1017. #TFCP - Dealing With Objections In Sales!

And what I mean by that is I only speak with transportation professionals because at the end of the day, you guys, I want to talk to the right individuals who have done what you're looking to do or who are currently doing what you're trying to achieve. So we can take this information, apply it, utilize it and see a meaningful difference in your business and your life. Cory Buchan, happy hump day, all. He's coming in over on YouTube. And yeah, you guys, for those of you who are listening to this on the audio only version which will be out later today on iTunes and Spotify, if you guys ever wanna check out the live stream, come over to YouTube. You guys, I go live on YouTube.

I go live on LinkedIn and I also go live on Facebook as well because I don't want to pay for to go live on Twitter. But yeah, those are the platforms that I'm on. And then the audio only replay of this is up on itunes and Spotify almost immediately. Well, not immediately after the show, excuse me, within a couple hours, because my marketing guy, the guy who handles all my post episode production, he goes out there and he takes care of all of that stuff for me. Puts the social media clips together and everything. But as always, you guys, if you guys want to, you know, to learn, just subscribe to the show. If you guys get value in it. That's all I can say. Dennis Everett, my man, coming in hot over on YouTube. Good to see you.

David Malzahn, I'm probably dropped botching the last name. They're sorry about that, man. He says good morning from Tucson. Dylan Turner. Good morning, boss man. Help. All is well, coach. Thank you as always. I appreciate you, Dylan. Also you guys, we have a weekly newsletter that released this morning. If you guys want to register for that you can just go to my website, the freight coach.com. It will auto prompt you to register. I don't auto sign people up for anything. I just don't believe in that. I believe in earning people's downloads and subscriptions and all of that stuff out there from the viewer. So if you guys want to check it out, go do that. This week's feature was on Chris Brewer with River City Logistics. And you know, a, Chris is a really good friend of mine. I talked to him a lot.

But b, he's built a really awesome company out there in River City logistics. And they got some really exciting things in the pipeline. And, you know, him and his team, you guys have built it up from the ground up in not a very long time. You know, might I add, they, you know, they've done this pretty fast overall. If you look in the business development side of things and you know, they're a broker and they own trucks, to you guys, they own their own fleet and they're building something really special. And he's somebody who I reach out to for advice on things, but he's somebody's content that I would highly recommend everybody out there follow because he speaks the truth. He loves trucking, as him. And I always say like this isn't a hobby to either one of us. Like, we love the game.

And you know, he's somebody who I would highly recommend following if you guys want to learn from somebody who's in charge of a, you know, a very large company and growing company. On top of that, he's grown to during this market. He's grown his fleet and he's grown his brokerage during this time, during this quote unquote downtime, right? So take that into consideration as you're out there looking for people to follow in the industry. He's somebody whom I highly recommend. Let's see here. Next one, diesel. Diesel's continuing to drop, which is always a good sign, but we all know why it's continuing to drop. There's that little thing in November called an election. So, you know, we got to try and buy our vote somehow. But that's down to 365 a gallon out there nationwide. I get this information from the EIA, you guys.

Eia dot gov is who I, I follow on that. And a lot of it is I use it from a bidding perspective, right? So a lot of the rates that I go in, you know, a lot of it's future, right? So in the open deck world, there's a lot of, customers who are pay, placing their bids out there for their future loads, you know? Cause a lot of it's project based. A lot of my customers are very project based and, we need to know where things are going. And you know, we always bid an all in rate, but I, you know, if I look at today's price, but it's going to ship in maybe like three months from now, I like to see where diesel is trending, where it has been at, because I think that's a real indicator on what I might pay.

So I use that as it is a great indicator on how I price out loads for the future. And I would highly recommend everybody doing that. The EIA, you guys, EIA dot gov is a, it's free, all right? So I don't pay for anything out there. It's free. It's published data. Check that stuff out. It really will really help you guys out from a load quoting perspective. The next thing I use for all of my quotes though, green screens, all right? Yes, they are an advertiser of mine, but I use them in my business, all right? I win freight, real loads, real tangible revenue with my, in my business, all right? Their prices are very accurate.

And I mean, I use them for everything but their drive in rates sometimes, I mean, I just, I talk about this, it's like $7 difference or $13 difference or something like that sometimes between what they quote and what I actually pay to a carrier out there. So I'd hit them up, you guys, if you guys want to learn more about quoting on everything, all right, so I, it's a solo show today, if you guys couldn't tell by now, but I like to use these solo shows out there to talk about specific things, you know, that I see a lot on social media, the questions that I get asked, because as we've kind of switched up the formatting of this show, we're really focusing in on very specific topics to talk about in the day, you know?

Yeah, we'll break down some articles here and there, but the articles will be on the topic and how we can utilize that in our businesses because again, you guys, yeah, it's challenging out there. All right, problem solved. What are we going to do about it? And that's why I kind of got away from that, because I kind of felt like I was talking about the same shit day in and day out, about how the sky was falling and everything was over. Is it a recovery? Is it not a recovery? All of that shit is irrelevant to me because I got to hold myself to higher standards to go out there and develop business. And that's one of the biggest things that I see out there all the time, you guys, is it's about sales, right? How do I find shippers?

How do I get a book of business? How do I prospect? What? How do I build a pipeline? What? You know, how do I deal with all of this stuff that's going on out there? So I'm going to talk about this today. I'm going to talk about dealing with objections in sales. I'm going to talk about building your pipeline. And again, do I know everything? Absolutely not. I'm just a dude with a mic who fucking cold calls every day and actually moves freight and is actually building a real business inside of this industry. So take everything I say with that little caveat. Oh, yeah, one more thing. I went to public school as well, and I went to a state school for college. So just fucking throwing that out there for anybody, I like to put those little caveats on there.

So you guys know what type of person is delivering that information now. Cold calling still to this day, the most effective way to prospect. And I know everybody's got a fucking opinion on this, but I cold call every single day. I talk to shippers every single day. And I rely on that. I rely on. I actually do a three pronged approach. I have a batch of people that I called, that I email. I have a batch of people that I cold call every single day. And then I have a batch of people that I try and do a site visit it with every single week out here. So the way that I break it down is I got to try and maximize my outreach as I'm growing and scaling because it's just me and my business partner. All right?

We're the only ones who are doing this. We're having a record month this month for volume and everything, but we are not in a good spot in the sense of like, we have all this freight that's consistently showing up. We're going to start hiring. We're building. We are very much building every single day. So we have to keep metrics in place that we need to follow so we can hit our outbound reach every single day. So for me, mine is I send out 50 sales emails and I make 25 cold calls every single day. That's what I do. Those are the KPI's, which I'm not a big KPI guy. But I. You do need to have benchmarks out there.

And if you're an individual or if you're an entrepreneur, or if you're somebody who's just starting to build up your book of business, you have to set those benchmarks for you to follow because nobody's coming to do this shit for you. So I do 50 emails, I do 25 cold calls every single day. And as I'm trying to build up, so again, ultimately, you guys, we're a full truckload broker, all right? That's what we do. We do full truckload, we do partial, and that's kind of the extent of it. Now, I will do drayage with my customers that we're actively working with, and I kind of consider that full truckload at the end of the day. I don't do ltl. I don't like ltl. Ultimately, when it boils down to it, I've just had a lot of bad experiences with that mode.

My man gabe panking in, he only does ltl primarily, and the dude kills it in it. So again, to each their own out there, but, you know, I go after one thing and I stick inside of that. So as I'm going out there, just like everybody, when I'm making, when I'm cold calling somebody, a lot of them, especially on the first one, I think you need to be brutally honest with yourself. The very first cold call to somebody, complete introductory. All right? That that's really what you're going for. You're not going to go in there and ask for somebody's business right away. I I mean, some of you might do it. I know some of you do it because I talk to shippers every single day and I know what is being said out there from the feedback that I'm getting.

But, you know, for me, my whole first point of contact with them is I'm calling to introduce myself and I'm really trying to just get a little bit of information out of them at that time because you're going to be talking to them for, you know, 30 seconds maximum. For the overwhelming majority of the time when you get somebody on the phone, you got to be quick, you got to be to the point, I don't believe in fluff. I'm never going to ask somebody, how's the fucking weather in Dallas, Texas? I can google that shit. GT's if I really want to know how badly the weather is in Dallas right now. But, you know, again, I'm going and I'm introducing myself. This is who we are, this is what we specialize in. If you're a reefer broker.

Say that, say that you specialize in refrigerated transportation or you specialize in full truckload, food grade transportation, whatever it is, utilize that. You got to put that out there. And I personally do not go in there and ask to start bidding on their freight right away. I think it's extremely off putting. A, the first one is, that's what I'm doing. I'm calling to introduce our services and I'm trying to get an idea, do they work with brokers or not? And I'm trying to find out, am I going to call them back? Because I like to be very respectful of people. And if they, if I called somebody and this was a, this is a conversation I had. What day is it? Wednesday. I had this on Monday with somebody.

I called them, I introduced myself, and they're like, listen, man, I'm going to level with you. I've been working with the exact same providers for like ten years now. Two of them are local here. The third one is a broker, but I've been working with them for a very long time. I am not going to make any changes in the foreseeable future or probably ever. So I think it's best, to remove me from your list. And I'm like, I, man, cool. Have a great day. I respect that. I appreciate it. Thank you. Hung up. Put a note in my system and I'm never going to call them back because I, as somebody who's out there who's trying to develop business, okay, I need to get to a yes. All right? I need to find a yes out there.

And that might not mean a yes in the sense of we're going to add you and we're going to start letting you bid on or afraid or anything like that. I just need to find a yes. Yes, we work with brokers. Okay, cool, perfect. But we're not adding anybody right now. All right, cool. When can I call you back? That's my big thing. So I want to get to that and then I want to be respectful of their time because I've had shippers come on this show. If you guys listen to this show at all, you guys know I have shippers come on here. I have large shippers. These guys are in charge of a lot of freight at the end of the day. And they will all tell you what I'm about to say. They've said it on my show.

They know exactly who they would want to hear back from or who they would reach out to in the event that they need somebody based on how you reach out to them adversely. They know exactly who they will never fucking reply to ever again. So I think it's very imperative that you approach each step based with that other person in mind, you know? And I have a very unique way of looking at things because I am a business owner. I have hired outside providers to provide services for my company and they have sucked very fucking badly. And it has cost me thousands of dollars that as a bootstrap founder, are very detrimental to my business. Okay? So I view this a lot differently from somebody because it is a major risk to bring somebody on.

So again, as I'm going out there, the very first phone call that I'm making to them, hey, this is who I am. My name is Chris Jolly. I already said this last week on the podcast on what I say, but I'll always go over it again when I'm talking to the gatekeeper. Hi, my name is Chris Jolly. Can I speak to somebody who handles your transportation or logistics, please? And then they're going to be like, what is this in regards to? I'm just calling to introduce myself. I'm the founder of a freight brokerage and we specialize in, you know, over dimensional freight, for example, they're like, all right, cool, I'm going to transfer you through to Tim again. I'm not, I'm trying to humanize that interaction and I always want to get their name if they will provide it.

Some people, for some reason, don't want to tell me who they are, but that's not my problem. But I'll always try and get that. And then again, I'll get transferred in and I always leave a voicemail. All right, it does not matter if Jim the transportation manager answers the phone or not. I'm leaving a voicemail and I'm going to say the exact same thing that I would say if they answer the phone. Hi, my name is Chris Charlie. I'm the founder of freight Coach Logistics. We're a third party freight broker. We specialize in full truckload, food grade transportation. I was just calling to introduce ourselves, see if there's some synergies between how we operate and what you guys might look for in a service provider. And then conversely, if they answered the phone, I would lead in with that.

I want them to know that I'm a broker. I don't believe in that asset light bullshit that some people say, I am a fucking freight broker. I am a transportation professional. This is what I do, and I am undeniably better than everybody else at it. That's my mentality as I'm going in with this. And I want there to not be any stones left unturned. I want people to know who I am, why I am calling, and I want to be mindful of their time, okay? Because that's ultimately what it boils down to. I'm taking time out of their day to call them. I don't want to waste their time. I don't want to bullshit them. I want to be brutally honest with people at all times. So that's my approach with it and that's how I prospect people now dealing with the objection.

Hey, man, we're not adding anybody right now. Remove us from your list. All right. Thank you so much. Have a great day. Now here's what I do internally, all right? If they say we're not adding anybody, remove us from your list. I will put those notes in my system and I won't follow back up with them probably for like 60 to 90 days. All right? I'm going to be mindful of that because the reality is they're not going to remember me at that time. So I want to follow up with them one more time. Now, if I call them back in those 90 days and they tell me at that time, hey, man, we're not adding anybody, remove us from your list. Perfect. I'm going to put a note in there that's going to be a dead lead.

I'm not going to go down that route. Now, the next objection that a lot of brokers deal with is, hey, we are asset only. We only work with trucking companies. All right, cool. Have a great day. Thank you so much. I don't own trucks. I'm not going to waste your time. I will follow back up with that one. Same situation. If I get the exact same response from them, I'm going to let them know at that time. All right, cool. And then I will make that same note in there. That's going to be a dead lead to me. But I have generally heard a lot of this lately, you know, and my business partners have this. And again, I'm just giving you guys direct feedback from what we are experiencing out there right now.

When I get somebody on the phone, a lot of the time it is, hey, we're kind of down right now in our load volume. We barely got enough to keep our established providers going. Follow back up with us. All right, call us back in two months. Call us back in 90 days or whatever. Or I will suggest it to them. And I'll always put a reasonable time frame out there because I feel like I'm not going to call them next week. It's not going to change next week in today's environment, it's not going to change next month. Right. But I will put a date out there. Right. So say it's, you know, it's August 28 today. I will say, I'll be like, hey, man, can I call you back early November? How about November 4? Does that work for you?

And then more times than not, they're like, yeah, that works. You know, again, I want to be mindful of their time, mindful of the fact that nothing's going to change during there. And then if I know that they are very seasonably based. Right? So again, I specialize in open deck and heavy haul, you guys. I do a lot of equipment, I do a lot of construction materials and stuff like that. I know how the seasonality of these things go. Right? So we are at the ascent of construction season, building season. You know, like realistically, it's fucking September next week. The snow generally starts to fly in October. Nobody's really making any changes at this time. So again, I'll take it like this. Hey, should I call you back in December or January after the new year? How does that work for you?

And a lot of them are like, hey, man, call me back in early January. We generally make our decisions around that time. Again, I'm trying to deal with the objection, but I'm also building up my pipeline, you guys, at the exact same time. Because again, I'm trying to get to a yes in some way, shape or form. And like I had mentioned earlier, not a yes in the sense that they're going to give us freight. I want to see, bam. They work with brokers. They're interested in me calling them back. Perfect. I know how this industry works. And the reality is some of you guys are fucking delusional with how fast you think you should onboard a customer and a prospect and everything else. These things take time. They take a lot of time.

And it will take a lot of time to get out there for this one. And speaking of that of time, I got to let my customer know. We just got a quote, so hang tight, you guys. All right, let's see. All right. So yeah, you guys, it's all about timing, ladies and gentlemen. It is all about timing. And that's how we get in there and that's how we get it done. Again, communications, everything. And, you know, I look at it like this, I want, I, you know, because communicate, like I said, communications, everything, whether it's with your existing customers, your prospects, all of that stuff. And I am. I'm probably going to talk about this next Tuesday when I do my next solo show out there about the situation that I'm just literally wrapping up today.

It is a yemenite, very unique scenario that I'm dealing with right now inside of this with an existing customer. We're doing a lot of volume. And again, I'm going to show you guys how I handled that situation because this is a very real world scenario. It was the first time that I've ever really dealt with it at this level, at this point in my career. And again, I'm all about best practices, you guys. I'm all about sharing wealth of information so you guys can better deliver that out there to your customers because, you know, again, you guys, $200 billion worth of freight out there for hire. Nobody out there is going to take any bread off of my table.

And if this helps you guys all stay in business, which I hope this ultimately does, you guys, ultimately, I hope this show provides you guys with so much value that you're able to take this out there and dominate it with your guys's customers. So you guys can see a lot of value out there. Let's see here. Now. Let's get into this one, ladies and gentlemen. Here's what we are going to do. All right, so, you know, as we're going out there, you know, we're dealing with these objections. We're building up our pipeline. Again, we want to find that yes. Okay? That's our big thing is we got to get a yes. We got to get a yes right now. And we got to utilize this to move forward, to try and get, and to try and develop business, right.

Because nobody's adding anybody at a high level right now. And I don't see that changing. I don't see that changing early next year. I don't. I honestly don't know when that's going to change. And I think that again, though, I can't pay attention to if things get better or things don't get better. Cause I got a family to feed. All right. I'm going to develop business. I'm going to win no matter what freight market. And that's my approach with it. Right. Cause I. Nobody's going to turn on the floodgates of freight here outside of a black swan event, which you never fucking know could happen, outside of a black swan event, I don't see this changing into 2025. Now, will rates increase and stuff like that? I mean, probably, right? If you.

Statistically speaking, if you look back, we're bound for an increase in pricing. I don't think that leads to a mass influx of people onboarding new providers out there. I think what we saw last week, there was a very large. And again, I'm not here to dance on anybody's graves or anything like that, but there was a very large freight brokerage that recently went under. I think that's the start of many that probably will, and I've publicly stated this before, and I'll state it again, I think the real mass exodus from the industry is going to come from freight brokers over trucking companies. Because, this next market that we're going to transition into is going to be a driver market. All right? It's going to be a driver market. Capacity is going to tighten up, and things are going to happen.

So I don't see drivers leaving the market at this point. Again, purely speculation. And plus, there's an article that came out, this was a couple weeks back, but I thought that this was an interesting point out there, that this is from ttNews.com, and that was us payroll data, likely to see the largest revision of jobs out there. So they were off by a little over 800,000 jobs. All right? 800,000 jobs. They were off by. And this was the job growth again. So they put these numbers out there like, oh, it grew this, but then there's a revision fucking four months later that shows the actual truth. It's not looking good out there, from the labor perspective that, you know, and. And it's. I don't know.

I'm not here to say anything other than you got to pay attention and to the long term side of these things. Then pay attention to just the headline that came out, because, you know, this came out, you know, when this came out in, was it march or whatever, it's like, oh, they've added, like, a million jobs, and actually, they haven't fucking added any, you know, and stuff like that. So pay attention to these things long term out there. And again, I think that this is very indicative and of how things are going to continue to progress. But rest assured, as I always say, if you're a real fucking player, if you're a hard worker, you will be fine. You will win in any economy. Doesn't make it easy, but you will win in any economy.

And I'm actually in the process of reading this book. I've had it for a while, but I was just recommended. It's called Grit by Angela Duckworth. And I'm only just, you know, in the, within the first couple hundred pages of the book. But, you know, again, I say it all the time. I can teach anybody anything they need to know about freight. I cannot teach a work ethic. And I think that a work ethic and grit are extremely intertwined out there. Another very interesting one that I've seen and heard of from it in a, this is kind of back into the sales side. Hear you guys about the objections is the private fleets. And the joc recently put out an article, this came out yesterday, that us shippers are expanding private truck fleets to haul more of their freight.

And that is a very common objection I hear out there. And again, a lot of these guys have it listed on their website and everything, so they're not just blowing smoke, but again, you know, pay attention to these things, you guys, because there's a reason why they're privatizing their fleets, all right? And they're moving it off there from the for hire into the private market. And I just wanted to share this little clip of this before I get out there and get back to work. But it talks about the leading reason shippers operate private fleets still remains service. All right, so keep that in mind out there. And then it says, out of the 121 companies surveyed, 49% said improving customer service was the key reason to have in house trucking operation.

20% cited controlling freight transportation costs and 13 noted enhancing control of their supply chain. Those secondary factors are becoming more important. Private fleets are taking a growing share of inbound as well. I think that we've reached inflection point in the past. In the past, private fleets flexed up and down based on the availability of for higher capacity. Now they're growing. Whether the for hire capacity is tight as in 2021 and 2022, as readily available prior to. And then I think that, you know, again, service and communication, you guys, right there, they said it out. And this is 121 different shippers that were surveyed for this. And between there, 50% of them, we're about service. All right, and take that. Service and communication, 50%. That was their top priority. So take that into consideration as you guys are going on out there.

And if you guys want to see that article, it is from the joc. Us shippers expanding truck fleets to haul more of their own freight. Check that out. But that is going to be it for today. Speaking of fleets, I got a good buddy of mine coming on the show tomorrow to speak about his fleet of trucks, his family owned trucking company. They are, they're big. They're a big company. You guys are going to come out here and spread some knowledge. But as always, you guys, if you guys got value in what you heard, subscribe to the show. You guys share it out there to your network, because if you see value, your network's going to see value as well. I appreciate you guys. I love you guys. And we'll be talking to you soon.