How To Drive Sales In B2B Logistics

If Commerce Were A League Of Heroes, Logistics Would Be Its Superman

E-Commerce is the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about logistics.? You know who does it well? Amazon. But where do B2B Logistics Providers fit in all this? Can we imitate Amazon’s success for any B2B company???

Logistics, as an industry by itself, is the backbone of the economy.? They motivate countries to trade and compete and have helped generate sources of employment in numerous sectors (not just the commercial ones).? It’s kind of mind-blowing if you think about it like that.

The Roles And Responsibilities Of Logistics

Amazon's dominance in e-commerce stems from its mastery of logistics, ensuring that every link in the supply chain is strong and efficient. Logistics plays a crucial role by having the right resources at the right time, transporting them efficiently, and delivering them in perfect condition to the customer.

• Planning and Movement: Logistics involves careful planning of goods movement, storage, and information flow.
• Transportation: It utilizes land, air, and ocean routes for moving goods and arranges storage.
• Fleet Management: It includes tracking shipments, managing fleets, and reporting through technology.
• Value Addition: It provides added value to supply chain partners.

Find out how to boost logistics sales with the right strategies.

Types of Logistics

Understanding different logistics models is key to choosing the right one for your business:

• Third-party Logistics (3PL): Experts with decades of experience simplifying and reducing logistics costs.
• Fourth-party Logistics (4PL): Manage entire supply chains, including shipping, inventory, and warehousing.
• Warehouse Providers: Focus on the storage and management of goods.
• In-house Logistics: Some organizations manage their logistics internally.
• Courier Shipping: The "last mile" deliveries directly to customers.

Logistics in B2B

Connectivity is a highly critical aspect of B2B, and to achieve this, there has to be better communication and collaboration between companies, their suppliers, and their customers.? Electronic Marketplaces (EM) have become the system to make this happen.? In the context of logistics, they are known as Electronic Logistics Marketplaces (ELM).

Logistics B2B Lead Generation

Logistics companies that create sales leads in-house miss out on chances that may drive their company ahead.

As logistics sales professionals, you know how challenging it may be to contact decision-makers with a logistics B2B lead generation marketing strategy.?

Perhaps they are just too busy for a phone call, or perhaps you are not targeting the right prospects. So, if you want to reduce the sales cycle, whatever the case may be, you must learn who your ideal prospects are to replenish your pipeline with fresh logistic connections for your transportation solution.

Achieving Higher Logistic Profits With Effective Management, Marketing, and Sales

7 Best Customer-Centric Practices

Developing goodwill strategies may depend on the organizations that are designed for them. However, I have found that companies that are in the business of supply chain (and logistics) have these customer-centric characteristics in common:

1. Understanding the buyer’s purpose. Understanding the buyer’s purpose ensures that production losses can be avoided and that the goods can be stored and transported safely.
2. Ease of doing business. The company that is the easiest to do business with gets higher customer preference.? Logistics management will want to make sure that there are no problems with the system.?
3. Take ownership of problems and improve outcomes. Customer expectations are increasing in terms of getting the goods faster, easier, and at a lower cost.?
4. Use Cost-To-Serve (CTS) data to create customer value.? Identify the specific actions to increase the bottom line without sacrificing customer satisfaction. But the real value of CTS becomes apparent when there is a loss-making customer and it helps you transform them from unprofitable to profitable.?
5. Listen to customer feedback. The feedback should help you gain customer loyalty, understand their buyer’s journey, and allow your representatives an opportunity to advise them on better purchases.??
6. Have an efficient cross-functional collaboration.? This will streamline the following flows and processes.
7. Map and measure performance. Determine if the goals are met by mapping and measuring the performance. This will help logistics management quickly diagnose any potential issues and make course corrections. One way to do this is to create a Value Chain Analysis. Another way is to track your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

Market Segmentation

There is no doubt that logistic enterprises have accelerated economic growth and productivity globally. Not only are the world’s countries becoming economically competitive, but the transportation and logistics industry as well.

Market segmentation is a way to help them optimize their marketing programs and create a personalized customer experience. This method goes well with the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) which helps narrow down your marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) and sales-qualified leads (SQLs). As a bonus, segmenting your market will help your supply chain partners allocate their resources more efficiently.

How To Market Logistics

To succeed, logistics companies must increase productivity, leverage assets, and reduce costs. Technological advancements offer new opportunities to enhance business models and improve ROI through effective marketing strategies.

So open your mind to these highly recommended marketing strategies!

• Inbound marketing has proven to be the most effective way to funnel opportunities to your logistic sales.
• Methods such as creating and publishing content, search engine optimization (SEO), and social listening are the trifecta of inbound marketing.
• Content can increase web traffic and bring value to your target audience.
• Social media channels such as LinkedIn will help increase your business and audience reach. However, be mindful of the post and connection limits since you don’t want to be banned for spamming!
• It’s not just for Sales. Making use of sales automation such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) can enhance your leads database and track information faster.

Tips To Increase Logistics Sales

Human-to-human interaction has always been the key to closing a deal. It hasn’t changed then, and it hasn’t changed now. However, our sales toolkits have. The world of logistics is full of spreadsheets and forms, and they used to be done manually. Now, we have smart applications that have made it easier to optimize the sales process, manage data, and save time.??

Embrace the data revolution! Here are some amazing tips to enhance your logistic sales!

CRM tools such as HubSpot or Salesforce should help you assess your deal stages, and determine the revenue you generate from your prospects and customers. These tools should also allow you to store their contact information and profiles, and make it easier to segment them. Different CRMs have their flows of automation but they generally look like this:

If I didn’t emphasize this enough before… Automation is the key!? According to Aberdeen, automation boosts sales performance across a variety of metrics:

• 107% better lead conversion rate
• 40% greater average deal size
• 20% team higher attainment of quotas
• 17% better forecast accuracy

The online traffic is mostly on desktops. But as younger generations start entering the workforce, the mobile footprints start increasing. Google has also started tracking mobile performance with its Mobile-First Indexing (MFI). It’s essential to have a website that reads well on mobile.

The Bottom Line

Many logistics businesses may be slow to adapt but the world of B2B is a fast-paced and agile industry. If logistic providers want to keep up, they would have to use data to digitize what was once a tedious manual process and utilize automation for their workforces.