Carriers employ salespeople to promote their business and fill expensive trailer space. While in my experience salespeople often downplay their importance in a company, their role in identifying the key decision maker for a potential client is invaluable.

All too frequently, salespeople spend their valuable selling time pitching people who couldn’t make a routing decision if their life depended on it (only a slight exaggeration). This mistake, which can cost carriers precious time, money and resources, often stems from false assumptions made by a salesperson about who they should speak to at a potential client company.

To be clear, salespeople should target the staff member who decides a company’s routing strategy. Routing decision makers have control over which carriers are contracted to transport a company’s products in different markets, and it’s these decisions that will ultimately decide a carriers’ business deal with a shipping client.

What happens if the wrong person is targeted? Take two examples:

• I once took over a sales territory from a previous colleague and found that not only did my predecessor make up personal facts about the customers, but he had also misidentified many of the decision makers. It took me a while to figure out I was entertaining, some regularly, the wrong people.
• A colleague scheduled a monthly lunch with a customer for five years. When he eventually asked if the client could make the routing decisions for his company without conferring with anyone else, the customer admitted he had to get approval from his boss before he could make any changes.

To avoid this waste of time and resources, salespeople must learn how to identify the true decision maker and the importance of doing so.

Typically, salespeople at a carrier will call a shipper and asked to speak to the transportation or shipping manager. Once connected, they assume the person with whom they are speaking makes the routing decisions. While this is a fair assumption, the person who handles the shipping function doesn’t necessarily set transportation policy or make carrier selections.

The first step in identifying the decision maker is to ask the first point of contact at a company the name, title and department of the employee who sets transportation policy. Experience has shown that this works quite well with small- to mid-sized companies.

At larger companies, the same question should be asked, even within a supply chain or transportation department. It’s not unusual to find multiple decision makers across departments. Purchasing, for example, often does its own routing of inbound materials. Failure to find the most valuable decision maker could result in lost revenue opportunities.

Once connected with the key point of contact, salespeople need to ask if this person can independently make carrier routing changes. The hope is that once in contact with all relevant routing decision makers, changes in your favor can be made on the first sales call.

When the true decision maker becomes convinced of your abilities to serve their needs and the needs of their company, success is more likely.