If you are a salesperson or responsible for your logistics company, it is important to be up to date with the strategies to get new customers in logistics and transportation.
We all know the old commercial - client relationship, the more you work a client portfolio or a physical area the more sales there will be. But are we up to date with the new trends and strategies to get more clients for our business? Do we know how to optimize the commercial work to get more results in less time? Do we know the concept of re-inventing ourselves but are we really doing it?
Customized Advertising
We are hearing more and more about personalized advertising, chatbots to provide responses
and on-the-spot, tailor-made campaigns with very specific targets that include even
products they have sought and the use of artificial intelligence (usually in more speeches from people who are not real understanders of the concept).
Explore the combination of different digital marketing techniques that allow first to target consumers who can show interest in the product (Google Ads, Linkedin or Facebook) instead of the old mass campaigns that were made on television, radio, print media, etc... that already sounds archaic. And secondly, give immediate response to the customer, as has been seen with Millenials who increasingly require and demand shorter response times.
Start-ups
It is important to keep up to date with the innovations and novelties that we find in the transport and logistics market. The emergence of new trends and start-ups can bring us the most important tools or opportunities that can help us the most.
Highlighting the award-winning startup in innovation Transport Comparator, the first free web-based comparator of road transport companies on the market. This platform allows both large transport companies and SMEs to advertise on the Internet without fixed costs. This marketplace not only allows us to gain notoriety on the internet but also to obtain sales possibilities without intermediaries.
Creating the experience
There is more and more competition and it is more difficult to differentiate yourself, isn't that your case? I don't believe it.
That is why it is so important that we understand that it is no longer a novelty but a norm to stop offering products or services and start offering experiences. Yes, experiences: Do you offer a transportation service or do you offer peace of mind? Do you offer logistics services or do you offer security? Your customers should link you to an experience, and if you think they don't, it's possible that they already do and you're the only one who doesn't know what it is.
And how do I create it? Very easy, another concept to point out: the famous "Value Proposition". The value proposition is to define in the narrowest possible words the differential fact and the reason why our customers choose us and not the competition. It is important that it is what differentiates us. We recommend doing something totally innovative: Ask our clients, get out of the office!
Once the value proposition is defined, we can study how to innovate or differentiate ourselves from the competition, and as Seth Godin and his purple cow say: innovate to get word-of-mouth.
Do you know about economies of scope?
You are probably familiar with the famous economies of scale: selling to as many customers as possible to reduce the unit cost. Instead, economies of scale explain how to get more out of tedious sales work or what amounts to "selling more things to the same customer" (multi-product catalogs).
And where is the most innovative part? In the collaboration with companies that offer complementary services or products to the same customers, gaining not only twice the sales force, but twice the positioning in the market and internet.
A recommendation before marrying another company: Take into account its reputation and positioning in the market. If we are positioned with the nº2 in the market, who of our competitors do you think will call nº1?
CRM and the value of salespeople
Let's start with the simplest: can you imagine if some part of the truck failed and it did not warn you? It is the same with sales, if you have 400 customers and one of them starts to fail, how do you detect it, very simple with a sales CRM: a program that will help us in the relationship with our customers and that warns you graphically of the differences in sales, if you have more than 100 customers we recommend using one. If we visit a customer who begins to detach from our brand, we may recover it in time and learn from our mistakes.
How do we treat our sales reps? It is proven that the better we treat our salespeople, the better results they will bring in the long run.
We can look at the Anglo-Saxon model in the USA, sales reps are largely remunerated with large variable bonuses without ceiling and with training to encourage them to stay with the firm, it is normal for a good sales rep to be rewarded with an MBA that costs thousands of dollars in exchange for staying with the firm for several years. We are not saying that you have to make such an investment for each salesperson, but when was the last time you made an investment in their training or empowerment?
Tip: When sales go down, it's easy to pick a scapegoat, and salespeople have the prettiest heads. Thousands of companies lose their most valuable assets out of spite, for not admitting their management's lack of strategy or the lack of competitiveness of their products. Sales reps are fired because of declining sales without asking two key questions: Is the market stagnant? And if the answer is yes: Is the competitor's product/service more competitive than ours?
Marketing (or Marketing or Marketingology)
That concept that sounds familiar but we never remember what it is. A term more commonly used in Latin America to refer to 'solving customer needs through the product or service'. And yes, it is what you are thinking, it is the living definition of Marketing, and here we go with the key question: Does your company invest enough in Marketing? Do you know the difference between marketing and advertising? Is there a marketing manager in your company? Does anyone know what SEO is?
As David Packard rightly says "marketing is too important to leave it in the hands of the marketing department" and marketing creates that desire to potential customers so that the sales department has a much easier job. Before starting to innovate in the sales department, think about whether it has the necessary support. The metaphor that is often used is that of the battlefield: Do my soldiers have the necessary weapons to fight on equal terms? Or what does my competition do in marketing?
Fear of the unknown
Companies are made up of people; these people may have more or less power and more or less tendency to change. Recognizing this point is very important; is the company's management willing to take risks for a possible evolution? As stated by innovators Franc Ponti & J. M. Ferrer-Arpí "If something works change it.". This phrase gives much food for thought, since it is easy to fall (if not normal, especially in family businesses) into the temptation of 'not touching what works' for fear of 'not knowing how to react in time if it goes wrong'. And here we find the root of the problem, the inability to know how to manage change.
Let's look at those companies that, as an internal rule, force innovation; not only are they leading companies in their own sector, but they are often the only ones that are still active after 50 years. Our advice? Train management to know how to manage change and keep abreast of new market trends.
