TMS & CRM Integration, Double Brokering, & Commissions | Final Mile #33

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It's an online self-paced course that'll help you get started in Freight Brokerage and grow your business . Our first customer or , I'm sorry , our first customer our first customer question . This came via email and she asked is there a TMS that integrates CRM capabilities for prospecting ?

So this is a great question , and so my brokerage uses MacLeod and I get this question from our agents all the time . They're like , oh , there's a CRM in here . The reality is , a lot of TMS companies are really good at creating transportation software and they aren't great at making CRM software .

They might have some little CRM module in there just to manage customers in general , but not with all of the functionality of follow-ups and tracking conversations and all of that stuff . What's your experience with that then ? I'm curious .

I think most of them are designed from the developer standpoint , not the users . But I do think there are a few that are very good and I think those tend to be people that have worked in the industry and things . But to this point it's great when they're integrated because they're your two systems , your CRM .

If they're separate , is the funnel that feeds your TMS . So knowing when a prospect becomes a customer and having to jump between two systems is problematic and kind of a pain in the ass . There are definitely a few that are integrated . We looked at one this week MVMT , mvmt . Yeah , and we talked about this too .

The developers of MVMT , m , v , m T right , I guess movement right , like well , you know the developer and the one of the designers we were talking with yesterday , like he has a lot of experience at the larger brokerages and I think Echo and we talked about the problem right in even bigger brokerages , when they're not connected , and most bigger brokerages don't

have them connected , and then- .

So like , if a customer goes inactive , they don't often get sent back into the prospecting funnel , or the data gets lost , or it only worked one way and not the other and it creates lots of issues , lots of prospecting disputes between somebody that is now working with a company and somebody else is trying to onboard with a branch .

We used to run into that constantly . So , like , having them in one place is very , very valuable , if it is doable , for sure .

If somebody new comes in and wants to prospect the customer that they already had or a prospect that somebody else had already had in the past , they got to create a whole new record .

So now you don't have like a paper trail that shows like oh , it was this person's on this day , here's the amount of revenue they did , or here's where they got in the prospecting phase . So it is frustrating , and I , like , personally , have always used an external CRM and just done it manually .

I am glad , though , you're right , we checked out movement this week , this week . This is pretty cool . I think the same goes with-so I guess here's my answer . Is there a TMS that integrates CRM and TMS ? Yes , a lot of them do . What I think is most important is your personal preference as a broker .

This is why I always recommend it , if you're looking at TMSs or CRMs or a combo , do a ton of demos Like do your research , because these are the tools that you're going to be using day in and day out for a very long period of time and it is hard to switch a software provider when you're so used to , whether it's just you and you're ingrained with it ,

or if you're company and all the employees or individuals working there are so used to one system , then you just switch . There's a lot of resistance to it . Some of them talk from CRM to the TMS , but not back . Some do both . Some don't do that at all .

So I would just say , depending on what's important to you and how you're going to use it , play around with different software companies out there . There's a lot of new web-based TMS providers that have some really cool functionality . With that you're going to get a ton of different varying pricing models and all of that .

There's a lot that goes into vetting out what kind of TMS you want to use . So that's my take on it . Next question I love this one If double brokering is illegal , why is it so common ? Is there a legal action to prevent this ? This was from our Facebook group .

One of the talking points to all the congressmen and women was we've had 80,000 complaints to the Department of Transportation about illegal brokerage practices and not a single one was investigated at that point . 80,000 . And that's just what was reported .

There's way more instances of it , but the reason why it was so common is that nothing was being done about it , and what's happened since then is you've seen a lot of solutions and SOPs go into action to help prevent a lot of this fraud , and that comes down to identity verification and looking at reporting things like the TIA Watchdog list or products like

Highway . We had Michael Cainian talk about Highway a few months back . So things like that happened . But the reality is the federal government it's our government and the FMCSA is a government entity , which means that they are not incentivized to go above and beyond to solve problems that exist in our industry .

Unless there's enough pressure put on them , that would be . Their incentive is they're getting heat from their constituents . That's why we continue to lobby every single year .

Chris Burroughs from TIA , who runs their government affairs division they're like almost every single week lobbying with somebody about these issues that are going on and I think since Ann Rankies come into the TIA and they've done a really great job with that division and the relationships that they're building with people that sit on the different Senate and House

committees that actually create legislation All right . So , all that to say , I think we're headed in the right direction . It's going to be a continuous effort on everybody's part , right .

Eventually , I think double brokering will not be as prevalent as it is now , but I think fraud is going to continue to evolve and the bad actors are going to find new ways to do stuff , new ways to do plus and the software companies are going to create new ways to stop that .

So it's going to be a constant game of staying up to date with where we're vulnerable and how we're getting scanned by people . So that's why it's so common is because not much has been being done until recently .

So , for example , right One of the instances that I was involved with the client last year , they got double brokered two loads so give or take it was like eight or $10,000 for both of them . Right Now that same double brokered scam , I think the insurance agent said they got upwards of half a million dollars in 10 days .

But if you think about it , right , every individual carrier it doesn't usually make sense to pay an attorney to fight for $5,000 or $4,000 . Because again , you're weighing the time and the cost of the legal battle to the five grand . Oftentimes it just makes business sense to move on and I think that's one of the reasons why it also happens .

A lot is because one individual instance it's usually just cheaper to pay it to move on to keep business moving . But to the industry , that same double broker might have hit 25 brokers in a 10 day period and a lot of fraud . And again , from a government standpoint it's really hard to catch these people .

It's also really hard to find out where they are because they're shutting them down very quickly . So , again , yeah , there are laws or regulations on the books , but there is no enforcement as of now , and there are lots of ways that other third party companies outside of the government are preventing this .

And again , we're coming up with solutions that are very effective in some regards , right . Others that aren't very effective at all but are being advertised as very effective , right . So listen to our other episodes to hear our opinions on which products we use and why . But I mean , I think we're moving in the right direction anyway .

There are people that are just afraid to pick up the phone and therefore they're like I need to have 2000 leads before anything . Or people that just go out and they try to speed through this step and then just buy a crappy shipper list . But what is your opinion ?

For someone that's new , how full should their lead list be before you feel like they're in a good spot to be actively prospecting and not wasting time ?

Now the most common thing that we see is a new broker calls all 250 leads , speaks to 10 of them and then calls all those leads dead and finds another 250 .

The important piece is that you're following up with your leads until you reach a point where you've either disqualified them meaning they're not a good fit , you spoke to them and it won't work or you spoke to them and you qualified them and you're going to progress .

Once you've disqualified them , you move them out of your prospecting list and you add another one in to fill that bucket of your 250 . In fact , I wrote a YouTube video on this this morning . It'll be out in the next couple of weeks on what disqualifies a prospect and how to do this .

But where your goal and objective is is you've got 250 , you're calling , call it 50 a day , so that's your 250 for your first week Maybe you speak to two or three every day . The rest no answer . Maybe you left the voicemail , maybe nothing . You're going to follow up with those again next week .

So you're only adding a few and maybe not even eliminating anything in your first week . Call all of those . The next week , maybe your third week , you've disqualified some and you can refill that bucket . But it is a race to get to a place where you are actively engaged in a conversation , not emails .

You are speaking to somebody , they're speaking to you , you're having conversations with them . That's an active prospect . You are in a race to get to as many of those as you can as soon as possible .

So in your first month or two maybe you have a handful , but by six , four to six months you should have at least 50 to 75 active leads in your funnel , meaning you've spoke to them once or multiple times and they're in some stage between I spoke to them once and they're a customer , and then you just actively work those 50 to 75 , you disqualify a few every

week , hopefully , and you add a few new ones because you've connected with people . You've been trying to reach for a few weeks and you actively work that like stable of prospects and they start to fall into customers and then some get disqualified .

Just go to our website , freight360.net , and type in prospecting or sales or prospect in our search bar and there's dozens of content around that I would say this Nate too on that topic .

. Our next one is our final question is about money . Show me the money right . What's a typical commission for a sales only role rather than a cradle to grave role ? So this , I don't have a right answer . There's no right , or I mean we can give you some examples and some some stuff like that .

This is going to depend on the I'm going to say , probably the experience . Is it a brand new rep ? Is it an agent versus a W2 ? Are you providing them leads ? Are they doing their own lead gen ? Are they bringing any book of business with them ?

Let's say we're going with the standard business model of a brokerage splits up , carry your sales and customer sales , and I'm going to look at it from this angle and we'll say they have an average commission . What are the big boxes ? Commission pay like 25 ? Sorry , not commission salary 40 , 40 , right . And then a commission .

So I would tell you it's probably not uncommon to have , if your sales only you're not covering your own freight 10 , 15% maybe if all you're doing is selling and someone else is covering it . 10 is the one that I've seen specifically at certain companies . Now I've seen 20 to 25 . If it's Cradle to Grave , you might see even higher than that .

It depends on what the salary is . Is there benchmarks to hit ?

The reality is , though , if you're a W2 , there's only so much of the pie that can be given out in commission because of all the other expenses that go into it Training salaries , 401k , insurance tax , employer taxes , right Whereas if you're a 1099 , and none of that's provided for you , there's a bigger piece of the pie to be paid out .

So , but you might be a . If you're just out there and you're an account finder and they've got a procurement team that covers freight , maybe you can get more , like 25% or something like that . If you're a full Cradle to Grave agent , I mean 70% . It's pretty common out there for the leading agent-based companies , I think , and I would check out too .

We did an episode with Beth Carroll . She's the compensation guru for logistics companies and she's got a book what is it ? How to team the compensation monster , or something like that that we both read . And what I like about her take is that there's no right prescribed compensation formula .

It is going to depend heavily on how your company is structured , how you want to incentivize people and things of that nature and I remember we had Trey on one of the first episodes that Trey did with us years ago and he brought . A good point is that , like , people are incentivized by different things , it's not always just money . Some people want to .

If you look at even just money , some people want a heavier salary because it makes them feel more comfortable and others want as much commission flexibility as possible because they want to go better themselves . Others care more about I want to be able to work from home three days a week , or I want more time off , or I want fill in the blank , right .

So I think it all depends . But the common ones out there you're seeing a modest salary with probably somewhere in the 10 to 15% commission on an account seller . You also have to look at , like Ben , you and I have talked about this and I talked about it with one of our clients recently .

I think , if you look at the , I think there's like three levels of how freight brokering happens , but like three individual roles . And this is I'm not talking about like you're accounting , a back office . You have business development , account management and carrier sales . In my opinion , right , and I said business development , those are people that develop business .

They go out there and they find new . They're hunters . They go out there and they find new business . Account managers are more like what'd you call them farmers , right ? They're taking what's already there and they're just going to keep watering it and keep growing it and take care of that customer .

And then your carrier sales I'm going to go find you trucks for that . Now , a brokerage can have a cradle to grave model where you do all that . Or you can break it out into sales and operations .

Or you break it out like when I my first sales job well , besides Best Buy , which was retail , but my first sales job at a Fortune 500 company and a big distributor . We broke it out that way . We had three levels , just like that . And I mean I started at the bottom .

You know , I was like the assistant or the support one , right , but I saw what that business developer did out there on the road trying to meet new customers right , trying to do all this different , these different things .

And then you've got your intermediary layer where it's all farming existing business and you know the customers are already used to working with us . They're going to send their orders over and we're going to quote them on this , that and everything .

But depending on what this person does and their value is going to heavily change that commission and that's my long-winded answer there .

Are you looking for security ? Do you want high earning potential ? Do you want to be a hunter ? Are you looking to like what is important to them ?

Because I think to your point , if you can really understand what really does motivate them and what they're looking for , right , you tend to get a better negotiation for both sides , both the business and the person in that role , right ?

Some people , again , like you pointed out , they want , nine to five , go home , not think about work , and be with their family . Some folks want the ability to earn as much as they can , as fast as they can , and they're willing to throw 60 , 70 hours a week at it until they hit that right , and that changes for everybody , even through life , right ?

I was reading something else this week on the same thing . Like everybody's , goals , objectives and time horizons are usually different in their 20s and their 30s and their 30s or their 40s , and what's important to you , when and with .

If it's important to you and these don't stay the same forever either , right , but I think one of the biggest pitfalls you see are people that get comped to be a hunter and , to your point , they're only managing their accounts . They get a huge commission to do something you could probably pay somebody less for right .

And , on the other hand , people that are being paid as operators that are hunting right . You wanna give them more incentive to make them wanna do more of it , right , exactly .

So if you guys listen to our Friday podcast which most of you do those are more full-length educational topics and we've got some some cool guests coming up in the in the coming weeks .

week . It made me think of us , our industry and you really , and they were talking about a very successful investor in like Silicon Valley . But they asked him like how , like how he defined success and his analogy was this right , we don't hit home runs in this business . It's about putting the bat on the ball and getting on base .

Then you use your rapport building and operations to steal second and third base on the other teams airs sometimes , and then we still home on a pass ball or a missed catch right like another air , and I'm like that sounds exactly like the sales cycle for a freight broker .

I'm like you just want to put the bat on the ball to get to know somebody at first to build some rapport . You maybe get the first with a loader , a quote here , there , and the reality is is someone else is making a mistake ? That gets you to second right , just like in baseball , and probably the third base Right .

Another broker didn't pick up the load , didn't respond fast enough , so the wrong equipment and whatever that is right .

That moves you around , and then some other air helps you steal home to get Into a bid and then you end up blowing the account up because you performed when someone else didn't right , like it's rarely , if ever right , you're hitting a home run , meaning you didn't talk to somebody , and all of a sudden they're sending you a ton of business right away , like I

can't think of many instances , if ever , that ever happens , and what we do , and to me as like this , is just a perfect metaphor for sales , for freight brokers , right , it's step-by-step , being diligent and consistent at it , to get where you want to go , absolutely .