Calling shippers

That info is worth it's weight in gold! Small shippers are the hardest, larger firms have profiles that can be bought online and LinkedIn is a great source of who is who in any industry, just takes time to learn how to search and navigate.

For me, selling to motor carriers, it is fairly easy to get the contact info since it is part of their public profile when they apply for authority and update their MCS-150, just costs a few dollars for a data mine to do the compilation for me. Same with selling to car dealers for my trucking company, just have to visit the auctions to find out who their buyers are.

 

I struggle like most people with cold calling new customers. One thing I’ve found that helps warm up the conversation with the decision maker (assuming you’ve made it to that point), which either a carrier or broker can use, is to find some sort of common ground with them and spend some time talking about it. For example find a shipper from your hometown or an area in which you’ve lived. When in discussion with them try to find something you both have in common. It could be totally unrelated to shipping/transportation such as the same or nearby hometowns for both of you? Or you both went to rival high schools or you are/were a consumer of their products, etc. if used properly it can throw the decision maker of just a bit to make them more human and personable and less likely to tell you the standard “we’re happy with our current carrier or broker, not looking to add someone new”.

The key to using this method is of course is slipping it in there without sounding like to total weirdo. Easier said than done.

 

Fill your sales "pipeline", or "funnel." You have to put a lot of prospects in one end to get a single sale out the other end. In the beginning you have one job only... prospecting. You have no sales, so prospect, prospect, prospect.

I worked in the retail financial services industry (arguably the toughest way to make a living... insanely competitive) and went from actually hyperventilating when making a cold-call to making upwards of 300-400 calls per day (no, that is not a typo). In less than four years I had over 1,400 accounts, a $50 million "book" and a very nice six-figure income. My bible was "Prospecting Your Way to Sales Success" by Bill Good.

The first edition was published in 1986, but the basics are all in there; list development, making calls, scripts, how to get past the "gate keeper", follow-through, etc.; pretty much everything you will need to turn a suspect into a client (other than your specific product/service knowledge). It will be just as relevant today as it was then. The book has been updated over the years, but I don't know when the last one was. Bill's focus is in financial services, but the basics in all relationship sales are the same and I have successfully applied the same principles in other industries and for other people as a consultant.

I COULD NOT make a call when I started. I actually hung up the phone on the first half-dozen or so people that I called. I did not have a clue. I was going to quit and went to the library and purely by accident stumbled across Bill's book. I can still remember the dedication...

To all the countless millions
of salespeople who would
rather stand in a cold shower
ripping up $100 bills
than make cold prospecting calls.​

 

I wrote up a whole long post about cold calling but I decided not to post it. Sorry this stuff is NOT something I want to really discuss in depth in public. Not trying to make survival rates for new brokers higher. Anything I post here that is in any way insightful or special is instantly less valuable because everyone in the world will have it.

I really wouldn't be sensitive about that if I hadn't been in the poker boom. A lot of people bragged about how much money they were winning and how they were winning it in PUBLIC on forums with very good SEO. Those people brought in more people who looked just like us, and before very long 300/hr had turned into 20-30/hr for a lot of people. Then those people started losing and became the fish. Who knows how long they would have made 100+ an hour if they had all just shut up about it?

I'll keep improving with the game as it advances, but I'm not actively trying to make it advance ahead of schedule.

 

Not - or could be - off topic.
My experiences with the scrap metal industry since 1983 were related, in detail, on a long trip
into NYC, the Bronx, to be exact, to a garage to pick up a Cadillac Fleetwood with the owner.
Next thing I know this guy is using the tricks and tips I developed over the years to squeeze in
on my local area. I now wish I had talked about the ballgame or the weather. I did it to myself.
There is only so much of a given commodity in any area.
That includes Customers, scrap metal, or whatever?

 

Yeah... I'm pretty free when I'm talking to people because I'm talking to customers not in my industry or trucking companies that can't really use anything I'm telling them. It's just showing off to make myself look good basically. The correct posture about giving away information that is super useful for newbies is to NOT DO IT.

The new people trying to enter the industry aren't your ####ing friends. They are the future competition. You should want them all to drown from a rational perspective. I make exceptions, but I'm certainly not about to make any public exceptions. I love @double yellow 's owner op startup thread, but as one former poker player to another (what's your 2p2 SN dude?) I can't actually believe he did it. I think it was a huge mistake, and worse a mistake that he should recognize having been in poker for the years he was in. Giving away tons of important insider information on poker just to be helpful and to gain the adulation of our peers really accelerated the onboarding of thousands of grinders myself included.

 

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I've written up a similar post probably three or four times, and backed off. It's one thing to talk about business as we interact with the vast majority of the population of this forum (IE: the drivers, owner/ops, and other folks on the trucking side) versus how to find and maintain that business.

Honestly, it's nothing personal to the OP - I'm sure she's a lovely person. But I'm not interested in actively assisting my future competition, especially as I can look around my office and very easily determine that she's not an employee of my company.

 

Oh yeah there is zero personal about it. She seems like a nice enough person. I wouldn't even mind giving her pointers 1 on 1... One new entrant isn't going to affect me much. But posting that #### on TTR?

Lol before you know it your forum posts have been quoted verbatim in TQL training materials... And they are hiring hundreds of people for the upcoming season.

 

Exactly, man. I had a dude from Landstar call me earlier this morning. He asked me if I worked with Landstar. I gave him my usual reply, "Man, I don't like to." I paused, and heard him crestfallen ask why. "Well, you guys have tried to double broker out my loads to drivers I work with on more than one occasion. I explain that the only way I'll work with Landstar is if I can verify that they're attaching a Landstar truck. "Well, I'm a trainee, so uh, I don't know how to do that." It was at that point that I politely declined his request to assist me. The loads I was on this morning were time critical, and I don't need to teach a competing agent's rook how to do his job.

 

It was time sensitive and mission critical lol. If I were the customer and I found out you used landstar there I would be super pissed.