For the third consecutive year, Dan Goodwill & Associates and BIG Media, publishers of Truck News, Canadian Transportation & Logistics and MotorTruck Fleet Executive, will be co-hosting a Freight Transportation Conference. In prior years, separate conferences were organized for shippers and carriers. The 2012 Surface Transportation Summit (www.surfacetransportationsummit.com, #Tsptnsummit) will bring both groups together to foster dialogue and networking.

The 2012 Summit will take place on Wednesday, October 17 at the Capitol Banquet Centre that is located at the corner of Dixie Road and Courtneypark Drive in Mississauga. It will focus on all forms of road and rail freight transportation. Prior conferences were held in the spring and summer months. The switch to a fall date was made to provide the attendees with a “year in review” perspective on the past year and a look ahead to the New Year.

Carlos Gomes, Senior Economist at Scotiabank, will again kick off the conference and provide his insights on where the economy in general and transportation in particular are headed as we approach the New Year.

Carlos will be followed by a joint presentation from Lee Palmer, President, Palmer Marketing and me on Social Media in Transportation. The two speakers will:

• Review the fundamentals
• Address the big four social media and outline how they fit into a company’s core business strategies
• Show industry examples where they have been applied properly...and poorly
• Review first steps, associated costs and key benefits in the areas of brand building, customer retention and recruiting.

Lou Smyrlis, Editorial Director of BIG Media, will review the findings from an annual research study that his company conducts with shippers across Canada. The presentation will provide early findings from shippers on their expectations as they pertain to rate increases, modal switches, freight volume expectations and other data. This information will be of interest to both shippers and carriers as they prepare their budgets for 2013.

This year’s Summit will feature a new track that will provide CEO perspectives on some of the major modes of surface transportation. Douglas J. Harrison, CEO, Day & Ross General Freight, will address the LTL freight market; Greg Hewitt, President, DHL (Canada) Ltd. will focus on where the courier business is going and Mark Seymour, CEO, Kriska, will provide his perspective on the truckload market.

This will be followed by a panel discussion on a subject near and dear to the hearts of shippers and carriers - - - freight rate negotiations. Representatives from two of Canada’s largest shippers, Brian Springer, Vice President, Transportation, Loblaw Companies and Michael Tan, Divisional VP, Supply Chain & Transportation, Hudson's Bay Company will engage in a dialogue with representatives of two of Canada’s largest motor carriers, Dan Einwechter, CEO, Challenger Motor Freight and Wes Armour, President & CEO, Armour Transportation Systems. The panel will be moderated by Lou Smyrlis.

The discussion will address such topics as how can shippers and carriers communicate and collaborate more effectively to create a Win/Win result, what information should be shared between the parties and would this help the process, what can the parties do to establish trust and commitment, creating a core carrier network and what role should contracts play in the process. Audience participation will be encouraged.

In keeping with the new format of the conference, the afternoon will feature parallel tracks focused on shipper and carrier issues. One track will contain representatives from two leading shipper organizations and one consultant. They will speak to how they led large organizations through major transformations that were driven by a change in transportation strategy. Mark Gallant, Director – Supply Chain Transportation for Home Depot, Jack Ampuja, President and CEO, Supply Chain Optimizers and Jim McKay, Director, Transportation, Wal-Mart Canada Corp,., will each address a major transportation initiative that they undertook to transform their companies or client operations.

Business Intelligence in Transportation has become a new “buzz word” over the past couple of years. Our two featured speakers, Steve Morandi, Analytics Solutions Leader, Deloitte Managed Services and Rick Tucker, Senior Vice President, Global Technologies, Lean Logistics will speak to how Business Intelligence in Transportation is helping their clients improve the performance of their transportation operations.

Human Resources are one of the key assets of any organization. The two speakers in this track have a long history in working with transportation organizations to successfully manage their employees. Ron Mosey, Principal, RM2 Associates and Marvin J. Huberman, Certified Civil Litigator, Barrister, Mediator and Arbitrator will lead a discussion on a broad range of important HR issues.

• Ensuring a Fair Workplace
• Combating Labour Shortages through Better Employee Retention
• Employee Performance Documentation: Avoiding Pitfalls
• Maintaining Labour Supplier Independence
• Statutory Compliance: "The best surprise is no surprise!"
• Non-Competition Clauses: The Real Story;
• Frustration of Employment Contracts Due to Illegality;
• The New Tort: Intrusion Upon Seclusion – Based on Invasion of Personal Privacy;
• When Is an Employer’s Covert Surveillance of An Employee Justified?
• Punitive Damage Awards for Employers’ Behaviour.

Safety is an important element of every transportation company. A poorly maintained fleet and poorly trained drivers can result in a loss of life, poor service and weak bottom lines. The three speakers will each approach this important topic from their own perspective. Rob Penner, Vice President, Operations, Bison Transport, the winner of a prestigious TCA safety award, will speak to Best Practices in Safety Management. Mark Murrell, President, Carriers Edge, will discuss the Best Practices in Safety Management of the Best Fleets to Drive For.
CSA has been heralded as the biggest change in Safety Management in the United States in the last few decades. Of course, CSA compliance has an impact on every driver who crosses the Canada/U.S. border. The third speaker on the panel, Jim Angel, Product Manager, Safety and Compliance Apps, Peoplenet, will talk about Next Steps in CSA Compliance.

In addition to the excellent educational content, there will be opportunities throughout the day and at the end of the day to meet new carriers and shippers and to expand your personal network. The “early bird” registration fee is $199. Register early and save $100.

The economic forecasts for the second half of this year do not look too promising. While there are a few positive signs in the United States (e.g. auto sales, new home construction), the overall trend line still remains slow or stagnating growth.

The Great Recession of a few years ago taught transportation company leaders the value in running a lean operation, to focus on the most profitable markets, to improve yield management and to hold back on making asset purchases. A recent Harvard Business Review article (CEOs Need to Get Serious About Sales by Ram Trichur, Maria Valdivieso de Uster, and Jon Vander Ark, July 10, 2012), argues that effective sales management is still overlooked by many CEO’s including trucking company CEO’s. Here are a few thoughts on how to increase the productivity of a freight sales team.

Direct the team to the most profitable lanes and markets

What can trucking company leaders do to energize their sales efforts in a stagnating economy? First, they need to make sure their sales efforts are very focused and productive. This starts with sharing the company’s vision and profitable routes with their sales team and ensuring that the team is directed to generating the type of business the company needs most. An unfocused sales team is an unproductive sales team.

Think “Network” rather than “Lanes”

A 2009 MergeGlobal Creation Initiative study (Time to Buy, Strategic growth in Truckload) indicated that “the most successful truckload companies have executed growth initiatives in extremely disciplined, deliberate manners, targeting incremental pieces of business which complement their existing operations. Because profitable growth requires careful attention to how each new piece of business fits with the existing portfolio, it is typically accomplished organically, through sales and marketing efforts.”

The study highlighted that “organic growth typically doesn’t happen in load-by-load or route-by-route increments. Instead, the increment in which a new “piece of business” is typically added is a number of lanes emanating from a single location (often a distribution center or manufacturing facility).

Furthermore, these lanes are generally one-way, leaving the task of constructing the remaining portion of the itinerary (closing the loop) to the trucker. It helps, therefore, to think of growing a TL carrier in partially constructed “itinerary cluster” increments. Each potential new piece of business will have a number of outbound lanes associated with it and must be evaluated in terms of how those lanes will become a cluster of closed-loop itineraries. Ideally, this will be accomplished by meshing it with the company’s existing portfolio of itinerary clusters.”

A 2008 study (Lifting the Veil of Value in Truckload) from the same company, which looked at some of the most successful truckload carriers in the United States, highlighted that part of the success can be attributed to selling into inbound unbalanced lanes where additional traffic can have a big impact on profitability. “Aggressively marketing the busi¬ness in markets that are heavily inbound imbalanced in terms of loads coming in serving the 300 to 600 mile market has a margin-improving effect on both rates and cost per mile”.

Build a Sales Plan around “hard data”

The HBR study indicated that “winning CEOs demand analytics from their sales organization (much as they do from operations or strategy) to help understand everything from the effectiveness of sales campaigns to opportunity analysis to performance reviews. CEOs need to champion this ‘sales as a science’ approach by demanding KPIs and then holding their leaders accountable for delivering on them.

When tracking trends for future growth opportunities, for example, invest real money (2 to 4 percent of the sales budget is good) to develop analytical tools and teams that monitor trends such as demographic shifts, regulations, and new technologies. Actively track performance and shift budgets to monitor promising trends while killing off tracking projects that aren't going anywhere”.

Invest in Training

Training is a key success factor in every facet of a business. Well trained employees work faster and smarter. Well trained sales personnel know how to secure appointments, how to handle objections and how to close sales. Don’t overlook the benefits of training your front line sales people and don’t assume that the training they received in other transportation organizations was effective.

Automate your Sales Processes

In my experience, many companies invest first in their accounting and financial systems. Sales automation always seems to be near the bottom of the priority list. An automated tool allows the sales team and the management team to have visibility into what the sales team is doing. It displays the sales pipeline of every rep. This indispensable tool highlights the reps’ prospects, the number of proposals prepared, submitted and approved. The tool tells you if the rep has confirmed appointments with his prospects or is operating on “hope and prayer”. They provide data on the profitability of accounts, the productivity of the sales team in terms of sales results, closing ratios and other key metrics.

Limit Non-Productive Sales Time

Are the weekly sales meetings necessary? What do your reps take away from the meetings? Are they used for training and role playing? Would conference calls be just as effective in many instances? Would much of this time be better used if the rep focused more on planning their itineraries, learning more about their prospects, study the shipment activity of their clients and prospects and in making more, productive sales calls.

Actively Participate in Social Media

There is so much you can learn about prospects and clients from their websites, Facebook page, their tweets, their LinkedIn participation and other sources. Join the groups they are in, obtain referrals from mutual friends and turn suspects into prospects and prospects into customers.

Makes Sales a Team Effort

Sales can be a very lonely job. There are long hours on the road and lots of rejection. A sales team can be so much more effective when the drivers are feeding the reps leads; the managers are alerting them to trial shipments; when other key operations and pricing managers are “in the loop”.

While the economy may be slowing in the second half of the year, separate your company from the rest of the pack by establishing a lean, focused, productive sales team.

The 2012 Surface Transportation Summit (www.surfacetransportationsummit.com) will take place on October 17. This year’s conference features some of the top shippers and carriers in Canada. Register early and save $100.

American Shipper conducted their annual shipper survey earlier this year to determine Best Practices in Freight Transportation Procurement. The magazine contacted 275 manufacturers and retailers in May of 2012. The results were published on June 27, 2012.

They reveal some interesting changes in shipper behavior. In terms of percentage increase in freight spend, 38% of the respondents indicated that their spend increased by more than 5%. This compares with 58% in 2011. Thirty-four percent of the same experienced an increase of less than 5%. This compares with 17% in the previous year. Only 11% experienced a decrease in spend. In 2011, the comparable figure was 16 percent.

The trends for contract freight were similar. In 2012, 21% of the same sample experienced an increase of over 5% in contracted freight rates. In 2011, the comparable figure was 40%, a significant decline. Thirty-seven percent negotiated an increase of less than 5%. This compares with a figure of 31% in 2011. Twenty-four percent of the respondents experienced no increase in rates. In 2011, the figure was 10%. Clearly there has been a dampening of rate increases in 2012.

The survey respondents were asked to rank the importance of Price, Service and Risk in their freight rate negotiations. Fifty-eight percent of respondents ranked Price as number one in 2012 as compared to 48% in 2011. The comparable figures for Service were 42% in 2012 versus 49% in 2011. No respondents ranked Risk as number one in 2012 as compared to 3% in 2011.

The survey analyzed the cost savings advantages of negotiating freight rates on a centralized basis versus on a decentralized (e.g. multi-plant, multi-divisional) basis. Thirty percent of decentralized companies experienced an increase of 5% or more as compared to 15% of those companies that negotiate on a centralized basis. Forty-two percent of the centralized respondents negotiated no increase as compared to 31% of the decentralized group. Eighteen percent of the centralized group negotiated rate decreases as compared to 20% of the decentralized shippers.

The survey differentiated between “winners” and “all shippers”. “Winners” were those shippers that negotiated the most attractive pricing. Winners ranked “price quoted for services” as the most important component of the bid as compared to 56% for all shippers. Thirty-nine percent of winners negotiated service level guarantees for transit times, on-time deliveries and damages while the comparable figure for the all shipper group was 33%. Eighteen percent of the winners negotiated capacity guarantees while for the sample as a whole, the number was 11%.

The study shows that as the economy is softening, shippers are looking to hold rates or negotiate minimal increases. The carrier negotiation period is shrinking to lock in the rate freeze or rate decrease more quickly. The more successful shippers are building in service and capacity guarantees into their contracts to further protect their companies. Price has again become the most important element in freight rate negotiations.

Register now for the 2012 Surface Transportation Summit (www.surfacetransportationsummit.com) and save $100. The event takes place on October 17, 2012 in Mississauga, Ontario. Check out the great roster of speakers.