Successful Freight Broker Agent management

a successful Freight Broker Agent management system include first of all having well defined revenue plans and revenue and margin objectives. Often times, this includes having bookings objectives for your individual freight agents. Having well defined e targets. And of course, having a strong, well documented plan, in terms of who your target markets and customers are.
The next component of successful freight agent performance system is actually having individual revenue margin and booking objectives for each of your people.
Typically, this is done once you’ve defined your overall company’s revenue plans. You should put together targets, annual revenue and bookings goals for each of your freight agents that are tied to that overall revenue plan. And often times you’ll be doing a measuring and monitoring of performance relative to those actual revenue goals systematically on a monthly or quarterly basis in addition to that.

The next element of a successful freight agent performance system is having a regional territory plan that your agents are working towards. This territory plan should list not only your major objects but also key accounts that you’re targeting, the strategies to get into those accounts, should probably have a section about both new business development as well as account maintenance or account management and also have a section related to actual strategies that your freight agents are going to be carrying out.

Again, having a plan in place allows you to use that plan as a tool for measuring and monitoring performance against that plan and having ongoing discussions with your freight agents related to how they’re progressing against the objectives and the overall plan that they’ve set into place.
The next element of a successful freight agent performance system has nothing to do with actual goals objectives or plans, but everything to do with the freight agent mangers role in working with individuals on the team. This is the most critical element. Freight agents are only as good as the freight agent manager. A lot of companies expect freight agent to be left at their own devices, but just like any other team, freight agents need to be managed and the foundation for that, of course, is having somebody in place in your freight brokerage who can function and is willing to work closely with the freight agents.

The role of freight agent manager is in developing solid freight agents and this can only be accomplished by working closely with the freight agents on an ongoing basis and establishing a relationship of trust, confidence, and mentorship. And that relationship built between sales management and its team is fundamental to empowering sales people to be successful in their jobs.

The role of the freight agent manger is to track sales activity and measure and monitor performance and to coach salespeople to success. Tracking activity can be done very easily when your company has a successful CRM implementation. We use salesforce.com to develop customized dashboards that give management a quick snapshot of each of their sales people’s activity in terms of amount of prospecting, amount of actual account qualification and actually being able to measure and track the activity of the sales people as it relates to moving deals through the actual sales process towards close.

Measuring and monitoring performance isn’t just about really tracking activity but in a deeper sense, getting behind the activity to understand what it is that’s working and what’s not working with each Freight Agent. A good example of that is working with accounts. Doing a good job of mapping out an actual customer prospect, in terms of people, decision makers, influencers and decision making process and then working hard in order to touch all the bases to develop and advance the sale a specific account. This is where sales management needs to work deeply to measure and monitor sales performance and this is not a trivial task. It requires active engagement from sales management in order to do this.

Another foundation of good sales management, of course, is coaching your people to success. There is all sorts of schools of thoughts out there about how to best work with people but in this day and age, which is one of empowerment, people want to feel like they’re involved in the decision making processes of their job. They want to feel like their opinion is heard by management. So a more enlightened approach to coaching your people today in today’s management environment is really working with sales people to help them to understand and reach their own conclusions about how they can improve their sales performance.

Coaching requires active engagement which requires in turn, time spent seriously involved in a sales person’s day to day, week to week routine activities. There’s a number of different ways to do this, of course. The most effective way is spending one on one time with your sales people strategizing with them, talking about and preparing for sales calls, doing sales calls and then debriefing after those sales calls to talk about what happened, what was learned and how could the sales call have been improved. Most freight agents learn by doing, and so the active coaching is the art of getting with your agents and then actually working with them to help them to understand how they can enhance their sales performance and their sales technique.

Another element, is regular phone contact with your freight agents just to check with them to find out how things are going, and frequent informal discussions with freight agents to just show them that you care and also giving them feedback on problems and challenges that they are facing on specific. Talking with them on a regular basis about how things are going and showing your freight agents that you are actually engaged with them in an active relationship and are interested in helping them to find ways to win. When your freight agent`s win, your company wins.

Yet another element is holding regular sales meetings. Some companies only do this on a very infrequent basis and the sales meeting should be a primary component of your sales system. By formalizing sales meetings and holding them on a regular basis, you’re showing your sales team that you’re creating an environment of accountability and information exchange. Sales meetings can be used for a number of purposes including information gathering, finding out how your sales team members are doing and what difficulties they may be facing.

Providing training is very important. Providing ongoing sales training is a way to make sure that your freight agents’ are always sharpening their saw and that you’re giving them the latest tools in order to improve their sales performance. So typically, we work on sales technique training as well as product training and customer and market training as well. Other things to do in sales meetings include providing recognition incentives and rewards, taking time in your sales meetings to praise and celebrate the successes of your people is a great way of showing them that you really do care about their performance and you’re willing to celebrate those success and give them recognition and rewards as appropriate for the successes that they have. So holding sales meetings is an important part of making sure that you have a motivated, high performance team that’s working together and is accountable for its activities.

The more that sales people understand that they are accountable for producing themselves and are held accountable through these different vehicles that we’ve talked about the better your sales performance is going to be from your agents. So building and deploying a successful sales p management system is something that a company cannot live without and needs to be taken very seriously.

Of course the best sales performance system is only as good as the people who are running it and when it comes right down to it, running a high performance sales team is all about good leadership. What is good leadership? That’s not the subject that I want to cover here but I certainly do want to say this: Leadership is about passion, about vision, about connectedness, about motivating people, about finding out what it is that unlocks the door to people’s special performance and helping them to open that door and go there. So in some way, building a successful sales management system is a key to accelerating your company’s sales and as your organization continues to grow, it becomes more important in order to achieve high performance scalability and repeatability in your processes.

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