I'm glad you asked
Salma,
I'm glad you asked. The amount of work it takes to find a new customer is often under appreciated by carriers. I am a broker and we spend most of our resources securing new business.
We call, call, call, call, call!!!!! As a matter of fact we call 100 new prospects for every new customer. We've been tracking this for years and it is pretty constant. Out of those 100 maybe 25 will give you the time of day. Twenty of the 25 are just jerking your chain. The remaining 5 are serious and one out of the 5 you can come to some sort of deal on pricing/service.
The answer is if you want 10 new customers you have to call 1000 prospects.
A sales rep can make about 20 prospecting calls per day (actual talk tos) so that's about 1 new customer per week per sales rep. Do the math!!!! Let's say a sales rep costs $40,000 plus payroll taxes and benefits = $50,000. They take minimum 2 weeks vacation so each new customer costs $1000.
Each customer has to move at least 10 loads with you just to break even on the cost to aquire them!!!! This is why brokers get so upset when there is a service failure. If they lose the customer all that investment has no payback.
Salma, the short answer is it's a lot of hard work. There is no easy way to get new customers. Some may argue, just lower the rates... however, a customer that switches to you to save $20 on a load will switch to someone else to $5 on a load. You're always chasing your tail and you won't make any profit.
Customers who switch to you because you solve a problem for them stay with you, regardless of what other rates people are offering. That's my advice. If more reps took this approach, the pricing in the industry would be much more reasonable.
Weigh your options, you can spend $1000 to obtain a new customer or you can outsource it to a broker to do it for you. That's what we do! Just wanted to give you another perspective on this.
