Carl Stanton has been appointed by Volvo Car UK as its new business sales manager, a newly created role to target large corporates.

Stanton has more than 20 years’ experience within operations and sales in the motor industry, including fleet, retail and rental.

He joins Volvo from Vauxhall Motors, where he spent more than a decade in various UK and pan-European roles.

The role of new business sales manager has been created with a specific focus on seeking new contract opportunities with businesses that may not have purchased Volvos for a number of years.

Steve Beattie, head of business sales at Volvo Car UK, said: “We restructured our business sales team in 2018, which reaped significant rewards. Just recently we announced our investment in a dedicated virtual sales team to support the needs of our SME customers, which is already proving to be a great success.

“Now, with the appointment of Carl, we are ensuring we place equal importance on our large corporate prospects, particularly those to whom we haven’t spoken in recent years. The newly bolstered team puts us in an ideal position to deliver on our bold UK fleet sales ambitions.”

In 2018, Volvo Car UK secured business from over 640 companies that hadn’t purchased a Volvo in the past four years, if ever, with its true fleet sales increasing 16% between July and December.

Stanton said: “This is an exciting time to be joining Volvo. Added to the transformed model range and its rapidly increasing market share, the recent changes Steve has brought about within business ales are paying strong dividends. However, there is still huge potential for growth.

“The combined experience and passion of the team, backed by the ongoing investment in innovative solutions to support our customer service offering, will be key to us achieving this.

“I am confident that a growing number of businesses across the UK with fleets of all sizes will be making Volvo their manufacturer of choice.”

With fleet and retail combined, Volvo sold a total of 50,000 cars in the UK for the first time in 28 years, taking a 2.1% share of the market to become the fastest growing premium brand.