Know your CRM
If you’re in the transportation business, you’re also in the acronym business. It’s amazing how many of them are part of our industry lingo. In fact, there are so many that Gene Orlick, a trucking pal from Canada, produces an annual list. The 2014 version of Gene’s List contains 138 legit entries, plus a dozen zingers that only his closest buddies will get.
It depends
It’s like clockwork. Whenever someone calls me about selling their company, they respond to my spiel with the exact same question: “What’s my business worth?” My answer is always the same but never the one they expect: “It depends.”
Let’s talk price
Pricing power—or the ability to raise rates without losing a customer—is hard to achieve in a commoditized business like transportation. But a report from Simon-Kucher & Partners gives reason to hope.
Mining for pricing gold
The need to fill the widening social media pipeline with “content” has everyone writing studies. As a regular columnist, my inbox is inundated with white papers, surveys, and reports from consultants that almost never get read. During a recent email purge, however, I came across two studies written almost 10 years apart that reveal a lot about transportation pricing.
Let’s put it in writing
I’m continually puzzled by our industry’s approach to contracts. Few carriers feel the need to have contracts with customers, and many flat-out refuse to see the value in them. We have no problem spending millions of dollars in equipment so a customer can “try us out.” If he doesn’t like us, we expect him to cordially return the iron so it can rot against the fence until sales can find some other “tryout” customer.
Lessons learned
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer surprised people when she recently decreed that the tech company’s employees would no longer be allowed to work from home. Never one to miss a chance to grab a headline, Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, reacted by calling her decision “old school thinking.”
Rx for January Syndrome
Every January I see a surge of suppliers who want to set up meetings. It seems like every Dale Carnegie comes back from the holidays committed to working harder and being a better version of last year’s model. It’s the same reason the company fridge is full of salads the first month of the year. I call it the “January Syndrome.”
Sale away
It didn’t hit me until my bride and I were going through customs in France, excited about our much-needed European getaway. After scrutinizing my passport, the agent raised his head and asked what I did for a living. I whispered, “Unemployed.”
Yes, in October, my partners and I sold the freight-brokerage/trucking hybrid we started 22 years ago in Toronto with a phone and a fax machine. I was no longer in sales management; no longer had a paycheck.
On a scale of 1 to 10
I cringe when I look at some of my older columns. Time has made some of my thoughts so contradicting, I wonder what song sheet I was singing from back then. One area where I’ve changed my tune is the value of customer surveys. In the past, I’ve penned how essential they are, insisted they be done annually, and made a lot of important business decisions based on their results. Fast-forward a decade and I think customer surveys of any kind are totally and utterly useless. A waste of your time and your customers’.
You are your brand
The day you become a parent is the day a trip to Disney gets automatically added to the family bucket list. These days, it’s almost mandatory that every kid feels the “Magic” and parties once with Mickey, Goofy, and the rest of the gang. As a parent, you stand zero chance of competing against one of the world’s strongest brands and the apparent guilt that goes with not taking the chickadees to the Magic Kingdom.
Life of the party
Twitter is by far and away the fastest growing social media site (even more than Facebook). Two hundred and fifty million times a day, someone tweets a 140-character message telling followers, “Here’s what I’m doing.” It’s the central theme of Twitter.
Frankly, I never got it. Other than my immediate family, I have zero interest in what someone else had for dinner. Even more confusing to me is why anyone would have one iota of interest in the mundane details of my life when I barely do.
Google yourself
Much to the chagrin of the rest of the McCarron tribe, my foray into social media began about a year ago when I started dabbling in the world of Facebook
Lose the cost drivers and win
This sudden surge in demand for trucking services doesn't mean that our industry's long-term challenges are over. In fact, I hear the same old rhetoric
How to respond to an RFQ?
Responding to bids is one of the many things we do to fill trucks. Call them what you like tenders, RFQs, RFPs they really amount to nothing more than
Dad is on Facebook!
It created chaos for my entire family. As the news spread, their phones and BlackBerrys sounded like Vegas slot machines
