Asset based transportation sales forces are grossly inefficient. Totaling up salaries, health benefits, cars, training, and expenses then divided into the calls per day, $500 cost per call is the norm. Long call cycles to sale of 9-12 months are considered the norm in freight sales, putting the cost at +$5,000 for a transactional shipment rarely paying over $500. The slim margins of asset based transportation providers simply can not tolerate this practice. The independent transportation sales agent brings experience, superior skills and results to an otherwise ineffective/inefficient transportation sales marketplace.

The new trend is clear with transportation providers using cost effective independent sales agents that focus singularly on closing new business deals. Agents leverage their experience by avoiding asset based behaviors that kill sales such as ongoing reports, meetings for management, training without results, joint calls to satisfy organizational dotted lines, serving internal needs vs. client needs, sales contests, et al etc. Transportation agents understand the need to focus on market referral opportunities, vertical markets and shortened sales cycles as compensation is based on performance results. Sales agents know how to present offerings as measurably important to client needs, explaining within customer processes how a deal will work for them, with constant awareness of building justification to close the sale timely. Sales agents understand they are the catalyst to make a difference in creating new business. They must be convincing throughout the sales process to close deals...with the right targeted opportunity, the right decision makers, at the right time.

Professional sales agents focus their resources on activities that lead to closing more deals faster. Representing a portfolio of solutions of measurable value is a critical difference with sales agents in value creation for senior level contacts and their supply chain needs. Asset reps with limited value are relegated lower level influencers who are prone to decisions of convenience, and are simply unable to make business deals. Performance based compensation drives the right behaviors and therefore the right results with independent transportation agents.

The critical success factors that sales agents make happen every day are:

• Professionalism. No casual days, no branded shirts on calls, no cheapening of the product-services with goofy advertising specialties, no questionable entertainments. All business dress, always prepared to call objective, appointment efficiency, constantly dollarizing values for the client throughout process of making a deal.
• Prequalified targets. No cold calls, no spray and pray. Every target is researched through various industry information sources for prospects with multiple shipments and the appropriate decision maker contacts for higher call productivity and close ratios.
• Development of senior level contacts who understand measurable bottom line results. Referrals are leveraged for additional growth. Vertical marketing is implemented with every deal. The deal must be engineered to appeal to all influencers impacted by their supply chain of in and out goods.
• Engaging clients. Senior level decision makers have no time for the unprepared or limited value door knockers of asset transportation providers...these are pushed to low level contacts who lack the authority or influence for change but who asset reps love to hang with as non threatening and makes an appearance of doing their job. Access to senior level leadership requires an experienced agent leveraging excellent presentation skills, an understanding of matching right product-services to prequalified needs, leveraging client processes to make the offering a big deal, explaining financial implications, operational impact of savings/growth opportunities with a bold call to action that appeals to decisiveness, and deliverable/measurable values.
• Commitment. Every impression or action of a sales agent reflects their commitment to a deal, successful implementation and service support throughout the process/duration of the contract. Deals structured with visible win-win outcomes, accountability for both parties, ongoing reporting of performance value are required. Agents do not tolerate delay or indecision with influencers as these cause deals to unravel. Agents know how to keep senior players informed and part of the entire process. Lower level influencers often feel need to unravel deals to justify their positions and or maintain asset rep's pizza deliveries, specialty hand outs and unfortunately, sometimes much more.
• Sales Focus. The sea of books on selling, CDs/tapes, seminars or online training are long on fluff, humor and procedurals but very short on performance results or personal accountability. Freight companies often feel training is relatively inexpensive way to educate and/or motivate...essentially to justify sales management existence without facing the reality of addressing true sales performance. Sales agents already have the skills and knowledge it takes to be successful as new deals drive their compensation. While salaried reps are languishing in meetings, training, making reports or calling on unqualified contacts, sales agents are out closing new business.

Transportation providers that believe their front line salaried sales personnel are effective are mistaken. Buyers of transportation services have no time to sift through all the various provider presentations of products, services, or technologies. Senior leaders are now more receptive to the integrity and value of an independent sales agent who can consistently look out for the collective best interests of supply chain efficiencies. Transportation sales agency is the future for asset providers who want to grow cost effectively so they can focus on servicing client operational needs.

The bigger tire firms restrict the dealers not only to a narrow profit margin but sell through countless distributive outlets, including their own stores. This further depresses both prices and profits. We, however, gave the independent tire dealer territorial exclusivity. We made sure the salesmen understood this.

But that still wasn't enough. The retail salesmen had been selling the well known tires so long, they had forgotten how to sell. Our client was an unknown name and the technical advantages of its tires were hard to teach to the salesmen.

We recognized that we had to conduct more than the usual product training and indoctrination program, and we had to do it fast. First, we wrote up some specific tire case studies that incorporated professional selling skills. Then, instead of having cumbersome meetings, we did the unusual. We rented a large van and outfitted it with video training equipment.

We drove from store to store in our van to do our motivational training. We found that the salesmen had been reluctant to commit their reputations to our product because they were weak on its technical advantages. We wanted them to have solid selling techniques backed up by sound product knowledge when they faced prospective customers. We wanted them to have the reeling of successful experience even if it was in a role-playing situation.

We spent more than an hour with each salesman going over the technical details, going over the sales cases we had written, and role-playing selling tires to each other and putting it all on videotape right in the van.

Then the salesman would review his performance and analyze it. After that, we erased the tape. We did that because we wanted the salesman to feel secure. Letting his boss see the tape would have only made the salesman anxious. And that is something you don't do to your best customer.

All this was long, hard work. We put thousands of miles on our van, traveling from one end of the country to the other. Why? Because those salesmen were our best customers. If we could motivate them, build their confidence in our tires sell them then they would sell the product. Essentially, this is what you do with your best customers. Removing the impediments to the sale is the first job of a company. And that first impediment is your salesman's reluctance to sell or his salesmanship deficiencies.

Further proof

Here's another recent experience of ours that points out the value in treating your salesmen in the same way as you would your best customers. Our client was a large distributor of steel, industrial hardware, electrical appliances, and plumbing supplies. Each salesman had a geographic territory and sold all lines. Our research showed that the salesmen were skimming only the surface of potential sales. Their sales line was too broad for any one salesman to be fully versed in all the products. So, instead of dividing the line by category and then having different salesmen call on each firm, we did the opposite. We divided the salesmen according to a specific kind of account steel mills, coal mines, contractors, and so on.

Soon we found we were getting deeper penetration in each of the lines because we were "market targeting." The more a salesman knows about a specific user/customer, the more he sells and the happier he is in his job. This approach enables salesmen to suggest new lines and pare the customer's inventory of lines he has less use for. Company profits and salesmen commissions increased markedly. Moreover, each customer felt that our salesmen were now experts in his industry. He was confident that our salesmen had the solutions, not just the catalogs.

What we did was to implement the attitude that our best customer is our own salesman. By targeting our sales strategy according to specific markets, and making each salesman an "expert" in his own area, we gave the salesman benefits and advantages just as we try to give to customers. Everybody comes out ahead.

Industry's best customer

There are many reasons why industry isn't terribly happy about salesmen. They cost money to maintain, they complain a lot, they sometimes inflate their expense accounts. But salesmen are the ones who move the products to the buyer, who make the sales that keep industry solvent. Yet, if industry wants high profits, then it must motivate its salesmen to an above-average degree.

One of the best ways of doing that is to treat the salesman the way he treats a customer. The salesman does not treat a customer as if he were an employee, and neither within reasonable limits should industry treat a salesman that way. He is the vital link between production and profit. If you do an excellent job of selling the salesman on your products and on ways to sell them better, he will almost inevitably do an excellent job of selling to customers. That's why I say that industry's best "customer" is the salesman, and he should be treated accordingly. Get him sold and you can sell the world.

One time someone asked me what were those "ah-ha" moments I experienced as a new region sales leader. I thought about it for a while and shared these three examples.

1) Understanding that "performance is progressive" was an "ah-ha moment" for me. In other words, recognizing what was good enough last week, last month and last year won't be good enough going forward if you sales team is going to increase their performance and contributions to the company's success.

Companies expect their people to grow and develop year after year. As they gain knowledge and experience the company expects more and better results. Simply put, a Sales Leader must instill the desire in each of his/her direct reports to focus on year over year performance improvement and then drive that sales person to those new levels.

Think about your role and responsibility in the area of "teaching" in everything that you do...use emails, voicemails, region meetings and spend time when you make calls with your ASMs to share best practices and coach your people on sales tactics and behavior that will make them more professional, more productive and more successful. Reality; when your sales people grow and develop so does our company's revenue and profits.

2) "Activity does not equal accomplishment", was another "ah-ha" moment for me. In other words, you need to make sure your team "is all about results not the amount of their activity".

Let me give you an example...sometimes a Sales Leader might direct his/her ASMs to make five calls a week on a certain type of customer. That is describing "activity" expectations but it is not establishing or defining expected results.

Bottom line, as the Sales Leader, you need to be crystal clear on your requests and the direction you provide...when you do, you will ensure your team understands the results you expect. If you are not clear, there is a chance they will focus on activity and not accomplishments and we all know that probably won't result in the revenue and profit growth the company needs.

3) "2 + 2 does not always equal 4" was one more "ah-ha" moment. The thing that you have to realize as a Sales Leader is this...your company can have the most wonderful, comprehensive and "can't miss" price, product, service and quality package in the industry and still not get the order!

The reason why? It is because there is a "history" at every account and that history is an important factor in the customer's sourcing decision.

For example, maybe your competitor took better care of your customer than your company did in periods of tight supply. Maybe they loaned the customer money at some point in time, or gave them extended terms, or allowed them to expand to different parts of the country when your company wouldn't.

The message is this...if you and your team don't understand the history at each account you can't shape your value proposition to address what is really important to the customer. Insisting that your people know the history (defined as: the behavior of your competitors and your company over time) of the customers they serve is fundamental to your sales person and your company's sales success.

A Sales Pipeline is a useful concept used by Sales Managers, individual sales staff and the owners of small businesses to quantify the demand for their products and services. Regardless of what you're selling, by effectively managing your sales pipeline, you can smooth out customer demand and create a more stable sales cycle with more reliable results.

A sales pipeline works by placing cohorts of leads or prospects at the different stages of the sales process/sales cycle, and then measuring their progress through the pipeline, from unqualified lead to satisfied repeat customer.

Unfortunately for you and me, the pipeline has a tendency to leak. Leads and prospects fall out of the pipeline on the way, failing to become the happy customers we know they could be.

At a gross level, sales pipeline management is nothing more than estimating incoming cash flow. We look at our leads and prospects, make some estimates of the likelihood that they'll eventually buy our products and services, and feed that information along with their expected spend into our projections to find out how much revenue we're expecting to make.

But the real power of sales pipeline management becomes clear when we establish proper metrics and put processes in place to respond to changes in those metrics. To illustrate, consider the following story.

A retail sales client of ours once called us to ask if we could help him improve his company's sales. He explained that sales revenue was not high enough, and that his staff needed training in closing sales, so that they could close more sales and therefore improve sales revenue.

When we spent some time with his staff, it became clear that there was nothing wrong with their ability to close sales. Instead, we found that staff were finding it difficult to start or carry on a conversation with a customer. Most potential customers were walking into the stores, then walking out again without really having an opportunity to talk about the products they wanted to buy.

By analysing the sales pipeline and the particular points within the sales process where more customers were "leaking" from the pipeline, we were able to determine that the biggest problem staff had was not in closing sales, but in opening a dialogue with customers.

Once we established that, we ran some training courses and created training aids designed to assist staff in opening a sale and keeping a conversation going.

Year on year sales at each store increased by up to 20%.

There are several benefits to managing your sales pipeline effectively:

* By focusing on the entire pipeline instead of taking a short-term focus on closing sales, or getting a single high-value contract over the line, demand for your services will be smoother and your cash flow more reliable.

* Making incremental improvements of as little as 1-2% in your conversion rates can increase your sales by much more.

* An in-depth analysis of when and why your leads and prospects leak from the pipeline will pinpoint specific areas for improvement and help you get far more value for your training dollar.

* If you keep track of which prospects leak from your sales pipeline and which prospects don't, you can construct a profile of prospects who are more likely to buy and prospects who are less likely to buy. This knowledge will help you to focus your marketing material and allow you to more accurately qualify your leads, leading to a more streamlined, more efficient and less costly sales process.

* Once you have established an accurate sales pipeline, you can use it to plan for new product launches. If you were to plug all the information about your new product into an existing sales pipeline, you would quickly get a pretty good idea of how many leads you're going to have to generate to reach your new product's sales target. This will in turn assist you in deciding how to launch the product, and give you an idea of how much it's going to cost. If you're going to need 500,000 leads to reach your sales target, you're probably going to have to look at a mass market advertising campaign.