Issue #22: Put on your carrier sales hat, shirt, and pants

The first half of my career was spent in carrier sales and I still talk to carriers on a daily basis. Carriers might be my favorite part of freight as I reflect on the carrier sales function.

Carrier sales has the word “sales” in it for a reason, you’re selling. As a carrier sales rep, you’re selling a carrier on why they should take a load that your company has over another company’s. And why they should take your rate. Usually one doesn’t happen without the other aligning.

There’s so much that goes into carrier sales besides dialing for dollars and getting a carrier to take a load for a target rate. Every load has something unique about it, whether it’s live loading or a drop trailer, maybe it needs fumigation or scale tickets, or potentially requires a PROFEPA inspection at the border on a shipment of pallets going to Mexico. Being a great carrier rep has always been about knowing what your carriers need, from the lane to the type of freight to the way in which a facility operates. It’s about helping your carriers match up with the right freight.

When I think about what I want to know about a carrier, it breaks down into a few categories:

Who are they?

Are they an owner-operator>? Or a small, medium, or large carrier? Maybe a private fleet? How many trucks, trailers, and drivers do they have? What type of trailers and how many of each? Do they only run solo drivers or do they also run teams? Is it company drivers or leased owner-operators? So many questions to ask a carrier just to understand what they do.

Understanding all those details tells you how much freight you’ll need to find your carrier, it tells you if they’ll haul dry or refrigerated or open deck freight, and if they have more trailers than tractors, it likely means they can do a drop trailer lane too.

What do they like to haul and where do they haul it?

Some carriers haul anything. Some specialize in automotive or chemicals or temp-controlled food products. If they specialize in something, you typically try to feed them more freight that fits their specialization. Some carriers are particular about certain commodities that they won’t haul, like scrap metal or used beverage cans (leaking old sticky beer all over a trailer). A lot of cross-border carriers won’t haul cow hides as it makes their trailers dirty and impossible to clean out the stench.

Some carriers run local freight while others run regional, and some run nation-wide and some service Mexico and/or Canada as well. You need to understand whether it’s an owner-op who can run loops within your network or if they have their own direct customer freight and need backhauls or consistent freight getting them home. Those types of carriers have totally different behaviors and needs. They all create a positive impact on improving logistics across North America, whether they run freight from Monterrey NLE to the Southeastern United States or Toronto ON to Dallas TX.

What can impact a carrier relationship?

All it takes is one canceled load without a TONU or a driver deadheading 250mi before having a load cancel and being offered $150 for a TONU before a carrier cuts their relationship off with a broker. MIT published a study called “Elephants or Goldfish?: An Empirical Analysis of Carrier Reciprocity in Dynamic Freight Markets”, by Angela Acocella, Chris Caplice, and Yossi Sheffi. It talks about how shippers or brokers have memories like elephants, whereas carriers have memories like goldfish. A shipper or broker will end up holding a grudge against a provider for a long longer than a carrier will hold against a customer who’s offering them freight.

Sure, a carrier may come back quickly to a broker who previously treated them unfairly, but they may start raising their rates by $50-100 on everything they quote for that broker. Broker reputation with carriers matters deeply, something I heard often while visiting Laredo and talking to carriers about what we’re building. Carriers care about if a broker will respond quickly when there’s issues, they don’t want to be harassed for tracking updates nonstop throughout a load (to be fair, if they just turn on auto-tracking it won’t be an issue…), they want to be paid fairly for moving freight and for related accessorial charges, and they want to put in a position to do a great job for their customer.

When it comes to cross-border carriers, there’s even more nuance to how they operate and what makes them tick. Most carriers who service Mexico, for example, have B1 drivers who run freight for them. Those B1 drivers start in Mexico, cross the border, and deliver the freight. After delivering, their next load needs to take them back to the southern border, they can’t do a domestic load (it’s called cabotage). You can read more about B1 drivers in Issue #10: How freight gets across the U.S.-Mexico border. So those carriers are limited by what freight they can haul and where they’ll haul it, knowing they need their next load to bring them back to the border.

How does a shipper of choice factor into this?

One of the first questions a carrier asks about a new lane out of Mexico is who the shipper is. They want to know if it’s going to take two hours or two weeks to get a trailer loaded. Or they’re wondering if it’s one of those facilities that will reject every trailer, even ones that smell too new. They worry about wasting time when there’s so much demand out of Mexico that they would rather get loaded at a facility that is easy to engage with and works efficiently. Drop trailer can be efficient as long as trailers turn regularly. Most carriers who run cross-border freight have a 3:1 trailer-to-tractor ratio and they’re more than willing to do a drop trailer on a regular lane.

Carriers care about equipment velocity – they want their trucks and trailers moving efficiently, hauling freight consistently to keep downtown at a minimum. They care about their equipment staying in great condition as that equipment is their livelihood and repairs can be costly. They don’t want a product ruining the floors or walls of a trailer as it limits the type of freight they can haul. Shippers take food grade requirements seriously and will reject trailers when it comes to products being consumed by people. Having dirty or damaged trailers cuts a carrier off from getting access to that type of freight.

There’s a lot that goes into what makes a load or lane appealing to a carrier. Shippers who earn “Shipper of Choice” awards have to check so many boxes to keep their providers happy. The ones who make the effort will see the rewards in the type of pricing and service they receive. Remember that comment about carriers raising their rates when brokers treat them unfairly? When carriers are treated fairly, they treat their customers equally, if not better.

P.S.: We’re hiring.

If you feel similar to how I feel about carriers and you happen to live in El Paso TX, you should apply for our Border Partnerships Manager role.