Don’t be afraid to change
One of the company’s goals was to retain its current business
with its solid customers and provide them with opportunities for
additional service.
“We were in some lines of business that weren’t as profitable as
they could be, and we needed to think strategically where the
sweet spot was for our company and try to narrow our focus,” Hall
says.
To make that happen, Hall and his team reached out to their customers to sell them on the additional opportunities.
“We just changed the view of what sales are,” Hall says. “Our customers were more interested in a solution set and what the value
proposition was of that solution set. We started communicating
that through our business reviews with our existing customers.
Trying to demonstrate with our business reviews both how we’ve
done but also selling them on our capabilities.”
The company also took a different approach to drumming up
new business by going without a person directly responsible for
sales.
“It works for us because of our industry and because of the size of
individual contracts,” Hall says. “Some new contracts could cause our
growth to be 25 percent for just one contract. I don’t really need to
have someone knocking on doors every day because if they were successful, I’m not sure we’d have the capacity to keep up with it. For us,
to land two or three new accounts each year probably is consistent
with our capacity.”
The lesson for Industrial Transport was that you need to assess
your own needs and not just conform to what everyone else has
done in the past.
“Although we don’t have a person on staff that is sales, through
myself and the president and even some of our field ops people,
we do make contact with companies and introduce ourselves so
that we’re not just fishing from our current customer base,” Hall
says.
The company does take steps to stay in touch with its current
customer base. Meetings are set up at least quarterly, and sometimes monthly, between Industrial Transport and its customers to
assess their relationship.
“You’re never so far out of whack that you’re caught by surprise,”
Hall says. “It creates a level of communication where people don’t
hold in. If there is something that’s not working, they pick up the
phone in between those meetings. People are talking on a regular
basis about the aspects of the business that are important to the customer.”
