How Freight Brokers Can Close More Shippers With a CRM

The CRM that logistics and freight sales professionals actually love because it was built specifically for them is Salesdash CRM.

Spreadsheets can be a sales reps best friend. This goes for any industry, not just freight and logistics.

However, if you're a sales rep that drives higher activity volume to shippers, then your spreadsheet can get very large and harder to manage. We've seen plenty of spreadsheets with the red, yellow, and green highlighted rows for contact management. It can become a mess.

But there's a reason the top freight brokerages and asset based sales teams use CRM software.

CRMs make it faster for you to organize and access your leads through searching. You are more effectively able to manage and prioritize your follow-ups. And the data collection of all of your notes in a spreadsheet make it harder to consume the info you need to know about your shippers faster.

At Salesdash, we work with over 200 freight brokerage, asset based, freight agency, freight forwarding, and logistics sales teams.

We've worked with teams that have come from spreadsheets, from non-logistics specific CRMs, and from the big, complex CRMs that sell you the dream that you have to build out yourself and pay a pretty penny for.

Let's talk about how CRM can help you close more shippers, but also to help you grow load count with your existing shippers.

Benefit #1: Stop letting leads slip through the cracks

Whether you are cradle-to-grave or split model, the days in freight get chaotic and it is easy to lose track of follow-ups. This is why freight brokers often have a lot of sticky notes, notebook notes, etc. around their desk. And then when it's time to find that note you need in a hurry, it's a challenge.

Using a CRM can help take the thinking out of who you need to follow up with.

Most importantly, they can help you keep customers and prospects top of mind. And most sales reps have been there, but being able to record your notes of previous conversations is helpful, as it can be difficult to remember who you spoke to and what you spoke to them about.

A lot of the sales leaders we speak to in freight say the sales cycle can be 3-6 months. Sometimes quicker, sometimes longer.

Recording your interactions, emails, calls, and quotes only helps yourself in the future.

Benefit #2: Tackling a larger list of shipper leads and the multiple contacts to reach out to

One of the most common issues we see with freight sales teams is lead management.

Specifically, how many leads that a shipper sales rep has in their name.

When reps have 300+ accounts in their name, it can get overwhelming for them to manage this list. And something to consider is that 1 account is typically not just 1 outreach. You may try the main line of a shipper, multiple extensions, direct lines, mobiles, and emails. Truly working an account requires multiple touch points across multiple channels.

A recommendation to start with? 75-125 accounts. Start from there, and then work your way up.

It's better to need to add more, rather than having to clean out 150+ that you don't need in your name.

Building on that, some sales teams will work with smaller shippers. And then as you get to more mid-market and enterprise level shippers, it's very common that you will have multiple contacts in shipping and transportation to reach out to.

Using a CRM helps you know who you've spoken to, what you have spoken with each contact about, and when the last time was that you had activity with them.

In a logistics specific CRM like Salesdash CRM, you can also keep track of the quotes you've received from specific contacts.

Benefit #3: Keep track of what lanes a shipper ships, as well as your quote history

In a generic CRM, a freight sales rep would have to enter a lane or a quote as a text note.

The issue with this is that it does not allow you to build a searchable database of shippers based on origin, destination, equipment type, mode, and more.

Let's say that one day that you are talking with a carrier one day that has consistent capacity out of Atlanta on Thursdays and Fridays. Wouldn't it be helpful to be able to search shippers in your CRM within 75 miles or however many miles from Atlanta?

Salesdash allows you to do this, and it allows your sales reps to be able to follow-up with confidence and with a purpose.

Beyond this, you can log quotes for an account, as well as for the contacts within an account. And Salesdash provides a clean Quotes Overview page to review your quotes by status, date, equipment, mode, and the origin/destination city or state.

Benefit #4: Confidence in your carrier network

Generic CRMs are incapable of being a good fit for carrier sales teams because they can't capture the lanes that a carrier runs or prefers to run.

Salesdash is the one CRM that you can buy off the shelf to capture carrier lane preferences, potentially integrate with your TMS (depends on TMS) for historical shipment data and auto-carrier creation, and to post live capacity for where available trucks are in the CRM.

Now, imagine you're a shipper sales rep and you are talking with a shipper about a lane they are having trouble with for capacity.

Salesdash makes it very simple to search your carrier database to be able to let the shipper know how many carriers you have in your network that can or have run that lane for you historically.

If you are a broker that tries to convert spot freight to a more contract basis, this is a helpful tool to have in your toolbelt.

Benefit #5: Phone, email, TMS integrations

Being able to use the other tools that you use on a daily basis to help you prospect shippers only makes your life easier.

CRMs allow you to integrate with phone or VoIP systems, such as RingCentral, to be able to click-to-dial, auto-log calls, and also drop call recording links in your activity timeline for accounts and contacts.

Integrating with Gmail or Outlook makes it easy to send emails and email templates directly to your shipper prospects in one area. Email templates allow you to move faster.

The most unique is being able to integrate your TMS. It allows you to feed your sales reporting into your CRM, keep track of last ship dates for customers for account management, and also increase your lane and shipment data from all of your historical shipments.