Sales Strategy Synopsis for Transportation Companies with Multiple Services

Sales Strategy Synopsis for Transportation Companies with Multiple Services

A transportation company with several divisions, and/or offering multiple services, should cross-sell their services, in order to increase switching costs and discourage substitutes. Offering the customer multiple interwoven services helps to increase switching costs and discourages the customer from seeking out other transportation companies.
Convergent Marketing- The Company’s services should be branded with the parent company name. The company should have a collaborative sales team operating under a single brand, with customized service offerings to serve individual customer’s needs.
Diversification- The greater the number of businesses in a company’s portfolio, the more difficult it is for management to find time to keep well enough informed about the complexities of all the businesses to manage them properly. Companies have the best chance of being successful at diversification if they capitalize on the existing relationships between business units by having them transfer skills and share activities.
Companies that sell multiple services should also determine the most powerful method(s) for showing prospects both the cost savings and the intangible benefits that they offer. Concrete examples of past successes should be used (such as case studies), including the details of how cost savings were achieved, concentrating on companies where the company acted as a lead logistics provider, or provided multiple services.
Sales Strategy- Listen to the customer. Understanding consumer needs and perceptions is the key to good strategic customer planning. Good companies will use both simple (point of service response cards) and sophisticated (customer focus groups) methods to find ways to improve their products and services in ways that are desired by customers.
Assess the competition’s market position, plans and strength- Competition has increased so much that achieving continuous improvement and exceeding customers’ expectations no longer assures faster-than-market growth in profits. It is the underlying strategy that will lead to sustainable competitive advantage. Accelerated profitable growth requires strategic cross-selling of the company’s transportation services (that the customer perceives are needed).

Account Retention: How to be a preferred vendor and more profitable. As the relationship matures into the retention phase, the account becomes very profitable if it is retained. Sales and service costs drop because the customer and vendor know how to work with one another. If the account is lost, the profit stream stops. If the account was a fairly new one, the acquisition cost might not even be recovered.
Customer satisfaction leads to customer retention, which provides the opportunity for account dominance or primacy. The long-term primary supplier typically gets higher realized prices as well. This may not be much as a percentage of sales, but it goes right to the bottom line. The preferred vendor also tends to have the ability to take a richer product mix with higher profit margins.
The salesperson plays a critical profit-generation role either in negotiating individually or in providing the information upon which headquarters-level executives make pricing decisions. These decisions are often clouded by customer threats and competitive activity.
The sales force, more than any other function, is responsible for profit-generation. If it falls down by choosing the wrong accounts, makes promises that can’t be kept, poorly manages the accounts or neglects its customer liaison role, the profit machine falls apart.
Productive salespeople often make the difference between company success and failure. Although CRM programs can monitor sales productivity, the best approach to driving sales productivity should be focused on the interaction between the salesperson and the customer. Teaching salespeople standard methods of prospecting, follow-up, cross-selling and making sure competitive pricing proposals are presented to prospective customers, on-time and administratively correct, are examples of the sort of sales enablement that works best.