Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/721587
ONE HORN TRANSPORTATION BY LOUIS AND CHERYL BIRON THE SHORT TERM CUSTOMER THE NEW NORMAL I t used to be that you could build a pretty good business with a handful of customers. You took care of them, you always said yes, no matter the circumstance, and you could enjoy years of steady profitable business. In fact, it was quite common for businesses to run on the same customers for 10 to 20 years. is meant that your job as a salesperson was really a sales maintenance job. Although we hear rumors that there are still some of these relationships around, they are few and far between. e new normal is that customers come and go at an accelerating rate and if you hope to survive by simply doing account maintenance, you are in for a rude awakening. We see a lot of people in the industry who go on acting as if nothing has changed. A good sign of the situation is usually customer concentration. Does one of your customer's represent more than 25 percent of your business? Fifth percent? What could go wrong? But what if your main contact gets downsized? What if the company gets bought out? What if you have one load that goes bad, really bad through no fault of your own, and the higher ups tell your contact he/she can never use you again? (One of our one hit wonder agents (single customer) had a close call where he feared this would happen, luckily for him it didn't, but it was a good "wake up call." What if their warehouse burns down? (Yes, this actually happened to one of our agents who never recovered.) If your book of business is largely dependent on one shipper, anything can happen that is totally out of your control and your livelihood could evaporate from one day to the next. What you do about this in advance is in your control. is is why we are strong advocates of diversifying your book of business and want to share a process on how to do this in parallel with your current model. 20 IT MAGAZINE Vo l . 1 0 , N o . 5