The Four Problems with Growing Wallet Share Today
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Definition of Wallet Share
- The amount of transportation spend your brokerage owns out of an existing customer’s total transportation spend.
1. You don’t know what you don’t have
Brokerages today
Every brokerage knows what they have. They know what lanes they manage for a customer, what volume they usually ship on those lanes, what revenue they can expect, etc.
A good account manager also knows what pain points their customer has on these lanes, the KPI’s they care about, the requirements for pickup, delivery, and carriers. Most of all, they know why a customer uses them over any competitor.
True visibility
But when it comes to growing wallet share, it’s not about knowing what you have. It’s about knowing what you don’t have.
You need full visibility on what else is available. You need to know how many lanes they are running with competitors as well as the typical volume and going rate on those lanes. Having an accurate insight into the total potential upside of every customer is crucial.
From a high level, this is great to understand how much of their spend you’re not currently working with, but in order to break into each of those lanes, you need a strategy and process to wrestle those opportunities away from incumbent competitors and make your slice bigger.
2. You need a strategy & process
Strategy
First, Account managers need a strategy for how they are going to win more business with a customer. This strategy should involve uncovering all of the pain points a customer has in their supply chain, and it should help account managers have specific conversations about specific opportunities with the end goal being new lane or additional volume acquisition.
Process
Second, there needs to be a process to coach account managers through the strategy and create consistency across the brokerage. Every account manager grows and manages business differently. This creates a lot of variability in the success of farming and growing accounts.
Coaching Points
Third, team leaders need coaching points to discuss with account managers and metrics to track wallet share growth. These metrics need to be better than the typical: what the customer spent last month vs. this month vs. potentially next month.
3. CRM’s don’t help with this at all
It’s interesting that the system brokerages use to acquire customers is then instantly abandoned 9/10 times once a prospect signs a credit app. The account and/or opportunity used to bring this customer into your network are left to rot.
They don’t fit the industry
CRM’s have never been an effective tool for account management and building wallet share simply because they do not understand freight. Logistics is about selling a service every single day across multiple areas, not about selling a one time product to a customer.
For this reason CRM’s are left in the dust. Account managers utilize email and Excel in order to build relationships and keep track of lanes and freight. There’s never been a tool specialized for farming accounts, growing wallet share.
4. Little urgency
Once a shipper signs a credit app, their entire freight spend could potentially be yours in the future. It’s all about how you serve them over time and if you ask the right questions in order to have those opportunities.
Ask for more
Don’t just wait for your customer to think about you one day and give you a shot on a new lane. Ask them constantly if there is anything else you can do for them.
Account managers should be doing this with a sense of urgency. How quickly can we grow this customer from $10,000/mo to $1,000,000/mo? That should be the attitude.
Conclusion
Account management is underserved in information, direction, and tech when it comes to growing wallet share with an existing customer.
The lack of a consistent strategy and a formalized process for doing this across a brokerage is the root cause. For years, accounts have been grown slowly because account managers simply haven’t been pointed in the right direction by management (because they don’t know any more than the account managers) and technology (because there isn’t a system that creates a consistent process for this).
Terralanes’ Solution
Terralanes allows users to build and visualize wallet share profiles for customers, locations and lanes. On each profile, we guide account managers to have specific conversations about these opportunities, putting you in the best situation to win them.
For management, we’re making the intangible tangible, allowing you to see what you have, what you don’t have, and what your total potential with any customer could be.
