Working the Spot Market, Cold Calling Success, and Career Transitions in Logistics | Final Mile 96

Speaker 1: 0:19

Welcome back for another Q&A session here. It's the final mile and we've got three questions from the community today that we will get right into. But first please take a moment to check out all of our other content at Freight360.net. You'll find the Freight Broker Basics course there for a educational option for yourself or your team, and check out the sponsors in the description or show notes to help support Freight360. All right, Ben, first question this came, I think, from it was a YouTube comment.

Speaker 1: 0:49

So the spot market for loads isn't necessarily available on load boards? Can brokers find loads directly on those boards? The only way to secure shipments is to first find customers or shippers independently and then post them to move their freight. So yeah, I want to. I want to just kind of first of all say the load board is not where you should be going to look for freight If you are a freight broker.

Speaker 1: 1:15

The load board is where motor carriers and freight brokers will typically connect with one another. Carriers are looking for freight to move, Brokers are looking for trucks to haul their customers freight. So if this if this person asking the question is asking regarding a brokerage perspective the spot market relates, what that means is that's like the daily available freight that customers have that wasn't contracted out previously. All right, and they're going to get that access to that freight from talking with their customers on a daily basis, sometimes in a form of an email that's sent out to the brokers throughout the day or throughout the week. Now, if this is a carrier asking this question, the spot load market would likely be what you're seeing on the load boards, or at least the majority of it, but that's from a carrier's perspective. Did I miss anything in there? Do you want to clarify anything?

Speaker 2: 2:08

No, I'll just use kind of like I don't know. I'll explain it again just from a different perspective to get everyone to understand. It's like the spot market are all of the available loads that brokers have that they put out, usually for the next day or over the next couple of days, maybe a week in advance, right? They're all the short-term loads that all the brokers all over the country have that they are putting out for carriers to either bid on, take or just work on. It happens in one or two or three ways, right? One is they're going to go to a load board. A load board is just part of the marketplace. The spot market is all of those loads, right? So DAT is the largest marketplace of the spot market loads all being put out by brokers for carriers to get Carriers also put up their trucks for brokers to see Truck stop second largest, and then there's a bunch of smaller ones.

Speaker 2: 2:59

Second way that happens is you can just email the loads you have to a bunch of carriers you've already worked with and say, hey, these are what I got this week. Does anybody want them? That's also where that happens. Those aren't publicly available but they are still considered spot market loads, right? And the third would be just a phone call, right? So they're all just short-term loads that need to be negotiated between a broker and a carrier.

Speaker 2: 3:21

Shippers don't typically participate, even though they technically could, because shippers don't have the ability to vet and onboard a carrier in a short amount of time, get them set up and then pay them and then do that, and they also don't want to go through that work. They're not going to go and onboard a carrier to move one load. That is the value that brokers provide to the shippers, and how we get that is by literally creating the spot market. Without brokers, there is no spot market, there's no load boards, there's nothing. There's just carriers working with whoever they've been able to talk to yeah, it's a great way to explain it all, right?

Speaker 1: 3:55

uh, next question out of the 80 calls you have to make, how many answer on the first call and if they don't answer, how many call you back? So we use like the 80 to 100 calls a day like metric. That's kind of where I think where this is coming from. So I'll tell you. I'm curious what your metrics you would say you would answer on this, because the last time I actually tracked it if I were to see if it was, if I'm looking at 80 calls, I basically did like two.

Speaker 1: 4:23

I did it with one of our guys on the team. We did I think we did like 240 call sessions or something around that. So I'll just combine them. I want to say we probably had a dozen to 15 people that we got on the phone, but those weren't all the people that we want to talk to. A lot of times it was a gatekeeper or a, an operator or something like that. Out of the 80, we probably had like three conversations, one of which was basically just overcoming objections the whole time, and the other two were. You know, we're definitely worthy of a followup. So that's, those are the metrics that I can give you from the last time I tracked it. What have you seen when you work with somebody, or last time you tracked yours?

Speaker 2: 5:10

I would also say that you should expect almost zero to call you back, so I wouldn't leave a voicemail Zero callbacks, nobody's calling you back, right, I mean?

Speaker 1: 5:18

Let me add one more thing in, too, is that tracking those metrics is actually an eye-opening thing, because when you start to realize that certain times of the day, when you get more of the check mark on the column of no one, no one answered that those things help you refine your, your techniques, but go ahead so.

Speaker 2: 5:35

And also there's a technique and this goes through all sales, but I've always liked it it's when know your numbers, you can count the misses, and it actually has like a positive effect, meaning like if my numbers are, I call a hundred companies a day and I speak to say on a good day, five. And when I say speak to, I want to clarify to your point like that is not a gatekeeper that answered the phone, an admin or a secretary that says that person's not in, that doesn't count, it's a decision maker or the person you need to speak to about the business you would want to do with them, right? So it's like if I call 100 and my numbers were like out of 100, a good day was five, a horrible day was zero and average was two to three is really where my numbers kind of fell right. A horrible day was zero and average was two to three is really where my numbers kind of fell Right. And then what you could do is you count the misses because statistically, every 95 phone calls I make I'm going to speak to somebody. So I know like once I got 50 or 60 misses, statistically, someone's probably going to pick up the phone pretty soon and that actually has a psychological effect. Where it's you're more optimistic because you know that eventually you're going to get to somebody the more shots you take, right. So it is really good to know those numbers and that's the other thing you pointed out.

Speaker 2: 6:49

For anybody out, there is like when and I mean when by the time of day and the day of the week, at which time you'll reach certain people, changes different on the industry and who you're reaching out to. For instance, I would use this example it's like I prospected bakeries for a period of time right. Well, after like a week of calling and talking to a whole lot of gatekeepers or people that weren't, who tendered freight, I found that like, oh, they keep completely different hours. Bakeries tend to open at like two in the morning and are done with their day at noon because they got to bake the bread, get it shipped to the stores before the stores open. So, like the decision makers were literally on, you could call them at six in the morning or five, 30, like Eastern standard, and you would reach them because nobody else was calling. That time of day, again, executives tends to work better, like they tend to be the first people in. So if you call before eight o'clock at seven, 15 or seven, 30, sometimes they're the only ones in the office, so the highest person sometimes is there early and late and that's a good like trick.

Speaker 2: 7:51

And then the other thing is, like you'll notice that like based on your, if you look at you work at a big brokerage you'll notice that, like everybody's days of the week are a little different. Like folks that ship certain commodities are really busy Monday mornings and don't slow down until Tuesday. Why? Because lots of their freight was supposed to deliver over the weekend, so all the stuff that didn't, there's a ton of work to do when you show up. Well, if you call that shipper, you're going to see the same thing. Like they're not going to answer the phone Monday morning because they're rescheduling, going through everything that should have happened and didn't happen over the weekend. You might reach them Tuesday afternoon when they slow down.

Speaker 2: 8:22

Some companies don't ship on the weekend and, like you could reach them at 10 o'clock on a Monday because, like their week, their orders haven't really come in yet and they tend to just be, honestly, kind of like reading the news, doing some admin stuff. So you want to bucket your leads to be able to like garner these insights as you're calling to go like man, I've called every day, monday through Thursday. No one answered. Thursday afternoon I reached 15 people, between two and four. Well, there's probably a bit of information that you could use moving forward that, like out of this whole group, these folks tended to answer all on the same day, at the same time of the week.

Speaker 1: 9:01

So let me I'll give you this is unrelated, but it was just an interesting how to like when you're making, making these calls, how to get through, because people are always like yeah, you know, you know, gatekeeper always stops me.

Speaker 1: 9:07

So, if you remember, I was telling about like the, the double brokered loads recently they were trying to clean up.

Speaker 1: 9:11

I had four customers that I had to call, four shippers I had to call last week and I had to get to the traffic department to verify if you know, if those, if they had loads that were actually real and you know who they tended them out to. So here I am calling as a guy from a freight brokerage trying to get a shipping manager on the phone, right, and I'm like, I'm like this is going to suck because they're going to like you know that no one's going to pass me through, but I, you know, I, the way we talk about like having a sense of urgency or sounding like it's something's really important, dude, I got through to three of the four and got a return call after a voicemail from the fourth um, because I said, you know, I don't remember exactly what it was, but it's something along the lines of like, hey, um, I just had a question about some of your shipments. We have a load that I think might have been double brokered and wanted to verify with you guys right through.

Speaker 1: 10:07

Like and I'm not telling you guys to lie, but I want you to think that's. Those are the kinds of calls that get through. So think creatively how you phrase yourself.

Speaker 2: 10:15

Two things that went out of. That is I used to work in banking, right, so we had to make cold calls to businesses and the thing I remember them telling us very early on is like how you leave a message is really important. You're calling a customer of a bank and if you leave a message like this is Ben from PNC Bank, I need you to call me back, and you just hang up. You can be sure that that person is calling you right Because, like, they don't know what's going on. You're calling from the bank. They don't know if somebody stole their money, if there's something wrong with their account. But here's the thing to your point, when you do that, you get a huge amount of return calls and they're all pissed off. Why? Because they're terrified and they're calling you because they think something happened to their money right.

Speaker 2: 10:54

Same thing in our scenario is like if you aren't selling yet and you've managed or just booked loads and you're working your way into sales, like if you call a shipper because your driver has a problem at that dock, nine times out of 10, you'll get the same person on the phone in one phone call that you call prospecting and can't get. It's just your tone of voice If I pick up the phone and call a shipper and go hey man, I need to speak to somebody in shipping, and that scenario would be like look, I got a driver. I'm not sure if he's at the right dock. I got a bunch of issues. Can you just push me through to who I need to talk to? Boom, gatekeeper, right to the decision maker.

Speaker 2: 11:28

I call that same company the next day. This is Ben from XYZ Logistics. Can I speak to somebody in shipping? Who is this? What do you need? What is this regarding Click thing? Who is this? What do you need? What is this regarding Click? I'm never getting through how you say. What you're going and what you're going to say are the two biggest determinants to whether or not you're going to get through a gatekeeper.

Speaker 1: 11:50

Yep, great point, all right. Our last one has anyone had success switching from a more pure sales role to more of an account management or operations role? Figure the pay will be less but better on the work-life balance. This one actually came from Reddit. I pulled it from the freight brokers community there. Okay, I don't. I don't have an answer specifically to this question. Maybe you do. I just wanted to take a take a minute to talk about what kind of expectations you should have in these different roles. So I think that that answer to that question just really depends on what those roles mean at the company that you're working for.

Speaker 1: 12:27

When he says pure sales role to more of an account management or operation, so this sounds like less cold calling and more of the easy work, right? Which is why they said, like you know, less pay but work-life balance. My first thing is like, if you're good at sales and it pays more, why would you stop? I mean, unless you're burnt out, which they said work-life balance, but I would say, like I always like to be, but someone else is bringing that business to the table. If I'm in operations, I really don't have much impact at all, except for maybe how much I'm going to pay a truck.

Speaker 1: 13:20

But I, you know, when you're looking to move around in your company, I really think it's worth having a conversation with your boss or your leadership or whoever, periodically about you know just overall, like where you're at, how things are going, where do you want to be in the future and what are those, like what needs to happen for you to get to that place, whether that's a paycheck number or a role or a, you know, work life balance, whatever you know, whatever that looks like. But I've also seen like the people that produce the revenue tend to kind of be put on a pedestal more than like an operations person at a lot of companies, that they're afforded more flexibility, they're afforded more decision making. You know all that stuff. So I'm curious what your take would be like. Think about if you had a guy in your company that's like, hey, instead of being a sales guy, maybe I'll go manage these house accounts or do operations. Like what would you? What are your thoughts on that concept?

Speaker 2: 14:20

So this person is probably working in a brokerage. That's cradle to the grave, meaning. Like they've got to sell and run their own freight and they're like, hey, if I could just run the freight coming in, I would have a better work life balance. Like could just run the freight coming in, I would have a better work-life balance. Like you're definitely going to make less money, right, because you're also creating less value and also there's a lot of risk there. Even if you do negotiate a good comp package as an account manager, a lot of what you make to your point earlier, nate is like out of your control If the market tanks and your customers just don't ship as much. Like you're going to make less money If your customers disappear because someone bought their company and they have their own transportation department and it's all gone. Like you don't really have any ability to fix that or to bring more in. So like you're the first guy that's either going to get let go or moved into another admin role.

Speaker 1: 15:10

that's going to pay even less. We saw this in COVID man. The first layoffs were the non-revenue producers.

Speaker 2: 15:16

And the other thing too is like I think there's more flexibility in sales, but it really depends on the definition of the role and the company you work for. Like I know outside sales folks that make decent money in freight and they travel a lot. Maybe there's not work-life balance, but they have flexibility in their schedule. I know folks that work in some companies where sales and freight brokerages just bring on accounts and then handing them off to customers. They do well and have flexibility in what and how when they're working right. Account managers tend to have less flexibility Monday through Friday, because you got to be there when the freight's moving, yeah, and somebody's got to be there, which means if you are taking time to come and go from the office, the company's paying somebody below you to make sure that freight's getting booked. And then at a certain point it's like what value are you adding? And like.

Speaker 2: 16:03

The last point I always want to say is like, think about it simply as like to take any money out of a company, you've got to create value for that company.

Speaker 2: 16:12

Like, how much value are you creating for that company?

Speaker 2: 16:16

Because as things get more and more automated, there's going to be a point at which, like taking information out of one screen and putting it into another isn't creating a whole lot of value and can be outsourced.

Speaker 2: 16:28

So maybe it's because you got good relationships and you manage accounts very well and you're good at problem solving and you understand lots of different equipment types and how and what to do, Like that creates a lot of value or it prevents a lot of problems, which one way or the other preventing a bad thing and creating more good things both create value right, Just on different sides. So, like, the more value you create, the more money you can take out of the company. And again, whether your salary plus commission like to me that is the simplest way you want to think about it it's like, okay, what am I really doing that helps this company either make more money or spend less money, or both, and how can I do more of those things in a way that gives me that balance in my life? And there's again, if that role doesn't exist in your company now, there are lots of other companies that may have that role defined differently, with different responsibilities, different hours and different expectations.

Speaker 1: 17:18

Yeah, it makes me think of we talked with Trey Greggs a couple of years ago about like how man this was probably like three or four years ago I was at my old house but like we were talking about how like as leaders, you can't assume that all of your team members like value things equally, like one might value the pay and other might value the flexibility more. One might value the work from home, time off.

Speaker 2: 17:46

Some people want more security and less commission, someone, way more upside and less security on the salary. And also the important, important thing is, this does not stay the same over the course of your career. In my 20s, I want way more commission, less security. If you have a family, maybe you need a little more security and more benefits and a little less commission. Bit more flexibility, where you used to be able to work 12, 14 hours three weeks in a row and then take a day off, where, like, these things don't stay the same indefinitely either. And I think having these conversations, both as an employee with your boss and your boss to your employees, is super important.

Speaker 1: 18:24

Yeah, I remember I had, uh, um, I worked with a girl years ago that like when it came time for her review, she went in and like didn't want to race. She just like wanted more time off. She's like she's like, yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to ask for another week off and like at the end of the day the boss was like that's all she wanted. Like she could ask for that six months ago. Like we're all about giving people time off, that they want it, that they want it, Whereas me I went to the same boss at one point and tried to get them to change me from W-2 to 1099 and put me straight commission, because I wanted the earning potential. So everyone's different. Like I wanted to. You know, hey, I don't want to be forced to sit here for eight hours a day and be limited to this. I want to be able to work whenever I want and be able to write my own paycheck based on my my efforts. So same with me.

Speaker 2: 19:18

And one of the main reasons that entrepreneurship and running my own businesses like appeals to me is I want every decision I have I want to be responsible for and I want it to have an impact on how much money I bring in good and bad Right.

Speaker 2: 19:31

I want to be in a place where, like, I can create the flexibility where, like there was nothing that pissed me off more in my entire career of, like, banking hours. You just got to be here eight to five, no matter what good or bad, like just punching in and punching out, and no matter how hard you worked or little, that never changed. I'm, like I want to be able to work harder, faster and smarter, to be able to get more done and then benefit from it, either having more money or being able to go. Hey, I'm leaving two hours early to go see my kid at whatever, but like I did two times the amount of work the average person does in this amount of time. Like I want to be able to take the benefits for improving. But again, everybody teach their own on what is the most important to them in these scenarios.

Speaker 1: 20:13

Great questions, though, as always, continue to send them our way and we'll answer them as we can. Final thoughts Ben.

Speaker 2: 20:20

Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right.

Speaker 1: 20:24

And until next time go Bills.