Our CEO Julian Alvarez joined Adam Hill, President and COO of The Scarbrough Group, and Zach Strickland, Director of Freight Market Intelligence at FreightWaves to discuss why you should, and how you can, use technology to win forwarding contracts.
Leveraging technology for your freight forwarding organization is not only essential – it’s urgent. These logistics professionals have come together to discuss the big questions surrounding digital solutions and how to optimize your operations with them now. Discussion themes that arose during the event included recent shipper survey results, benefits of digital solutions, online quote-to-booking experiences, and other impacts of digitization.
Speakers
Zach Strickland, Director of Freight Market Intelligence of FreightWaves
Adam Hill, President & Chief Operating Officer of The Scarbrough Group
Julian Alvarez, CEO of Logixboard
Below we are sharing a sneak peek of what was covered in the webinar by our speakers. Want to learn more about how to use technology to win contracts and grow your business? Access the full webinar here.
Shipper Survey and Report Discussions
Our speakers start off by analyzing the results of a recent FreightWaves and Logixboard survey that gathers answers from 100 shippers/BCOs on their criteria for evaluating a freight forwarding partner. Discussions continue on to cover how the industry may have been very paper heavy since its start, but visibility data needs to be online and accessible to customers across logistics as a whole.
If you aren’t investing in customer visibility technology, you are falling behind.
“As a whole the industry has done a pretty good job, especially recently, at really starting to put some investment behind their technology and what they’re ultimately going to offer their customer,” said Hill when asked whether he was surprised about the recent report stat that 45% of shippers have fired a freight forwarder due to inadequate technology.
COVID-19 also plays a role in the quick advancement of digitization in the supply chain and logistics industry, but how much? The desire of greater visibility from resulting pandemic delays, capacity changes, and more are a conversation across the world. This webinar will gather expert thoughts on whether this impact has changed the way shippers evaluate the offerings of their freight forwarders and brokers.
Shipper expectations have evolved, but our speakers additionally discuss how to level up to meet them.
Benefits of Digitization Discussions
A huge topic in the industry around digitization is on how your team can measure the ROI of any investments. Our speakers dove head first into discussing their thoughts on this.
Overall internal team efficiency is the first benefit that all speakers agreed to. Whether from digital customer experience software, document sharing solutions, or a TMS, they discussed how resulting productivity is an effective way to measure.
“TMSs that are much more focused on efficiency, they’re very much focused on how you are saving your team hours a day,” said Alvarez.
Playing off efficiency, measuring the ability of your organization to scale is another way to measure the benefits of your digital solutions.
“Are you being able to scale and win more business without having to necessarily hire, and hire a lot more people?” said Alvarez.
You should be seeing positive changes from your digital investments with your current customers as well. From an increased amount of your customers’ overall business, to higher cost acceptance due to the growth of your offerings, ROI is easy to measure from metrics around your returning shippers/BCOs.
“Are you increasing share of wallet? You can certainly use technology to go out and win new contracts, but you can also use technology to increase the share of wallet that you have with your existing customer base?” said Alvarez.
Listen to their full discussion to hear all measurements of ROI for solutions added to your tech stack.
Core Impacts of Technology
Adam Hill brings up how tangible the impact of technology is within Scarbrough’s internal operations. They are able to free up their team members from manual, repetitive work. This gives the team time to use their professional expertise to provide solutions and conversations of strategy to customers.
“I want to pay my people for their brain, not their fingers,” said Hill.
The sales enablement benefits of technology and automation can be used to adjust pricing and differentiate against competitors.
“If you have good price technology really helps take you over the top, especially if you’re competing against forwarders that don’t have that type of technology.” Alvarez
Other Discussions
Our speakers cover what technology you should be prioritizing in your tech stack first and why – with direct insight into visibility vs. online quote-to-booking experiences. From regulations and requirements for US forwarding, to Mexico, to Africa, our speakers also dive into the benefits of technology in handling more difficult markets.
