Convergent Marketing and the Role of the Salesperson

Competition has increased so much in the transportation/logistics industry 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 services.

Convergent Marketing is used when all of the services offered by your company are branded with the parent company name. In this situation, your company strategy should be to have a collaborative sales team operating under a single brand, with customized service offerings to serve individual customer’s needs.

Transportation companies that sell multiple services should 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, including the details of how cost savings were achieved, concentrating on examples where the company acted as a lead logistics provider, or at least provided multiple services.

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, making promises that can’t be kept, poorly managing the accounts or neglecting its customer liason role, the profit machine falls apart.

The more “roots” you can sink into a customer’s business, the more likely you are to retain their business. Providers are adding more and more services to their portfolio, as customers demand more integrated solutions. Sales and service costs drop over time, because the customer and vendor learn how to work with one another. 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. 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.

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, cross-selling, follow-up 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 work best.