Full Transcript for Sales Funnel Management for Freight Brokers | Episode 242

Um, which the last time the Bills did that, kansas City got Pat Mahomes. 00:04:26.644 --> 00:04:33.427 So this time they do it again and they picked up Xavier Worthy. 00:04:33.547 --> 00:04:40.129 I think that was like the fastest wide receiver in the draft and the Bills need a receiver and everyone's like what are you doing? 00:04:40.129 --> 00:04:45.632 So then we get traded back to like the 32nd pick, which we then again trade away to Carolina. 00:04:45.632 --> 00:04:58.437 So the Bills didn't even make a draft pick in the first round and everyone's up until midnight waiting, but we ended up picking first pick of the second round, keon Coleman, wide receiver, out of Florida State, which come to find out. 00:04:58.437 --> 00:05:00.338 Josh Allen pretty much handpicked him. 00:05:00.338 --> 00:05:01.338 He said that's the guy I want. 00:05:01.338 --> 00:05:12.706 He's got the quick speed off the line and makes the moves that that'll work for our offense. 00:05:12.706 --> 00:05:12.786 Um. 00:05:12.786 --> 00:05:13.810 So that's kind of a blessing in disguise. 00:05:13.810 --> 00:05:20.454 Everyone was frustrated at first but bill's got 10 drafts or uh draftees 10 draft picks this this year, which is a record um draft class for the buffalo bills. 00:05:20.494 --> 00:05:38.288 But obviously not everyone's gonna get signed um, so we'll see what happens I would say this the one thing I really noticed about the draft this year was we talked about this before, like the steelers have just always had such a consistent team in my lifetime that like there was never really much changing in the draft. 00:05:38.288 --> 00:05:39.571 They were talking about that this morning too. 00:05:39.571 --> 00:05:44.098 Like basically, even like last year, like, yeah, these guys are gonna be good in like three, four years. 00:05:44.098 --> 00:05:52.430 Right, two, three years, yeah, and it's like this is the first year I can remember where it's like we need people and they're drafting people that can play now. 00:05:52.951 --> 00:05:59.295 So I get now what I think I missed as to why everybody would get so fired up about the drafts in the past. 00:05:59.295 --> 00:06:01.682 I'm like it doesn't matter, like it's such a risk. 00:06:01.682 --> 00:06:03.504 No one knows how these guys are going to play the games. 00:06:03.504 --> 00:06:06.790 Play different college versus nfl, like it's all a crap shoot, right. 00:06:06.790 --> 00:06:17.267 But now that I'm kind of in it and I care and we need people, it's funny, it's like watching it through, like this different perspective where I like get the excitement oh for sure, yeah. 00:06:17.288 --> 00:06:23.206 I mean there's definitely like there's guys that you can plug and play year one and then there's guys that you hope by year two. 00:06:23.206 --> 00:06:32.122 And then there's guys that you think like, yeah, maybe in three or four years, but, um, so like some of those receivers will come out real quick, right away, tight ends

can be. 00:06:32.122 --> 00:06:42.266 The same way some of your linemen um qbs, you can usually assume their first year is going to be just get acclimated to the nfl, gets put some size on you. 00:06:42.266 --> 00:06:45.610 But yeah, that's all I got for sports. 00:06:45.610 --> 00:06:46.471 Was there anything in golf? 00:06:48.173 --> 00:06:48.915 No, I looked it up. 00:06:48.915 --> 00:06:52.146 There was a tournament, Shane Lowry and Rory one. 00:06:52.146 --> 00:06:55.089 I'm sure it was some match play tournament that I'm not familiar with. 00:06:55.089 --> 00:07:01.505 It was the Zura classic down in new Orleans and I didn't have time to catch up on even the format. 00:07:01.505 --> 00:07:03.827 But that was about it, Gotcha. 00:07:04.860 --> 00:07:07.827 Well news up on even the format, but that was about it, gotcha um well news I uh. 00:07:07.827 --> 00:07:14.956 So every weekend dean croak, who's been on the show from he's from dat he sends out his uh market update. 00:07:14.956 --> 00:07:23.463 That goes out like officially on tuesdays I think, and we include snippets of it in our thursday newsletter in the market update section on, like you know, van reefer and flat. 00:07:23.463 --> 00:07:24.446 So I was looking at it. 00:07:24.446 --> 00:07:26.369 Did you see the one from this past weekend or no? 00:07:27.029 --> 00:07:43.209 I did, but I don't remember, yeah, so I mean like I just read it I was just kind of depressed, like it's basically saying like the van market still sucks, the reefer market still sucks, but the the flatbed market is what it started to started to pick up a little bit, if I read it correctly. 00:07:43.209 --> 00:07:48.444 Really what they do is they're comparing load to truck ratio. 00:07:48.444 --> 00:07:58.420 So basically this is based off of DAT's load postings versus truck postings and obviously you're going to have skewed numbers there because you might have 10 brokers posting the same load. 00:07:58.420 --> 00:08:03.569 But they'll compare it to where that same stat was year over year. 00:08:03.569 --> 00:08:06.415 So the same time the previous year and the previous week. 00:08:06.415 --> 00:08:10.725 So like, for example, I'll run through, let's go through van. 00:08:12.420 --> 00:08:16.050 So dry van volume was pretty much flat. 00:08:16.050 --> 00:08:21.350 So it still didn't change and truck postings decreased from last week. 00:08:21.350 --> 00:08:26.449 Line haul spot rates decreased by another penny. 00:08:26.449 --> 00:08:30.310 So there's not a whole lot of movement, especially upward. 00:08:30.310 --> 00:08:51.714 The reefer market let's see decreased 3% for load-to-truck ratio week over week, although it did say renewed strength in the produce market, boosted truckload spot market volumes following last week's 5% increase in load post volume. 00:08:51.714 --> 00:08:58.110 So the reefer load to truck ratio increased 8% week over week. 00:08:58.150 --> 00:09:01.245 It looks like All right Equipment

went down. 00:09:01.245 --> 00:09:04.969 So that would make sense Spot rates flat, so still bad. 00:09:04.969 --> 00:09:08.307 But where's the flatbed? 00:09:08.307 --> 00:09:18.109 So the load post volume fell here, it says, after being flat for the last two weeks. 00:09:18.109 --> 00:09:24.384 Flatbed line haul rates showed renewed strength following last week's penny per mile increase averaging just over $2.02 a mile. 00:09:24.384 --> 00:09:35.265 The national average is $0.13 a mile lower on an 18% higher volume of loads moved compared to last year, highlighting excess capacity. 00:09:35.265 --> 00:09:36.149 All right, I guess I was wrong. 00:09:36.149 --> 00:09:38.990 It's just bad around the horn there. 00:09:38.990 --> 00:09:42.330 I thought I read something good about the flatbed market, but maybe not. 00:09:42.330 --> 00:10:09.828 So yeah, I mean what, what have you seen like this year compared to other years in the beginning of the year, because I like normally by april, going into may, we're starting to see a boost and it seemed like, at least from my perspective and what I'm seeing within pierce, um, like we've had, you know, we've had, you know we've had some wins, but I mean overall it's been kind of a flat first, like four months of the year. 00:10:09.869 --> 00:10:16.552 Have you seen anything different or I haven't seen much different, right, I've seen a lot of the same things you're talking about. 00:10:16.552 --> 00:10:27.960 But the other thing is like it's anecdotal but like I'll look at some lanes that I'm like are much higher than kind of expected, like, and again they're to less dense areas. 00:10:27.960 --> 00:10:40.285 I was working on something last week going into Nevada from New Jersey and it was being like 245 mile, like average, like for a van, and again like there's not a ton of freight coming out of there so you're going to pay going into it. 00:10:40.285 --> 00:10:52.745 But the other thing I have noticed, where I guess I've seen more of this, is just changes within a given week and again anecdotal, but I was talking with one of my clients about this last week. 00:10:52.745 --> 00:11:06.238 They'll see like a lane into the Midwest, for instance, maybe coming out of the East, where they'll be fine Monday and Tuesday to cover their loads at like a decent margin. 00:11:06.238 --> 00:11:15.629 You know, I don't know 11, 12%, but like Wednesday or Thursday they'll lose 10, 12% to cover the loads, like they're swinging that much. 00:11:15.629 --> 00:11:18.837 And so I'm seeing swings in the middle of the week. 00:11:18.985 --> 00:11:27.410 And I'm also seeing carriers where they've got drivers stranded in the middle of the country to go back west for days. 00:11:27.410 --> 00:11:31.486 I mean just no spot freight coming out, nothing going in that direction. 00:11:31.486 --> 00:11:38.681 So I mean I'm seeing some odd things here and there, but nothing to make up or to shed any light for any specific reason. 00:11:38.681

--> 00:11:39.990 Just like odd anomalies where there's here and there but nothing to make up or to shed any light for any specific reason. 00:11:39.990 --> 00:11:43.778 Just like odd anomalies where, like there's just nothing there, where that's. 00:11:43.778 --> 00:11:53.797 I've like really not seen that very often in some areas where you're seeing a lot and then nothing, and then a lot, just peaks and valleys through Monday, even just through Friday in any given week. 00:11:54.546 --> 00:12:05.610 You know I got to remind myself of, as though, like, just compare it to go back like five years to 2019, and that's like a that's probably a better reference point to where the market is, versus when you compare it to the post. 00:12:05.610 --> 00:12:07.913 Uh, shutdown like boom. 00:12:07.913 --> 00:12:11.799 So, um, we got what's. 00:12:11.799 --> 00:12:14.371 Did you put something in the show notes here about dallas? 00:12:14.371 --> 00:12:24.038 That might have been producer steven, I think he did so I'll read this dallas's outbound tender volumes have grown approximately 50 percent over the past five. 00:12:24.144 --> 00:12:25.169 There you go, past five years. 00:12:25.169 --> 00:12:37.916 Compared to the national average of 18, two largest outbound markets in the us ontario excuse me, ontario california and atlanta have both lost a significant share. 00:12:37.916 --> 00:12:44.030 The ongoing capacity glut is hiding a rather significant shift in national freight flow patterns. 00:12:44.030 --> 00:12:45.797 So there you go. 00:12:45.797 --> 00:12:47.884 Yeah, five-year comparison right 50%. 00:12:47.884 --> 00:12:55.272 So the national average sounds like outbound tender volumes is 18% higher than it was five years ago. 00:12:55.272 --> 00:12:56.951 But compare that to two years ago. 00:12:56.951 --> 00:12:59.188 Obviously it's going to be much lower. 00:12:59.188 --> 00:13:00.952 So we'll see where. 00:13:00.972 --> 00:13:03.236 Yeah, and he also pointed to. 00:13:03.236 --> 00:13:06.230 Stephen wrote this that Dean mentioned and I was aware of this. 00:13:06.230 --> 00:13:10.793 In fact, every time I see an article like this I feel like sending it to you, stephen, related to the meat market. 00:13:10.793 --> 00:13:14.268 But yes, the cattle market in the US is significantly down. 00:13:14.268 --> 00:13:17.131 I think some of it was drought, some of it might. 00:13:17.211 --> 00:13:23.278 I can't, I don't want to misspeak, but for sure the US cattle market is down, meat production is down. 00:13:23.278 --> 00:13:33.614 Supply of even processed meat, I think, is in shorter supply this year for a lot of reasons, which again is usually increasing transit times for the stuff that is available. 00:13:33.614 --> 00:13:50.062 But to your point, like that's really why Chicago became Chicago in the first place, was all of the cattle in the 1800s were driven from Texas up through the middle of the country to the slaughterhouses in the Midwest because the

trains took the beef to the major cities in the country. 00:13:50.062 --> 00:13:52.613 That's why Chicago was this huge meat town. 00:13:52.613 --> 00:15:09.033 There's still a lot of that happening there and for sure, if you're going to see a significant decrease in meat produced in the us, the freight coming out of there is obviously going to be affected, which makes a lot of sense yep, um sweet. 00:15:09.174 --> 00:15:28.153 Well, let's we got anything else in the news before we get into our topic today. 00:15:28.854 --> 00:15:30.315 All right, jump into it. 00:15:30.315 --> 00:15:30.514 Yeah. 00:15:30.514 --> 00:15:31.936 So we're going to talk about? 00:15:31.936 --> 00:15:33.977 Uh, all right, jump into it. 00:15:33.977 --> 00:15:38.520 Yeah, so we're going to talk about prospecting, kind of reviewing yourage. 00:15:38.520 --> 00:15:49.277 It could be just you, it could be a small team, it could be a large organization, right, there's all different shapes and sizes and forms of freight brokerages. 00:15:49.277 --> 00:16:04.497 But these are the kinds of things that you should be thinking about and discussing If you've got another employee or a manager in, like a sales meeting or one on one, because it's important to have, first of all, to keep yourself in check on what's going on with your business. 00:16:04.497 --> 00:16:07.511 But, number two you have a second opinion besides your own. 00:16:07.511 --> 00:16:16.336 A lot of people get lost in their own way of thinking and their own train of thought and they get blinded. 00:16:16.336 --> 00:16:24.799 They have their blinders up and they don't see certain risks or maybe even opportunities that might be there, that somebody else might For sure. 00:16:25.225 --> 00:16:39.676 That's like why I really enjoy doing a lot of stuff with you, because there's things that you think of that I never would have, and I think probably vice versa and being able to you know, even working remote, being able to bounce that stuff off of one another, is extremely helpful. 00:16:40.378 --> 00:16:40.979 A hundred percent. 00:16:40.979 --> 00:16:45.977 I hate doing this stuff by myself because I know I don't have that other perspective right. 00:16:45.977 --> 00:17:05.374 One of the things I love most about the first time I got into free brokerage sales was just that I had a really good buddy that I worked with at TQL and we had similar ways of like kind of similar but different ways and like looking at things I would say similar and we were both curious different perspectives on how we looked at them. 00:17:05.374 --> 00:17:20.250 So this is what we did every day, like in between our prospecting calls when you walk around the building after an hour calling session, lunch after work, like, hey, this is what I'm hearing, this is what I run into and he would see things that I didn't see and vice versa on his prospects. 00:17:20.250 --> 00:17:28.335 And we used each other as sounding boards to learn and find more information that we could use to do better at what we were doing. 00:17:29.316 --> 00:17:33.198 Did you guys have like a structured sales meeting or anything like that with your teams? 00:17:33.959 --> 00:17:39.701 Yeah, so there was a biweekly pipeline review similar to what we're going to do here. 00:17:39.701 --> 00:17:40.923 I think it was every other week. 00:17:40.923 --> 00:17:45.127 It might have been once a month, but I think it was every other week. 00:17:45.127 --> 00:18:01.098 We also had at least once a month, maybe every two weeks, where the whole sales floor would kind of semi-circle around the manager, like Friday afternoon, and we would discuss what was going on, what people were seeing, helpful things, to kind of share information. 00:18:01.098 --> 00:18:02.369 So I would say three different ways. 00:18:02.369 --> 00:18:02.831 We did that. 00:18:03.204 --> 00:18:04.230 Yeah, gotcha. 00:18:04.230 --> 00:18:13.699 Yeah, I've been exposed to like the Monday morning and Friday afternoon meetings, which it always like kind of made me scratch my head. 00:18:13.699 --> 00:18:16.654 I was like what's really changed from Friday afternoon to Monday morning? 00:18:16.654 --> 00:18:20.686 It's like pretty much the weekend, but either way. 00:18:20.686 --> 00:18:22.049 It's like pretty much it's the weekend, um, but either way it's good. 00:18:22.049 --> 00:18:38.670 And then obviously like periodic, like quarterly or um midway through the year, and we've talked about like annual review of your book of business and stuff like that and other episodes, um, but I do think some sort of a structure, oh, and I would do like a one-on-one too, usually like once a week or every two weeks with a boss. 00:18:38.730 --> 00:18:39.693 So pipeline reviews. 00:18:39.693 --> 00:18:40.896 Yeah, we're always one-on-one. 00:18:40.896 --> 00:18:49.980 The other thing I did and this was not in freight, this was in like the patent world when I worked in sales for like. 00:18:49.980 --> 00:18:50.861 It's all applicable, though. 00:18:50.865 --> 00:18:52.191 It doesn't really matter what industry you're in. 00:18:52.424 --> 00:18:57.129 And here is the thing that we did that is very helpful in, I think, all sales right. 00:18:57.129 --> 00:18:58.150 We get this question a lot. 00:18:58.150 --> 00:19:01.413 We're talking pipeline reviews like what do you say in a follow-up call? 00:19:01.413 --> 00:19:08.561 Right, it says the sales cycle in that industry was very long, like six months, right, sometimes a few years, getting a product developed right. 00:19:14.404 --> 00:19:19.293 So you needed a creative way to keep your clients engaged in what was sometimes a very boring process, like you're just talking to them like once a month and like nothing's really happened. 00:19:19.293 --> 00:19:28.057 Yet Engineers are working on something, something's happened over there, like it's just not really that, it's some of it's just paperwork, right, and waiting and filing

things. 00:19:28.057 --> 00:19:37.352 But you've got to keep your clients engaged in the process, otherwise they sometimes just want to give up and let their product fail or whatever it was you've been working on, right. 00:19:37.352 --> 00:19:46.553 So the hardest thing to do was like well, how do you keep somebody excited in something that is like really kind of a boring process at periods Like and there's nothing really exciting to talk about? 00:19:46.553 --> 00:20:01.657 This is what we do, like those I think it was like once a week, or maybe even twice a week, in the morning we would all get together as a team and we would come with the follow-up calls that were most important and we'll talk about this today like our hot list, right, Like these clients are really important. 00:20:01.657 --> 00:20:04.829 They've got maybe some of the best products we think would be successful. 00:20:04.829 --> 00:20:06.213 We want to keep them engaged, right. 00:20:06.213 --> 00:20:08.868 And you'd be like, okay, I'm on call seven. 00:20:09.048 --> 00:20:28.770 It's been three months, and they would share the product, the idea, and then the team would brainstorm things that were happening either in current affairs would brainstorm things that were happening either in current and current affairs, what's going on in the news, the market, whatever, or even just a story like, hey, yeah, I was somewhere and we ran into this problem and somebody wished they had this product. 00:20:29.192 --> 00:20:36.765 And this is how we would have come up with our follow-up ideas to keep people engaged in the process, which is what we talk about in freight too. 00:20:36.765 --> 00:20:44.216 It's like you really should put some thought into what you're going to say when you follow up, because if you just call and say, hey, how's it going? 00:20:44.216 --> 00:20:52.891 Touching base like that did not only didn't create value, you detracted from the value you've created already, like it's even worse than not calling. 00:20:52.891 --> 00:21:14.176 So a lot of this, I think, is really helpful to get people in the mindset of what you should be thinking, what you should be asking and really what you should be learning in your prospecting phone calls to determine am I getting closer to a customer or am I just wandering around in a field talking to people with absolutely no strategy purpose, hoping somebody goes hey, can you move my load? 00:21:14.176 --> 00:21:16.186 That's not what we're looking for. 00:21:16.467 --> 00:21:19.792 Yeah, and I've done this in. 00:21:19.792 --> 00:21:49.109 What I'm going to recommend here and talk about is stuff that I've actually done and I still, you know, will do with folks myself is, you know, if you're going to dedicate time to a one-on-one, for example, you definitely want to cover, like, your current business, but that should be, in my opinion, like a very small portion of the discussion, right, a quick review of the numbers, how it compares to what your goals were, et cetera, but really focus on the opportunity that's ahead of you, right. 00:21:49.109 --> 00:21:57.356 So these are, like you kind of mentioned, your hot leads, your warm leads, your lukewarm leads, your cold leads, opportunities that are coming up. 00:21:57.356 --> 00:22:12.893 Because, like you just mentioned with the patent thing there, when it could take months, think about a company that isn't in their shipping business yet but it's coming up, so something seasonal like Christmas trees or pumpkins or a certain kind of produce, right, they would fall into an upcoming bucket like that. 00:22:13.545 --> 00:22:23.412 Maybe a project-based construction company that's going to be they've got a project coming up in eight weeks from now, right, and you're hoping to be part of that business. 00:22:23.412 --> 00:22:31.731 Or maybe it's just a year-round shipper that you're in the process of building rapport with and you haven't gotten to that point yet. 00:22:31.731 --> 00:22:37.208 Right, these are the things that are ahead of you that you really want to focus on and look at. 00:22:37.208 --> 00:22:38.333 Okay, where am I at? 00:22:38.333 --> 00:22:40.211 What are the hurdles I've got ahead of me? 00:22:40.211 --> 00:22:46.097 Is there any objections that I'm being, you know, thrown, having thrown at me by this prospect? 00:22:46.097 --> 00:22:53.794 Is there anything I need to get done administratively to be able to work with this customer, like insurance or you know what right it could be? 00:22:53.794 --> 00:22:54.636 A whole bunch of things. 00:22:54.636 --> 00:22:56.831 So, the things I want to outline right. 00:22:57.252 --> 00:22:58.737 First off, what this isn't. 00:22:58.737 --> 00:23:10.511 This is not talking about what you're doing now, your existing volume, the existing loads, and it certainly isn't a time to discuss all the reasons why you're so busy. 00:23:10.511 --> 00:23:11.513 You can't prospect. 00:23:11.513 --> 00:23:13.137 That is not what this is for. 00:23:13.137 --> 00:23:28.316 Right, and why I'm saying this is the most common thing when I would run these at a company was the people not making their sales calls would want to spend the whole pipeline review talking about all the business that they had because they weren't really doing prospecting. 00:23:28.316 --> 00:23:29.826 They weren't prospecting, right. 00:23:29.826 --> 00:23:30.870 So it's like, well, look at this. 00:23:30.870 --> 00:23:36.109 And then it's always gets into the conversation of, well, this customer said they're going to do this and I know it's coming. 00:23:36.109 --> 00:23:38.353 I'm like, yeah, but we've been working with them for three years. 00:23:38.353 --> 00:23:40.176 There isn't anything you don't know about them. 00:23:40.176 --> 00:23:40.977 If it comes, great. 00:23:40.977 --> 00:23:42.446 If it doesn't, it is what it is. 00:23:42.446 --> 00:23:54.312 But there's nothing really much you're going to do to move the

needle to make that happen. 00:23:54.312 --> 00:23:55.513 It is either going to come or not. 00:23:55.614 --> 00:23:58.297 At that point you've got as much of a relationship as you're ever. 00:23:58.297 --> 00:24:10.867 You can't prospect what you're doing with existing customers and I would even go to say it's probably not really penetration of your existing customers, because, again, you should be doing that and you should be meeting more people. 00:24:10.867 --> 00:24:17.269 If it's not a new division or a new location under the umbrella of your existing customers, it's not really. 00:24:17.269 --> 00:24:20.657 Prospecting Like this is just you building more relationships. 00:24:20.657 --> 00:24:23.252 And again, this is where most of your excuses come from. 00:24:23.252 --> 00:24:25.791 Salespeople is like oh, my customer said they're going to give me this. 00:24:25.791 --> 00:24:30.234 That's why I haven't time to prospect, because I'm just making sure I just really service them. 00:24:30.234 --> 00:24:37.491 No, this is a cop out for not doing the thing you don't want to do, which is pick up the phone and call companies you're not working with, right? 00:24:37.511 --> 00:24:43.524 This is the framework, because there are different personality types handle meetings like this different. 00:24:43.524 --> 00:24:43.644 Right. 00:24:43.644 --> 00:24:44.706 They might get defensive. 00:24:44.706 --> 00:24:47.973 The whole point here is not to beat anybody up. 00:24:47.973 --> 00:24:52.009 It's to be productive and try to get you moving in the right direction. 00:24:52.009 --> 00:25:04.066 So if you can't go into it with the right mindset of being humble, being honest and being transparent about what's going on with your pipeline, if you can't do that, then you're wasting your time, even going through the motions of it. 00:25:04.145 --> 00:25:12.253 So, um and I say that you know nicely, because it's a you know for people that are out there that they have blinders up. 00:25:12.253 --> 00:25:25.280 They might not realize that they have one of their weaknesses as um, in admitting where they're actually at instead of just trying to find all the good stuff in life or in their business. 00:25:25.280 --> 00:25:37.441 So again, if you're a manager, you should set the tone of these conversations in a way that they're very, very productive and constructive, and not to beat anybody up. 00:25:37.441 --> 00:25:38.367 It's just. 00:25:38.367 --> 00:25:45.153 All I'm going to be doing if I'm the manager is I'm going to be taking a mirror and I'm going to be holding it in front of you so you can see what's you know who you are. 00:25:45.153 --> 00:25:46.904 That's really the point of all that. 00:25:46.904 --> 00:25:48.346 You can see what your book of business looks like. 00:25:48.346 --> 00:25:55.475 You can see what your prospecting looks like, uh looks like, or the lack of it for that matter, which is the case for a lot of people like you just mentioned. 00:25:55.475 --> 00:25:56.476 So I just wanted to add that in there. 00:25:56.596 --> 00:26:00.066 And here's the thing, right For any managers out there, that we're not going to go too deep into this. 00:26:00.066 --> 00:26:05.750 But, like everyone thinks, like I can either be supportive or I can tell the truth, and there is no middle ground. 00:26:05.750 --> 00:26:14.475 The reality is there is, and these are best done by managers that genuinely can get their salesperson that they're managing to understand. 00:26:14.475 --> 00:26:22.252 The point of this is to support the salesperson to grow faster and give them the tools and information to be more successful. 00:26:22.252 --> 00:26:29.431 This is not for the manager to, you know, browbeat you and yell at you, to make you scared, to make you want to do more of this. 00:26:29.431 --> 00:26:29.651 Right? 00:26:29.651 --> 00:26:36.133 This should be a supportive conversation where this person has done this enough that they can help you learn from their experience, right? 00:26:36.133 --> 00:26:38.509 And this is why we're asking these questions, right? 00:26:39.050 --> 00:26:48.165 So, yeah, let me get in there really quick Cause you just brought up a good point like to support people. 00:26:48.165 --> 00:26:49.891 I I've done this like so a lot of times with, um, certain agents in our company. 00:26:49.891 --> 00:27:10.759 I will do these meetings with them, uh, either at their request or I'll suggest it, and they're productive Cause we find out that like hey, there's, there's something that we can do from our level that's going to support them in their journey, whether it's hey, there's this product out there that's going to really help us get the information that we need to get us over the hump with these guys and get in their bid. 00:27:10.759 --> 00:27:12.266 Or hey, there's this. 00:27:12.646 --> 00:27:21.458 I had one with somebody a few months ago where we found out if we can get her in this organization or get the company in this part of a member of this organization. 00:27:21.458 --> 00:27:28.677 It would allow her to get to a conference and have conversations with certain people in that niche and that's all it took. 00:27:28.677 --> 00:27:30.970 It was like all right, $500 annual thing. 00:27:30.970 --> 00:27:33.154 Boom, our brokerage is now a member. 00:27:33.154 --> 00:27:43.512 Now she's got doors open with these two people in Florida who are in these different members of this produce organization or whatever it was. 00:27:43.512 --> 00:27:57.894 But little things like that you can find out about that you otherwise wouldn't if you're not having the conversation right, because the person that's making the calls might doubt, like, oh, the prospects asked me for this and there's no way my boss is going to go for that. 00:27:57.894 --> 00:27:59.869 Well, you don't talk about it, right? 00:27:59.869 --> 00:28:00.029 The? 00:28:00.070 --> 00:28:00.491 answer is no. 00:28:00.491 -->

00:28:01.213 You're never going to know. 00:28:01.213 --> 00:28:01.694 Don't ask. 00:28:01.694 --> 00:28:03.047 The answer is always no, right? 00:28:03.047 --> 00:28:08.945 Exactly so I'm going to go through one that like an example that I mean we do this all the time. 00:28:08.945 --> 00:28:10.427 I do this with my clients, right? 00:28:10.427 --> 00:28:13.992 This is what used to be done with me, this is how I learned, right? 00:28:13.992 --> 00:28:19.644 So we'll just go through like a simple example of kind of how I did this with somebody last week, right? 00:28:19.644 --> 00:28:29.817 So the first thing we're gonna do is sit down and I go okay, let's look at all of your prospects, right, and the first thing I'm looking at is how many active prospects are they working? 00:28:29.817 --> 00:28:30.947 Which is the first thing, right? 00:28:30.947 --> 00:28:34.596 Like what is the total number of prospects you're actually working? 00:28:34.596 --> 00:28:37.506 This could be 200 for somebody new. 00:28:37.506 --> 00:28:41.389 This could be 400 for somebody that's been in it. 00:28:41.589 --> 00:28:53.237 You're really not actively working much more than probably 400 or 500, even if you get really good at this, because there's just only so many hours in a day, days in a week for you to be able to do this. 00:28:53.237 --> 00:28:55.659 It's usually somewhere in there At the big companies. 00:28:55.659 --> 00:29:17.733 You have like a limit on what you can have active, like back in the day, like I think TQLs was, like I could have 80 or maybe 90 active prospects in my name that I was like working Right, and then you either had to drop one to add one or you could add someone a list that you were waiting to get if somebody else couldn't close them, right. 00:29:17.733 --> 00:29:33.306 So you really have like a finite number in the bigger companies For agents and people that are out there or working your own brokerage, right, like there is no limit on what you can have, but you should have an active list of at the very least 200, I would say to 300, even from start, right. 00:29:33.465 --> 00:29:34.087 So those are your first. 00:29:34.087 --> 00:29:34.789 Where are you at? 00:29:34.789 --> 00:29:35.874 How many are you active, working? 00:29:35.874 --> 00:29:44.127 Second you're going to look at is what is their activity, though? 00:29:44.127 --> 00:29:46.091 Like, how many phone calls are they making, right on an average, on a given day or over a week, right? 00:29:46.091 --> 00:29:49.486 The next thing you want to know is not just how many people you're calling, but, okay. 00:29:49.486 --> 00:29:52.073 Are they actively following up with people? 00:29:52.073 --> 00:29:56.351 Or are they just calling a list of a hundred one time and then calling another list of a hundred one time? 00:29:56.351 --> 00:29:58.976 Scrapping that, calling a list of a hundred, scrapping that, right. 00:29:58.976 --> 00:30:10.052 Like, again, the sales cycle is you got to talk to a prospect eight to 12 times and right now it's like closer to four months to close a customer right, so it's a long period of time that you've got to follow up. 00:30:10.072 --> 00:30:11.725 It's not just the what you do, it's the how you do it. 00:30:11.725 --> 00:30:12.586 You're absolutely right. 00:30:13.028 --> 00:30:14.129 All the money's in the follow-up. 00:30:14.129 --> 00:30:25.936 So the next thing you want to look at is like, okay, well, of all of these prospects that you started with, say you have 300 and say you're two months into the job, the next question I'm going to go is how many of them would you consider active prospects? 00:30:25.936 --> 00:30:27.401 Now here's what active means. 00:30:27.401 --> 00:30:44.780 It means you spoke to them and had a conversation right, not spoke to a gatekeeper, not got blown off and left a voicemail Like you actually spoke to somebody in that department in either transportation, right, or maybe procurement, and you had to have learned something. 00:30:44.780 --> 00:30:46.393 Like I mean, a conversation isn't. 00:30:46.393 --> 00:30:48.197 I call Nate, nate says I don't need anything. 00:30:48.197 --> 00:30:50.153 Nate hangs up on me Like that's not a conversation. 00:30:50.153 --> 00:30:52.702 Right, I needed to learn something. 00:30:52.702 --> 00:30:54.207 I didn't know before. 00:30:54.207 --> 00:30:56.818 That phone call that I now know after. 00:30:56.818 --> 00:30:58.023 That makes it active. 00:30:58.023 --> 00:30:59.228 I had to learn something right. 00:30:59.228 --> 00:31:01.413 You're either going to win or you're going to learn right. 00:31:01.812 --> 00:31:03.495 Most of this is you're learning right. 00:31:03.495 --> 00:31:23.352 So now, those two or 300, right, if you've been doing this a month or two, you should probably have 25, maybe 30, maybe even closer to 50 companies that you've talked to right, had conversations with, you're starting to build some rapport and they're probably still telling you that they don't need help from a broker or have any freight to give you or any quotes to give you. 00:31:23.352 --> 00:31:23.612 Right. 00:31:23.612 --> 00:31:28.195 But you are learning a little bit either about them personally, like maybe Nate likes the Bills. 00:31:28.195 --> 00:31:30.337 Nate lives in Buffalo, nate's got two kids. 00:31:30.337 --> 00:31:33.780 Maybe it's their busy season's coming up in a month. 00:31:33.780 --> 00:31:36.163 He says I should follow up closer to June. 00:31:36.163 --> 00:31:44.396 It could be that, hey, they just cut their asset division or they just added something Like it doesn't matter, they hired somebody, somebody got quoted, they just added something Like it doesn't matter. 00:31:44.416 --> 00:31:46.044 They hired somebody, somebody got positive or negative information. 00:31:46.044 --> 00:31:49.495 It can be negative too, where you feel like, oh, this makes it less likely they'll do business with me. 00:31:49.495 --> 00:31:54.199

But remember, in your first couple of calls, they don't know you so they don't trust you and they're probably not telling you the truth. 00:31:54.199 --> 00:31:59.593 But you want to have learned something, right, that's your active list right Now. 00:31:59.593 --> 00:32:11.201 From those active lists, the next question you want to ask and this is the one that they'll be asking over and over and you should also be asking yourself is okay, now, all these active prospects, which would you say? 00:32:11.201 --> 00:32:15.663 You would categorize them, and they usually do like three buckets, but you can do two, maybe it's. 00:32:15.663 --> 00:32:20.508 These are the highest likelihood to become customers, these are the lowest likelihood. 00:32:20.508 --> 00:32:24.897 These people I don't think will work with us at all. 00:32:24.897 --> 00:32:28.809 That's usually the three buckets, right, yep, really, these people I don't think will work with us at all. 00:32:28.809 --> 00:32:29.972 That's usually the three buckets, right, yep, really likely. 00:32:29.972 --> 00:32:30.634 Maybe probably not at all, right. 00:32:30.653 --> 00:32:46.218 And now, within those, right now, we get into really the pipeline review, because this is your pipeline, the leads you've reached out to, sent an email to or trying to talk to, like they're not your pipeline yet, they're just company phone numbers that you've researched, that you have the ability to build a rapport with, but they are not in your pipeline. 00:32:46.218 --> 00:32:50.634 The pipeline funnels into your business, into your TMS, where they become customers, right. 00:32:50.634 --> 00:33:00.009 So from there now is when we really get into these questions, where I'll go through this with a client or someone on my team or an agent or whatever it's like. 00:33:00.009 --> 00:33:15.473 Okay, now let's go one by one and I want to start asking you questions to learn what you know or have learned, because if you don't know these, it's not to shame you or to make you feel like you should, it's to teach you. 00:33:15.473 --> 00:33:18.581 These are the questions you need to ask when you speak to them. 00:33:18.641 --> 00:33:28.204 Again, You're just identifying gaps in knowledge that then can give you information on what to throw into your next phone call and find out Right. 00:33:28.204 --> 00:33:36.629 And a lot of this stuff is like well, unless you're going a different direction, A lot of this stuff the way I do it is, it's the same kind of questions that you ask when you're prospecting Right. 00:33:36.629 --> 00:33:41.682 These are the kind of things that you want to make sure that somebody either knows or can identify that they don't know yet. 00:33:47.269 --> 00:33:47.610 So little tangent. 00:33:47.610 --> 00:33:48.853 But, like everyone asks us, what do I say when I follow up? 00:33:48.853 --> 00:33:49.695 I don't know what to talk about. 00:33:49.695 --> 00:33:54.133 These are the questions, these are the things

you want to get answered right. 00:33:54.133 --> 00:34:03.482 And again, if you want to build rapport with somebody, you don't make friends by telling people what to do and that you know more than them and to try to educate them. 00:34:03.482 --> 00:34:07.838 You build friends by asking them questions and getting them to talk about what they're interested in. 00:34:07.838 --> 00:34:09.383 These are the ammunition. 00:34:09.383 --> 00:34:13.583 Like to go and prospect right, Like these are what get you. 00:34:13.583 --> 00:34:17.755 The rapport is asking these questions in a way that makes them want to talk to you. 00:34:17.755 --> 00:34:19.641 Right, that's the nuance piece. 00:34:19.641 --> 00:34:23.496 But like this is exactly what you, like you said you want to be asking. 00:34:24.139 --> 00:34:37.052 Now, some of them are really simple, right, and the first is everybody has done this at almost I've met, including myself which is you get a prospect, they're easy to talk to, you enjoy talking to them and no one else wants to talk to you. 00:34:37.572 --> 00:34:45.199 So we end up believing that that's going to be a good customer, because we're getting results and it feels good, so we keep talking to them. 00:34:45.199 --> 00:35:22.351 I can't remember the name of my company the one mine was, but like it was like two and a half months when I finally turned them into a customer and I was so excited and found out they shipped like four full truckloads maybe a week or a month, like just so low volumes that like no matter how much this person liked me, there was never really enough to turn it into a business relationship other than to help here and there and maybe to learn a bit which, again, but this is a big cost to me because I spent hours and hours talking to this person, over two and a half months that could have been spent trying to get to know somebody that I could have been working with, right? 00:35:23.011 --> 00:35:29.302 So the first questions you want to understand as quickly as possible is how many loads a week are they moving? 00:35:29.302 --> 00:35:32.034 Or how many loads a month, or how many loads a day? 00:35:32.034 --> 00:35:45.159 However you want to ask, it gets you around the same information, and I want to know what it is now, what it is at the bottom of their season, meaning the slowest they are, and I want to know what it is the most at their busiest time of the year. 00:35:45.159 --> 00:35:47.163 Those are the three things I really want to know. 00:35:47.730 --> 00:35:49.978 Yeah, I go very, very similar. 00:35:49.978 --> 00:35:52.418 Hey, what does their seasonality look like? 00:35:52.418 --> 00:35:54.538 Is it fairly consistent throughout the year? 00:35:54.538 --> 00:35:56.577 Do they have a peak in the spring? 00:35:56.577 --> 00:36:04.219 I mean, obviously certain commodities is going to be self-explanatory right Like the Christmas tree example, not shipping a lot of Christmas trees in May and June. 00:36:04.219 --> 00:36:07.949 Like the Christmas tree example, not shipping a lot of Christmas trees in May and June. 00:36:07.949 --> 00:36:17.130 But certain kinds of farms that have different types of they grow different stuff throughout the year and they grow different stuff different years. 00:36:17.150 --> 00:36:24.304 But yeah, your traditional like manufacturing, you might get a low time at the tail end of December and the beginning of the year and then you get kind of a boom into the spring and summer. 00:36:24.304 --> 00:36:28.490 If it's a food product, obviously holidays, seasons and summer is going to be big on that. 00:36:28.490 --> 00:37:39.632 But I love to know what is the year round peaks and valleys look like? 00:37:39.632 --> 00:37:40.701 Or is it consistent? 00:37:40.701 --> 00:37:43.925 And, to your point, what is their volume? 00:37:43.925 --> 00:37:56.583 And I even like to break that down by the type of you know their LTL, their full truckload partials, anything that could be segmented right. 00:37:56.583 --> 00:38:07.163 Because if you can have a conversation and your answer is, yeah, they're pretty consistent throughout the year, with the exception that they have a pretty big boom in the summer months. 00:38:07.163 --> 00:38:11.259 They're doing about 40 truckloads a day on average. 00:38:11.259 --> 00:38:13.487 They do a little bit of LTL here and there. 00:38:13.487 --> 00:38:18.447 It's by exception, and every now and then they might have an expedited ship. 00:38:18.447 --> 00:38:23.168 That's got to go super fast, that's a great answer right, perfect. 00:38:23.300 --> 00:38:28.364 And if you don't know the, if you can't answer it like that, it's not to say that you're not doing your job, it's just like you know. 00:38:28.364 --> 00:38:29.367 Here's what. 00:38:29.367 --> 00:38:32.960 Here's some of the conversations that you can have and legitimate questions. 00:38:32.960 --> 00:38:35.458 You can ask that prospect the next time you're on the phone with them. 00:38:36.141 --> 00:38:41.683 And then and then the next one, and I'll give you an example that we're running to, like a close one to what we're seeing right now, right? 00:38:41.683 --> 00:38:52.969 The other one is like I want to know what's going inbound versus outbound and if, if I can get them to tell me a little bit about what is likely to happen, right? 00:38:52.969 --> 00:39:02.123 So, for instance, we were talking with a lot of produce shippers call it in California, and right now a lot of them are having a hard time getting a lot of their supply inbound up from Mexico and Central America because there were a lot of droughts. 00:39:02.123 --> 00:39:15.681 So you have higher prices, lower volumes, and most of them said like they literally couldn't get enough product to fulfill their customers orders, right, so where's their volume at? 00:39:15.681 --> 00:39:16.465 Lower than where they want it would be? 00:39:16.465 --> 00:39:20.400 They can't even get enough product to

fulfill the orders coming in, right, so it's slower than they would want it, well, again. 00:39:20.400 --> 00:39:30.748 So the next question that we wanted to ask is okay, well, you bring most of this stuff up from here in the winter months and definitely when you guys have operations in Arizona, closer to there. 00:39:30.748 --> 00:39:37.927 But hey, let me ask you, I know California's watermelons are going to be coming online and about two or three weeks. 00:39:37.927 --> 00:39:45.849 When do you expect your volumes or you to be able to start pulling enough product from local farms to meet your orders? 00:39:45.849 --> 00:39:47.701 Like, are you thinking that's two, three weeks? 00:39:47.701 --> 00:39:48.342 Like, I'm just curious. 00:39:48.342 --> 00:39:51.411 And if you ask, in a way it's like I'm asking about the industry. 00:39:51.411 --> 00:39:55.545 I'm not asking them how many loads they move today and how many loads they'll move in three weeks. 00:39:55.545 --> 00:39:59.329 I said, hey, I know you guys everyone's kind of running into this out of curiosity. 00:39:59.329 --> 00:40:08.329 With the horizon coming up, you know, with everything coming to crop in the next two, three weeks, what do you guys normally see when the season really picks up with local produce, you guys. 00:40:08.989 --> 00:40:13.501 Now here's the veteran tip is most people just ask what that volume is. 00:40:13.501 --> 00:40:17.217 I find if you give them a choice, they're more likely to just pick one. 00:40:17.217 --> 00:40:21.317 And I will say something like hey, I know you guys mentioned when you guys are kind of slow. 00:40:21.317 --> 00:40:23.367 You're probably like I don't know, 20, 30 loads a week. 00:40:23.367 --> 00:40:28.364 I got to imagine when stuff's coming in from a local farms and you've got what you need to get out to your customers. 00:40:28.364 --> 00:40:30.847 Are you guys like 50, 60 loads a week? 00:40:30.847 --> 00:40:33.972 You, you know, 60 to 75, a hundred plus. 00:40:33.972 --> 00:40:45.306 I mean just trying to get an idea on kind of where you guys fall when everything's really fired on all cylinders, right, and most people are like, yeah, you know, on the higher end of that, oh, you know, we're probably about double what we do now. 00:40:45.306 --> 00:40:48.871 They'll give you some idea to know. 00:40:48.871 --> 00:40:56.231 Again, I'm trying to think about what it looks like in this building If there are only 10 going out a day and they think that'll double. 00:40:56.231 --> 00:41:07.105 Okay, there's a likelihood they're going to need some help, either in the time of when they're going out or just in the volume over the next few weeks leading up to this. 00:41:07.105 --> 00:41:14.353 It gives you, like, the timeframe at which point in time their needs will increase for what we provide as a service, right? 00:41:14.353 --> 00:41:17.643 Just your time capacity or additional capacity, right? 00:41:17.643 --> 00:41:23.442 So again, it gives you this benchmark of where it was when it is. 00:41:23.663 --> 00:41:30.324 And another great tip is to use the timeframe in the past and the analogy I used for somebody, a client, the other day. 00:41:30.324 --> 00:41:47.150 I was like, well, if you were on a date and somebody asked who were the other people you're dating right now, well, when people are dating, they're all kind of dating other people, but no one really feels comfortable enough on a first date to share that Like, oh, I went out with this other guy two days ago and he was really nice, because it's going to make the other person feel threatened, right, or just not comfortable. 00:41:47.150 --> 00:41:47.831 They don't trust you. 00:41:47.831 --> 00:42:02.007 But if that person asked you, hey, you know over the years, or even like last year or past couple of years, like what are the kind of people you tend to date or that you kind of enjoy spending time with, they'll tell you everybody they've met and didn't like or whatever happened two years ago and last year. 00:42:02.007 --> 00:42:05.206 They're far less likely to tell you about what's happening in the present. 00:42:05.699 --> 00:42:06.983 So use the same thing in shipping. 00:42:06.983 --> 00:42:15.090 Like, hey, last year, when things were kind of slow and they were ramping up, what did you guys do when you were really busy last year, when all the local produce was firing? 00:42:15.090 --> 00:42:17.086 Do you guys really see your volumes? 00:42:17.086 --> 00:42:18.846 Are you expecting about the same thing this year? 00:42:18.846 --> 00:42:22.230 You might be like, yeah, we were at 100 loads a week last year at peak season. 00:42:22.230 --> 00:42:23.545 We're expecting about the same. 00:42:23.545 --> 00:42:32.554 Great, I've got at least a general idea that this company is worth me continuing to build a relationship with, because there's probably an opportunity there. 00:42:32.759 --> 00:42:40.925 So one of the things you can do, too that's relevant now is you can ask a couple things you could ask about hey, how was last year? 00:42:40.925 --> 00:42:46.675 But also, how are things compared to 2021? 00:42:46.675 --> 00:42:48.822 Late 2020. 00:42:48.822 --> 00:42:59.903 Obviously, a lot of industries were impacted and they might just be like, oh man, it was crazy, and they'll spew out a ton of information because, you get, everyone remembers what it was like then. 00:42:59.923 --> 00:43:05.268 It would mean it was, it was a shit, exactly, um, but also into the like, because you mean, you already kind of hinted at it. 00:43:05.288 --> 00:43:21.170 But, looking into the future, right, I think it's a, it's um, to lower the, the threat, as you called it, of a conversation or really this like the, the awkwardness of it, because you, what you want to know is like, who are you, who you're giving your loads to and how can I get into the next thing? 00:43:21.170 --> 00:43:21.369 Right. 00:43:21.369 --> 00:43:56.308 But you can

ask things like about the past, but also about the future, and you already kind of alluded to that um, because you want to be able to project where things will be in the future and if that means there's a higher probability that it's worth your time to pursue this prospect or think about if they're like we're actually going to be shutting down this plant in six months and all of our stuff's being absorbed by this company that's acquiring us and you're like, okay, I've got to shift my focus here, and had I not asked that question, I could have spent the next four or five months wasting my time. 00:43:56.710 --> 00:43:58.322 I'll give you a better one If I find that out. 00:43:58.322 --> 00:43:59.628 I'm like this is fantastic. 00:43:59.628 --> 00:44:05.965 This is like inside baseball info, because now I'm going to go prospect the company that's going to buy you and I'm going to go. 00:44:05.965 --> 00:44:11.891 Hey, you know, I've heard some buzz amongst people in the industry that you guys might be working with them in the near future. 00:44:11.891 --> 00:44:14.054 I've been talking with Jamie over there. 00:44:14.054 --> 00:44:17.996 They've had great things to say about possibly working with you guys if the merger goes through. 00:44:17.996 --> 00:44:20.588 I'd love to know who I would need to be connected over there with. 00:44:21.090 --> 00:44:27.132 I took that little bit of information and turned it into what seemed like a very good conversation starter with this other company. 00:44:27.132 --> 00:44:35.347 I might not even have been prospecting right and I might get both right at the end of the day. 00:44:35.347 --> 00:44:37.556 So we're going to transition a little bit to like some other questions or things we want to understand. 00:44:37.556 --> 00:44:39.824 So the next thing I always ask really close to those questions, right? 00:44:39.824 --> 00:44:47.831 Because, again, we really want to know if there's, if they're, a potential fit, like are they qualified to be a customer that we want to work with, right? 00:44:47.831 --> 00:44:56.244 So that's why those first few questions you want to get answered or get some information on as soon as possible, right, but really close to that. 00:44:56.385 --> 00:44:57.769 And sometimes they happen before. 00:44:57.769 --> 00:45:02.829 Sometimes they happen right after right, and we talk about this a lot is some personal information. 00:45:02.829 --> 00:45:09.182 Hopefully you have been able to get them to talk about something about them personally right Now. 00:45:09.182 --> 00:45:19.150 I think better salespeople, or even people that come from the service industry, I think, are very good at this, but it's getting somebody to share about something they have personally right. 00:45:19.190 --> 00:45:27.201 So we talk about Mondays and Fridays great opportunity to just ask people like hey, how was your weekend, how was your Monday coming along? 00:45:27.201 --> 00:45:29.965 Or hey, what do you have planned for the weekend? 00:45:29.965 --> 00:45:36.154 Any of those are really great openers to get somebody to share, usually what they're really interested in. 00:45:36.154 --> 00:45:44.864 And again, these are great cues that make somebody else enjoy talking to you, which is the point, right For the first handful of calls. 00:45:44.864 --> 00:45:50.333 I care more about trying to make friends and acquaintances far more than business. 00:45:50.333 --> 00:45:59.331 I want to know if they're worth working with and then I just want to build rapport with them so that we can build some trust to see if we want to work together Right, that's really the timeframe. 00:45:59.739 --> 00:46:07.887 Yeah, and when you get to know personal things about them, it makes it really easy to open a future call, right Cause then you've got something to reference back to Um. 00:46:07.887 --> 00:46:13.683 Like you know, the sports analogy is like an obvious one that we talk about a lot. 00:46:13.683 --> 00:46:20.938 If it's a Monday and you're calling this week, you're like, hey, what do you think about your team's draft picks over the? 00:46:20.958 --> 00:46:21.378 weekend. 00:46:21.538 --> 00:46:21.739 Right. 00:46:21.739 --> 00:46:24.291 Hey, I saw you guys snagged up that. 00:46:24.291 --> 00:46:30.688 You know that QB from whatever, and you'll get them talking Right Because you know they're passionate about it. 00:46:30.688 --> 00:46:34.063 Yeah, I mean, those are great ways. 00:46:34.244 --> 00:46:45.375 Here's one of my other ones that I think is really useful that I haven't talked a lot about, but I was going through this with a client late last week and it's have you ever heard the term like commiserate? 00:46:45.375 --> 00:46:46.358 Right yeah. 00:46:47.242 --> 00:46:49.311 So commiserate, only from a Blink-182 song. 00:46:49.992 --> 00:46:50.786 Right, and I'm curious. 00:46:50.786 --> 00:46:54.416 Actually, I want to look up the actual definition of this word. 00:46:56.925 --> 00:46:58.529 Is that watching, waiting? 00:46:58.670 --> 00:47:09.536 commiseratingiserates with them on a loss, oh, to feel or express sympathy, condole, right, like to feel or express sorrow or compassion for it right now. 00:47:09.536 --> 00:47:33.592 Here's where I feel like this is a really effective one to use, right, you walk into just about any office at nine o'clock on a Monday morning and mostly people again, very generalization wish they had one more day of the weekend, or probably still thinking about what they were doing Saturday or Sunday and wish maybe they had one more, at least even a few hours, to start their day like their weekend. 00:47:33.592 --> 00:47:38.088 Right, so they're not fully into work and again, they're still probably thinking about it. 00:47:38.088 --> 00:47:45.514 And if you walked up to a water cooler into any office and didn't know anybody and you just went oh man, mondays, tell me about it. 00:47:45.514 --> 00:47:56.032 And had a sip of coffee, I

would be willing to bet more than half the people would be like, even if they were in a good mood and excited for work, that day would bite on that and be like oh yeah, man, let me tell you what we had. 00:47:56.032 --> 00:47:56.552 Three day weekends, man. 00:47:56.552 --> 00:47:57.275 Let me tell you what we had. 00:47:57.275 --> 00:48:00.298 Three-day weekends, man, it's just this way. 00:48:00.298 --> 00:48:16.755 And again, it is a negative thing, so you don't want to stress it too much, but if you can do it in a way that allows somebody to connect with you about something they want to express a negative emotion can be really valuable, because that opens that door right. 00:48:16.985 --> 00:48:21.789 Like the other one I'll use is like on Wednesdays or Thursdays, right. 00:48:21.789 --> 00:48:28.215 And there was this old cliche I remember the guys used to say on the construction sites they'd be like Thursdays or Wednesday, but like one more and out the door. 00:48:28.215 --> 00:48:31.954 Like one more, get up to go to work and then you had the weekend, right. 00:48:31.954 --> 00:48:44.827 And this is this thing like on Thursdays or Wednesdays I'll be like, oh man, on Wednesdays I'm like, ah, two more and out the door. 00:48:44.827 --> 00:48:45.650 Then it's the weekend, you're looking forward to it. 00:48:45.650 --> 00:48:47.326 Yet and you say it in this way that almost most people will be like oh yeah, it's been a tough one. 00:48:47.326 --> 00:48:53.929 But I'll tell you what I'm keeping my head above water and I'm looking forward to this weekend because I'm going kayaking, I'm going hiking whatever insert there, right. 00:48:54.449 --> 00:48:58.836 That is this open door to allow somebody to now talk about what they care about. 00:48:58.836 --> 00:49:01.019 Oh, you kayak, tell me about that. 00:49:01.019 --> 00:49:03.510 Oh, you do this, right, like it doesn't matter what it is. 00:49:03.510 --> 00:49:05.751 Oh, I got my kids' t-ball game tonight. 00:49:05.751 --> 00:49:06.869 We got those every Wednesdays. 00:49:07.384 --> 00:49:20.798 It gives that person permission to take the conversation out of the business world and into a topic that is a little more personal, and these are just really great ways to connect with people, because this is what they care about, too right, like they care about their kids. 00:49:20.878 --> 00:49:43.992 The t-ball games, the soccer games, like I was talking to my buddies this morning, same thing like about our daughter's gymnastics class, like these are things that are of interest to us and if you can get somebody to share that, to me this becomes so valuable of a note to have in your crm because now, at any point in time, I can door right If you've told me you've got two boys and one of your kids starting T-ball and it's on Thursday. 00:49:43.992 --> 00:49:50.476 Every time I talk to you I can ask how your kids are doing, how T-ball is coming along, how's your little one doing. 00:49:50.476 --> 00:50:00.306 Like we can have an actual conversation, more like parents outside of work than we are two people discussing whether or not there's going to be a potential to do business together. 00:50:00.306 --> 00:50:06.788 That builds incredible trust and to me, those are the things you really want to know very early on. 00:50:06.788 --> 00:50:10.175 Something personal and their volumes, right. 00:50:10.315 --> 00:50:16.954 Yeah, and this might sound obvious, but to at least explain why that rapport is important. 00:50:16.954 --> 00:50:18.846 The whole know, like and trust right? 00:50:18.846 --> 00:50:22.791 People do business with those that they know, that they like and that they trust. 00:50:22.791 --> 00:50:36.228 So if you're building rapport with a prospect and maybe a new lane pops up or a spot load pops up that someone else fell off of, when they think about what do I want to do with this load, they might be like you know what I really like. 00:50:36.228 --> 00:50:39.317 Talking with Ben, let me reach out to him and let him know that, hey, I finally got. 00:50:39.317 --> 00:50:40.798 I got one for him to work on, right. 00:50:40.884 --> 00:50:44.036 You're going to be top of mind when it comes to exactly. 00:50:44.177 --> 00:51:03.295 So I mean, I know that sounds obvious, but this is why we spend time building relationships and sales, because it's not just to butter them up, it's to truly get to know them so that we can, when we do business together, it's with somebody that I know and that I like and that I trust, versus someone that we've just done it with them for years. 00:51:03.295 --> 00:51:07.860 Their pricing is good, they're a pain in the butt to talk to, but they get the job done. 00:51:07.860 --> 00:51:09.440 No, I'd rather work with someone that I like. 00:51:09.981 --> 00:51:10.402 For sure. 00:51:10.402 --> 00:51:18.536 And I want to stress the point too, that we're all human and we all forget and we all aren't remembering everybody we've ever met that could help us at any given time. 00:51:18.536 --> 00:51:23.331 Right, we're focused on the thing that's in front of us, Otherwise we wouldn't be able to function right, like that's how the brain works. 00:51:23.331 --> 00:51:29.992 And I have a client that's been in mortgage for like 30 years, right, and this just happened to her recently. 00:51:29.992 --> 00:51:58.454 Mortgage has been really slow, so she wasn't doing as much networking getting out in the community, and she also lives in a smaller community where she knows everybody because she's been there for decades, and she got into the habit of just not spending as much time interacting with people because there wasn't a need in the market. 00:51:58.454 --> 00:51:59.956 So it just's like I got four deals. 00:51:59.956 --> 00:52:03.065 I got more deals in the past week than I have in the past two or three months. 00:52:03.065 --> 00:52:04.690 I was like, oh, what would you do different? 00:52:04.690 --> 00:52:21.206 She

was like, oh, I was just out, I went to a charity event, I went to this networking thing and this other thing in the community and I just saw people that knew me and knew me for years and they literally went oh, I can't believe I ran into you. 00:52:21.206 --> 00:52:23.190 We are looking at possibly buying a new house and I completely forgot that you were in the area. 00:52:23.190 --> 00:52:23.972 Give me a call next week. 00:52:24.574 --> 00:52:30.112 This top of mind thing seems like it isn't strategic or seems like it's just a nice to have when it happens. 00:52:30.112 --> 00:52:34.230 But you can create more of this, right, like you can. 00:52:34.230 --> 00:52:39.067 Like the other analogy I heard, for this is like hanging around the rim for business deals, right. 00:52:39.067 --> 00:52:49.436 The most successful people in business tend to be people that surround themselves with other people that are very active in business, so they get they have more people talking to them about things that are happening. 00:52:49.775 --> 00:52:50.989 More opportunities, right? 00:52:50.989 --> 00:53:07.588 Nobody's going to run into you and ask you to ship their freight at the grocery store or probably at a bar, but it happens occasionally and for sure people aren't going to bang down your phones to get you to help them. 00:53:07.588 --> 00:53:11.925 We are in a very proactive industry where it's offense is everything, like if you aren't reaching out, they're not talking to you. 00:53:11.925 --> 00:53:14.813 You can be intentional to create more opportunities. 00:53:14.813 --> 00:53:17.485 You've got to meet more people, talk to more people. 00:53:17.485 --> 00:53:30.346 Build the Rolodex right Of just the names and names of everyone you're talking to, because the more of these you have, the more people that are thinking of you when they need help right, which is the whole point of prospecting to begin with. 00:53:31.068 --> 00:53:31.268 Yep. 00:53:31.268 --> 00:53:36.818 So to kind of put a bow on this one, what would you say? 00:53:36.818 --> 00:53:43.614 So we kind of talked through like the team setting right, Probably one, last one before we wrap it up All right, what do you got? 00:53:44.206 --> 00:53:50.679 So last one and again I want to go a little further down the line, because we talk a lot about rapport, but you do want to understand their lanes, right? 00:53:50.679 --> 00:54:05.567 You want to understand, once you've had these two things, you've understood and you've got this rapport like, how many loads a week are they shipping or per day? 00:54:05.567 --> 00:54:06.525 Are they shipping inbound and just not that? 00:54:06.525 --> 00:54:09.958 But are they the one arranging inbound transportation or the places they buy it from, like you want to know what they're actually controlling. 00:54:09.958 --> 00:54:16.391 And then, in addition to that, I want to know what lanes maybe they have dedicated carriers on they've worked with for years and never have an issue. 00:54:16.391 --> 00:54:22.465 And I want to know the ones that are that come up now and then where they have more problems, because that's where I'm most likely to help. 00:54:22.465 --> 00:54:26.375 So I want to know that about the inbound, and I want to know where those places are. 00:54:26.375 --> 00:54:27.188 What are the lanes? 00:54:27.188 --> 00:54:28.192 Where do they pick up from? 00:54:28.192 --> 00:54:32.246 Are there issues where they load that some carriers don't like to keep going back to? 00:54:32.246 --> 00:54:33.567 That's why they have issues, right? 00:54:33.567 --> 00:54:44.880 Whatever that is, I want to understand as much as I can about what's coming in and who's responsible for it, because if it isn't this company, it's another company and then I'm going to call them next and I want to know the other side, right? 00:54:50.286 --> 00:54:57.382 Very simply, you don't need to think about logistics as this complicated things where trucks are moving everywhere and there's buildings and there's all these different things you don't know. 00:54:57.382 --> 00:54:58.443 Think about it simply. 00:54:58.443 --> 00:54:59.547 There's a box, there's a box, there's stuff in there. 00:54:59.547 --> 00:54:59.887 It's a warehouse. 00:54:59.887 --> 00:55:01.851 It is being brought in there by a truck and is being taken out by a truck. 00:55:01.851 --> 00:55:03.697 How many come in and how many are they responsible for? 00:55:03.697 --> 00:55:04.117 Right? 00:55:04.117 --> 00:55:07.106 Are they brokers, carriers or their own trucks Coming out? 00:55:07.407 --> 00:55:11.996 Same three things your trucks, a broker, truck or direct carrier relationship. 00:55:11.996 --> 00:55:13.447 What is the number of them? 00:55:13.447 --> 00:55:14.411 Who has which? 00:55:14.411 --> 00:55:15.653 Where are they going? 00:55:15.653 --> 00:55:23.965 Where do you need help and where are they going? 00:55:23.965 --> 00:55:25.190 Where do you need help and where do you not need help? 00:55:25.190 --> 00:55:31.447 Now I have a very clear understanding, as much as I'm ever going to have, of what it would be like to sit next to this person at their job all day long, because you don't just want to help with problems after they've happened. 00:55:31.447 --> 00:55:37.291 You want to be able to understand this supply chain well enough to help prevent problems. 00:55:37.291 --> 00:55:38.713 That's where we're going. 00:55:38.713 --> 00:55:46.228 That's why you need to know both of those things and those qualitative things in order to actually be a good broker to work with them in the first place. 00:55:46.427 --> 00:55:48.996 And you're not going to get all this stuff in one conversation. 00:55:49.036 --> 00:55:49.115 No. 00:55:49.806 --> 00:55:51.869 This kind of just reinforces what you said. 00:55:51.869 --> 00:55:58.431 Your 8 to 12 phone calls, I mean in some of this stuff I mean even with customers that you're growing. 00:55:58.431 -->

00:56:04.349 I know we're talking about prospects right now, but think about customers that you're growing, you can't stop. 00:56:04.349 --> 00:56:09.730 You know how they say, like never stop dating your spouse, always keep that relationship healthy. 00:56:09.730 --> 00:56:16.210 It's the same thing Like never stop building the relationship with your customers because somebody else is trying to. 00:56:16.210 --> 00:56:26.181 And if you don't keep doing that and you don't keep building that rapport and learning more about what's coming up as far as changes in their future, you're going to be behind the ball on that. 00:56:26.181 --> 00:56:27.389 So just kind of keep that in mind. 00:56:27.389 --> 00:56:28.989 Anything else on this one. 00:56:30.306 --> 00:56:35.197 No, I think we covered really the whole spectrum, really what you should be understanding. 00:56:35.197 --> 00:56:38.353 And you should be asking these questions of yourself, right? 00:56:38.353 --> 00:56:43.387 Because again, at the end of the week, look at who you've talked to and ask yourself the questions. 00:56:43.387 --> 00:56:51.965 In fact, maybe print them out and leave them on your desk for a while and then every time you look at your notes before you make a follow-up call and you go, this is a good lead. 00:56:51.965 --> 00:56:54.331 Read your notes and can you answer these? 00:56:54.331 --> 00:56:55.793 Do you know something about them personally? 00:56:55.793 --> 00:56:57.556 Do you know what their volume is now? 00:56:57.556 --> 00:56:59.460 Do you know where it will be or where it will peak? 00:56:59.460 --> 00:57:01.090 Do you know what's going inbound? 00:57:01.090 --> 00:57:02.329 Do you know what's going outbound? 00:57:02.329 --> 00:57:06.534 Do you know if it's their own trucks, a broker truck or an asset truck, Inbound and outbound? 00:57:06.534 --> 00:57:09.748 And do you know where they are most likely to need help? 00:57:09.748 --> 00:57:17.112 On any of those six, right, the three coming in and the three going out, because that's gonna that's going to allow you to ask better questions about where your need is. 00:57:17.112 --> 00:57:26.610 And, to your point, if you can't, then remind yourself, like in your CRM for your next call, like I schedule my next call maybe for two weeks. 00:57:26.610 --> 00:57:31.592 Now I will go into that call note even though it hasn't happened, and I type the questions I need answered. 00:57:31.592 --> 00:57:38.932 So when I talk to Nate in two weeks and I pull up his card, I read everything I've already put and then I see three questions I wrote for myself. 00:57:38.932 --> 00:57:41.235 Hey card, I read everything I've already put and then I see three questions I wrote for myself. 00:57:41.255 --> 00:57:42.737 Hey, nate, you know what I made me need to ask you out of curiosity? 00:57:42.737 --> 00:57:47.121 Boom, and you can just ask them some directly, especially if I know something personal about you, right? 00:57:47.121 --> 00:57:48.786 Hey Nate, how was your kid's t-ball game? 00:57:48.786 --> 00:57:49.987 Oh yeah, blah, blah, blah. 00:57:49.987 --> 00:57:50.807 We catch up on that. 00:57:50.807 --> 00:57:55.893 Hey, real quick, while I was here, while I have you, I was really curious on your inbound stuff. 00:57:55.893 --> 00:58:01.677 Is all that on your own assets or just most of it, because that's another one that catches most people? 00:58:01.677 --> 00:58:10.215 I'm FOB Well, it's almost never 100% FOB and what's important of it is and where and when do you make the decision to them to do it or you to do it right? 00:58:10.215 --> 00:58:16.891 Those are the things you want to be able to understand, to be able to tell your manager, because he can now help you to your point. 00:58:16.891 --> 00:58:21.251 Maybe ask them this tell your manager, cause he can now help you to your point. 00:58:21.251 --> 00:58:22.436 Maybe ask them this hey, we can do this. 00:58:22.436 --> 00:58:23.521 Hey, did you think about showing them this option? 00:58:23.521 --> 00:58:23.742 Right, like? 00:58:23.742 --> 00:58:24.485 This is the point. 00:58:24.985 --> 00:58:25.346 For sure. 00:58:25.346 --> 00:58:27.088 So the to. 00:58:27.088 --> 00:58:32.788 To finish this up, what I wanted to kind of hit on just real quick is how often do you do these? 00:58:32.788 --> 00:58:35.748 And it's going to be a little bit different for everybody when you're. 00:58:36.108 --> 00:58:40.324 So, again, if you're the, the manager, this is something you should think about implementing. 00:58:40.324 --> 00:58:41.427 How often? 00:58:41.427 --> 00:58:42.009 Um? 00:58:42.009 --> 00:58:50.177 But if you're the, if you know, if you're the one that's getting or having the meeting with the manager, um, you know, there comes a. 00:58:50.577 --> 00:58:56.213 There's certain times when you you got to tell your manager like, hey, I need to be doing this with you every week, or something like that. 00:58:56.775 --> 00:58:58.427 Um, but you know some of your season folks. 00:58:58.427 --> 00:59:03.436 It might just be kind of a you know, a quick little oil change once a month, or something like that. 00:59:03.436 --> 00:59:35.307 But if you are totally on your own just one guy or gal working from home as a freight broker you got to figure out some way to put this into your, your rhythm of your week, right, and it could be that, hey, at the end of the week, on Friday, I'm going to take some time to have a little internal reflection on where my book of business is and all that stuff, and you don't have a manager to be asking you questions, right, take the information that we gave you in this episode, in this conversation, and write this stuff down. 00:59:35.307 --> 00:59:42.000 Ask yourself these questions, take notes on where the gaps of knowledge are with some of your customers. 00:59:42.000 --> 00:59:46.576 And so, ben, what you said is awesome too with the CRM. 00:59:46.576 --> 00:59:48.210 Do something with it. 00:59:48.210 --> 00:59:51.494 Don't just have the conversation and then not take any action or record it. 00:59:52.969 --> 00:59:54.894 So that was my final wrap on it. 00:59:55.324 --> 00:59:56.721 And I think that's totally true. 00:59:56.721 --> 00:59:58.971 Right, like, these aren't misses. 00:59:58.971 --> 01:00:05.992 Like, if you don't have these questions answered and you've talked to a prospect four or five times, that does not mean you wasted the four or five conversations. 01:00:05.992 --> 01:00:08.121 That just means this is good news. 01:00:08.121 --> 01:00:11.471 You have a whole lot of things to talk about that you haven't thought of yet, right? 01:00:11.471 --> 01:00:17.317 So you got enough to now talk to them at least six to 10 more times, just from what we gave you in this episode, right? 01:00:17.317 --> 01:00:24.389 So again, don't beat yourself up If you haven't been asking some of these things. 01:00:24.389 --> 01:00:28.257 Look at this as a great opportunity to go and learn more about your prospects and the companies you've wanted to build relationships with, for sure. 01:00:28.257 --> 01:00:29.097 All right. 01:00:29.097 --> 01:00:34.308 Final thoughts Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right. 01:00:34.971 --> 01:00:37.422 And until next time go bills.