field every day.
New truck orders have experienced a year-over-year decline in every month of 2025 and a December turnaround seems highly unlikely. The truck freight recession remains unmovable and could enter year four in 2026, and while the vocational and medium-duty markets are stronger, neither segment will look back on 2025 fondly.
Rush Enterprises Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing Jody Pollard says it’s been a year where sales processes have really taken center stage. The truck sales competitions at the Tech Skills Rodeo are designed with detailed product testing and simulated sales walkarounds that evaluate a salesperson’s aptitude when navigating a real-life customer interaction.
Pollard says those interactions aren’t the same as they were back when the market was humming, but they remain incredibly important. With clarifications around EPA 2027 NOx regulations forthcoming and a hope that next year will see more trade stability, Pollard says it is imperative that Rush Truck Center sales associates using today’s conversations to support tomorrow’s truck sales.
The market will shift eventually, and Pollard says salespeople who have proven themselves knowledgeable, helpful and understanding to a customer’s needs are those who will earn the most business when sales return.
“It’s been a lot this past year. Really the last two years. There’s been no established rules for how to play the game,” says Pollard, referring to the difficult capital management decisions fleet managers are having to make in an unstable marketplace. He says that’s where Rush wants to help, offering as much guidance and insight as it can.
A competitor in the Heavy-Duty, International category speaks to judges at the 2025 Rush Tech Skills Rodeo in Nashville.
“We have people at Rush who do nothing but policy research, who do nothing but legal affairs, so that we give our customers the best information possible when they are trying to make capital decisions,” Pollard says. “When you’re in charge of capital capacity, you have to have a trusted source of knowledge to make those decisions because they are ever changing.”
[RELATED: How technicians prepare themselves for the Rush Tech Skills Rodeo]
And Pollard says those decisions aren’t as simple as which month to order, or how many trucks a buyer can get with the capital it has allocated. Buyers also must consider the trade-in values of their existing equipment, production timelines and rising costs against inventory available now and the custom spec’ing decisions required when placing an order.
If freight picks up or a pre-buy materializes, Pollard says some of the ordering challenges that existed during the 2021 order boom could return. He says Rush’s goal is to ensure each customer knows that, and is planning accordingly.
[RELATED: Weak ordering now may limit capacity later]
“I think you have to be foretelling,” Pollard says. “I believe the candor of being brutally honest about what’s happening inside this space and foretelling [to the customer] the pros and cons of if they do not purchase at a certain point, the impact that could have to their overall business. I think that’s extremely important.”
