How to Drive Efficient Growth in a Changing Transportation & Logistics Landscape

Usually, if you want to know the state of transportation and logistics (T&L), you can look at the state of the economy. In normal times, no other industry registers the ups and downs of our financial well-being quite like T&L. That’s just one reason why Fedex earnings are a reliable bellwether for the economy.

But these have not been normal times. During the pandemic, demand spiked and shipping containers lined port horizons. Anywhere you drove in America roadside signs advertised for truck drivers. After two years of going full-throttle, T&L now has to steer around inflation, the war in Ukraine, continued supply chain disruptions, looming recession, rising interest rates, higher fuel prices, and cautious consumers.

On top of all that, the industry has a staffing crisis to wrestle with. There is still a global shortage of warehouse and dock workers, drivers, pilots, and rail crews that will ripple through the entire industry for some time.

So how do you manage the ups and downs of the economy? Here is what successful transportation and logistics companies are doing to future proof themselves.

In the face of this much uncertainty, smart T&L organizations will plan for best case, expected case, and worst case scenarios. To make that really work, you need to monitor and analyze key signals, like capacity in key lanes, customer spend by lane, and customer lifetime value.  This enables you to make the right decisions about where you place focus, where you make investments, and where you pull back. That means unifying all your customer data across sales, service and operations.

Too much T&L business, especially in sales, marketing, and customer service, gets done manually with phone calls, spreadsheets, and email. Worse, too much knowledge languishes someplace on a forgotten shared drive, not doing anybody very much good. If you’re lucky it might live in somebody’s head, but say they go on vacation or leave the company – or you just don’t know who they are. What do you do when no one can find the critical information needed to track down a special border-crossing arrangement for one of your biggest shippers? The right answer could mean the difference between a strained relationship and brand loyalty.

Meanwhile, nine out of ten logistics companies believe their customers want them to offer a broader set of logistics services, but most have done very little to segment customers or analyze customers by value. Without centralized customer data, you can’t apply intelligence and analytics to process trends or free up people to focus on what matters.

T&L companies investing in data unification reap the benefits quickly : In a survey across industries, Salesforce customers estimate significant cost saving, efficiency, and productivity benefits including lowering IT costs by 25%.

T&L leaders are using their centralized customer data to generate efficiencies and build more business resilience by improving shipper experiences. For example, you can plumb internal and external data with artificial intelligence (AI) to predict customer retention and potential churn.

That will help sales and marketing take proactive steps or alert operations to issues that can be resolved before they become crises. With real-time data intelligence, customer service agents have more capacity to make the right decisions and solve problems faster. Data, when intelligently assembled, tells important stories.

You can generate valuable insights by examining volume across geographies or staffing requirements at a warehouse, on a dock, or in a call center. Many large companies don’t have access to shipper-specific on-time delivery performance. But the shippers themselves know well enough, based on their own experience. If your sellers don’t have data about your successes and failures, they can’t truly understand their relationships or partner very well with their clients. The best leaders don’t let that happen; the ones that get the right data into the hands of their staff and customers see real-world results, such as a 29% increase in sales productivity.

More than half of T&L organizations are investing in cloud connectivity and data sharing. Of those, 18% say they are driving the most value in sales and marketing, customer relationship management (CRM), distribution, and end-to-end visibility.

Shippers are anticipating a drop in orders and prices on the cusp of an impending recession. Those types of financial stresses are likely to reverberate throughout your organization. To succeed, T&L companies need to step up to new expectations from quoting to final delivery.

For example, companies like DHL and FedEx can give consumers real time quotes, often through self-service. But if you want to move a container from an inland Chinese manufacturer to Dallas, Toronto, or Berlin, you might wait days or even weeks for a price. That won’t cut it – not any more. The growing expectation for automated quotes is already reconfiguring big parts of the industry.

You can use automation, AI, and real-time data integration to reduce redundancies, cut costs, and create efficient growth. And when the best option is unclear, you’ll be glad your people have the information they need at their fingertips, so you can work smarter with fewer resources.

Want to learn more? Schedule a meeting with your Salesforce account team

Bob Hitt

Industry Advisor for Transportation & Logistics, Salesforce