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001 - Scott Case, The Future of Supply Chain Marketing, And the Attack of the Robot Overlords
116 Plays7 years ago
PROFILES SUPPLY CHAIN CONVERSATIONS
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EPISODE 1 SCOTT CASE, THE FUTURE OF SUPPLY CHAIN MARKETING, AND THE ATTACK OF THE ROBOT OVERLORDS
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Welcome to Episode 1 of Profiles, a podcast centered around supply chain conversations hosted by Brian Glick, founder and CEO of Chain.io.
For our inaugural guest, we have Scott Case, the founder and chief storyteller at Position Global. Scott has been in transportation his whole life, literally. His father worked for a major Japanese freight forwarder before Scott was born, and Scott grew up in customs brokerage and freight forwarding. After graduating from Northwestern University, Scott earned his customs broker's license and as handled air and ocean import and export for his entire life. He served on the NCBFA Board of Directors for Chicago and a number of their committees focusing on air freight, carrier relationships, and freight forwarding.
Since 2012 Scott has helmed Position Global. Scott's firm focuses on branding and marketing needs of companies in and around the logistics industry and does everything from website design to content creation. They do digital and print advertising and audio and video production. In addition to being available the support chain.io customers and partners, Position Global is also our marketing firm here at Chain.io.
Think about the things that we move. It could be antique vehicles, classic cars, giant projects, live event logistics. I mean there's things that we move that our customers may not see and we have a chance to…give people visual access into what I'm doing.
Hey if you're standing inside of an empty 747 loading classic cars, take a picture, take a video of that because not everybody can get onto a ramp to get into an empty freighter to watch their cargo get loaded.
Listen in as Brian and Scott discuss:
- How Scott got into the supply chain business and what caused him to stay in the space
- Things people should be looking at to understand how to talk about accelerating their marketing or how to bring this idea to a CEO or the owner of a small company to sell it internally that marketing is even a problem they should address
- Marketing around your company’s differentiator, and why the marketing focus might need to be both outward to potential customers and inward to your own team
- Inbound marketing vs brand marketing
- The future of the supply chain industry and how its changing
- Challenges and/or opportunities for people just getting into the supply chain business
While the opportunities for some of the more basic manual components of lumping boxes may be dwindling as as the optimization and some of the handling gets more sophisticated, people who have an awareness of how things connect either domestically or internationally are always going to be in demand.
Links and resources mentioned in the show:
Recommended
Transcript
Loading Classic Cars onto a 747
00:00:01
Speaker
If you're standing inside of an empty 747 loading classic cars, take a picture of that. Take a video of that because not everybody can get onto a ramp to get into an empty freighter to watch their cargo get loaded.
Introduction to the Podcast
00:00:16
Speaker
Welcome to the inaugural episode of Profiles by Chain.io. I'm Brian Glick, Chain.io's founder and CEO. Over the coming weeks and years, we'll feature the partners and customers who make up the Chain.io network.
00:00:28
Speaker
We'll focus on learning about the individuals within these companies and how they've helped build the organizations that drive our network.
Meet Scott Case and Position Global
00:00:36
Speaker
Together, we'll learn what drew them to the industry, why they made it such a big part of their lives, and where they see us all going in the future. For our inaugural guest, we have Scott Case, the founder and chief storyteller at Position Global. Scott has been in transportation his whole life, literally.
00:00:57
Speaker
His father worked for a major Japanese freight forwarder before Scott was born and Scott grew up in customs brokerage and freight forwarding. After graduating from Northwestern University, Scott earned his customs broker's license and has handled air and ocean import and export for his entire life.
Position Global's Expertise in Logistics Marketing
00:01:15
Speaker
He served on the NCBFAA board of directors for Chicago and a number of their committees focusing on air freight carrier relationships and freight forwarding.
00:01:25
Speaker
Since 2012, Scott has helmed Position Global. Scott's firm focuses on branding and marketing needs of companies in and around the logistics industry and does everything from website design to content creation. They do digital and print advertising and audio and video production. In addition to being available to support Chain.io customers and partners, Position Global is also our marketing firm here at Chain.io.
00:01:50
Speaker
So without further ado, let's get talking to one of the great personalities in the supply chain space. Welcome, Scott. And thank you for joining us. I think we'll just jump right in and see if we can learn a little bit about you and your story and your journey through this industry. So welcome aboard the podcast. Thank you very much, Brian. It's great to be here. Can you tell us how you got into the industry and why you stayed?
Scott Case's Journey in Logistics
00:02:17
Speaker
You know, it's kind of funny, some people say that they're born into something and that really happened in my instance. Before I was born, my father was actually working for a messenger service and a customs broker in the Chicago area. And shortly after I was born, probably about three or four years older, so he'd been working for Kintetsu.
00:02:34
Speaker
a very large Japanese freight forwarder, and they tried to promote them all around the world. And ultimately, when it came time for him to select either just kind of plateauing or being transferred to Tokyo, I was three or four. My sister was just born, and it wasn't a move that my parents wanted to make at the time. So he took a year off, sold CB radios, and then started a customs brokerage and freight forwarder in Chicago. I joined him when I came out of college in 93 and was with him for about 20 years or so until I started Position Global back in 2012.
00:03:05
Speaker
met a lot of people over the years who have been born into the industry, but not all of them stay. So what is it about this business that kept you in the space?
Transition from Operations to Marketing in Logistics
00:03:16
Speaker
I wish I could put a finger on just one thing, but it's a combination of different things. I think that I realized early on that this is a really big planet, but it's really small when you start looking at people to do this. I mean, people who come up through a traditional international logistics background, freight forwarding the customs brokerage side,
00:03:33
Speaker
versus maybe more of a domestic thing, you really start to get a good understanding of what's on the globe, where things are on the globe. And you start to meet people from different backgrounds, different cultures. And I always found that to be very interesting, just sort of what's happening beyond the immediate radius. And just when you're a kid, things can really be bigger than life. I mean, one of my most vivid and fond memories was we were doing clearance work for a Japanese automotive company and they would bring in prototypes
00:04:00
Speaker
that would clear customs in Chicago and then go by truck to an EPA testing lab in Western Michigan. And I just remember being a kid and going at like 10, 30, 11 o'clock at night up to the airport when Flying Tigers was still flying pre FedEx days, obviously. And so FedEx, or I'm sorry, Flying Tigers would have one of their freighters come in. And this plane would be right there on the main deck of a 747. And I just remember vividly as a kid, getting these little disposable cups from the coffee and hot chocolate machines and we get a hot chocolate.
00:04:30
Speaker
And it would have poker cards on it with the whole card on the bottom. They would be doing weights and balances for the aircraft on really giant desk size tablets to make sure obviously they're putting things in the right position on the plane. And then obviously pre a lot of the security that we face nowadays being able to go out and actually walk around in that plane. And an empty 747 to a kid that's seven or eight years old. I mean it could be as big as a football field and just that sort of scope that magnitude of things.
00:04:54
Speaker
really always stuck with me. I'm sure maybe somebody who was in a port and watched container ships come in, felt that same smallness next to things, but that was really what stuck with me.
Improving Marketing in Logistics
00:05:05
Speaker
Take us down the journey a little bit from that kid who then goes into the operational side of the business and then eventually says, hey, I want to start a marketing company. That's the jump that most people don't usually make, so I'm very curious how that inspiration happened.
00:05:23
Speaker
I think for me, it started sort of coming together in like 2010 and 2011. I mean, we came out of a really rough time in the late aughts with the economy being where it was. Really what I considered at the time best-in-class companies were just doing really sort of just crazy things and just forgetting about how service needed to be done. And that was more just sort of on the asset provider side, Steamship Blinds Airlines and things like that. And I really looked at how hard
00:05:50
Speaker
Our industry was working to try and work with these people and to still make things work for importers and exporters. And I realized that sort of our one sin, if you will, as service providers was not communicating with people or just being able to get that messaging out. I mean, as things moved away from needing to be in a physical port to do a shipment or to clear an entry to RLF where you're able to do business anyplace.
00:06:13
Speaker
All of a sudden, it wasn't so much your competition on the rubber chicken circuit in your city within a 200 or 300 mile radius. I mean, you could be competing with someone across the country. And for people looking to sort of, for people looking to make an impression around the world, or around the US, or even around the world, if they happen to be in a forwarding network or an agent network, they needed to be able to talk about what they were doing. They needed to really be able to just sort of talk about their value proposition.
00:06:40
Speaker
And I went to Northwestern and I'm very fortunate to be able to string a couple of sentences together. And I also enjoy technology and at the time social media was really sort of on the ascendancy. Here come platforms like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and how do people leverage them individually and as companies.
00:06:56
Speaker
And I had a good understanding on them. And I went, you know, I think that there's an opportunity out here. And I was very fortunate to be able to start my business and do things at the outset like websites for people. We do things like newsletters. We do content creation. Because again, I mean, my customers are people who move things for a living, and that's what their expertise is. I'm able to understand it having spent 20 years as a logistician. I think that's a word for it.
00:07:22
Speaker
and being able to translate and communicate what those issues are to external people. So I'm not going to ask you to give away your whole business here, but I still come across a lot of companies that are doing the pretty bad business card style website and they don't have a great logo and they don't have a great presence. Like 2005 called and they want their MySpace page back? Pretty much. So what are some kind of quick things that
00:07:47
Speaker
people should be looking at to at least understand how to talk about accelerating their marketing or how to bring this to a CEO or the owner of a small company who may say, hey, you know what? We know our customers. I don't have this problem. I don't need to spend money on it. What are some things that people can do from a sales perspective to kind of sell it internally, that this is even a problem they should address?
Differentiation Through Audience Understanding
00:08:13
Speaker
That's a great question, Brian. I think there's a couple things that people need to look at. One of the ones that I say is that you reach sort of the theoretical limit of people who know you and know your company that are in your orbit. You can only hire so many salespeople whose personal brand
00:08:29
Speaker
Companies will follow you can only have your teams there for so long. I mean, eventually you're going to start needing to bring new blood in. Maybe you become part of a network where you need to sell yourself to other companies within that network to be able to compete against or to compete for business in the city or cities in which you operate and absent somebody getting on a plane to sit down and have a face to face with you.
00:08:50
Speaker
One of the first things that they're going to do is they're going to sort of look at that online presence. I mean, if we think about how we as people go about sort of making a decision tree, whether it's, hey, I'm going to go out to that restaurant. I'm going to look at reviews on a restaurant platform. Hey, I'm going to go see that movie. Maybe I'm going to go look at Rotten Tomatoes to see what its score is. Hey, before I buy that product from this e-retailer, I'm going to look and see what other people who purchase that product have said about it as well.
00:09:15
Speaker
You as a company need to be in control of what your message is and what you want to be talking about and how you want to look to people, realizing that somebody's going to do a heck of a lot of research about you before they make that first ping. So the best sort of digital footprint that you or that burst, the best sort of digital image that you can put forward is really what you want to sort of think about.
00:09:36
Speaker
And at least from what I see with a lot of legacy service providers, people sort of break it down into what they do. They do air freight, they do sea freight, they do trucking, they do customs brokers, they do warehousing, that's all great. And everybody that you're competing against does one or more or all of those things as you do as well. The question that you need to ask yourself is, who am I doing it for? Who is my audience? What are the things that I can say to them that makes the most sense? So I tell people,
00:10:02
Speaker
Sure, it's important to talk about the services, but really let's talk more about the industries. Let's talk about the solutions. Are you a company that focuses just on the company brand and you don't sort of put individuals forward? Or are you really proud of your executive and leadership team and that's what drives people into the waiting arms to do business with you? You need to understand your culture and make sure that whatever you're putting externally for people matches that look and culture and
Engaging Younger Audiences Digitally
00:10:27
Speaker
feel.
00:10:27
Speaker
That's really good advice. I think differentiation is a thing that gets lost a lot in this industry of how to separate yourself from the pack when we all we all kind of at the end of the day are moving boxes.
00:10:39
Speaker
Yeah, and I tell people too, the other thing to stop and think about is your customers may be at their desks all day long. They may not be people that travel. They may not be the purchasing manager who goes and visits the factories that they're buying from or the customers that they're selling to. So as a result of that fact, the thing that you've got to stop and take a look at is how do I bring people into my place? We talk about it a lot and I talk with customers about it. There's a great library and a great, I mean, there are millions of stock images out there.
00:11:08
Speaker
but think about the things that we move it could be it could be antique vehicles it could be classic cars it can be giant projects it could be live event logistics i mean there's things that we move that our customers may not see and we have a chance to let them sort of get excited by the things that we have so we're we're really
00:11:25
Speaker
If we think about how we behave now as private individuals and how we go through and we look at platforms like Instagram or we look at platforms like Facebook where it's pictures or videos, think about that in the same sort of buying context from a business point of view. How do I give people visual access into me and to what I'm doing? Hey, if you're standing inside of an MP 747 loading classic cars,
00:11:49
Speaker
Take a picture of that, take a video of that because not everybody can get onto a ramp to get into an empty freighter to watch their cargo get loaded. That creates a connectivity that moves far beyond the spoken word and also makes for just sort of a great sort of visual or table stakes. Video is something huge where imagine if you're sitting down to do a presentation for somebody.
00:12:09
Speaker
or you're doing a webinar to a bunch of potential clients. You can give somebody 30, 60, 90 seconds of video to start that up that is going to absolutely set the mood and set the tone for who you are and what you do. And now you've created a mental picture for your audience and you have an opportunity to really move forward with talking about things and how you want to convey that and what you're going to be able to offer them.
00:12:33
Speaker
For those of us who are over 40, sometimes these new channels can be a little bit intimidating, somewhat because there's so many of them and also because there's an engagement methodology that's different than what we grew up with. How can we use these channels without freaking out? Also, how can we engage the younger employees that we have to learn from them and what's their role in this process?
00:13:02
Speaker
I think the first thing that companies need to understand is we don't need to create an age bias or somebody, a company makes a strategy and they say we have to do something digital or we have to engage in social. Go grab that person's son or daughter who is a recent college graduate because obviously they know it and they know how the internet works. That isn't necessarily the first step that you want to take. I think the first thing to look at as a company is
00:13:29
Speaker
anything that you do externally, and this is sort of a new area of thought for people, it's about sort of establishing your bona fides, it's about fending off your competition. So if you're a company and you're looking to make sure that you keep that client retention, you can use these channels to promote education, to talk about the fact
00:13:46
Speaker
that you're aware of the issues that are out there. If you are looking to use these as a sales tool, then again, that same sort of thing. Here's the solutions that we delivered for someone. Here's a case study or a white paper.
Balancing Marketing Strategies
00:13:59
Speaker
What are the channels that make the most sense for us? There's ways to communicate at a corporate level and make sure that that messaging is staggered, but there's also opportunities as well. If you have the right staff and you have the right sort of engagement,
00:14:12
Speaker
to be able to leverage those people as well. And ultimately, the sales component of this, you have to ask yourself is how is this going to be measured? How is this going to connect into an initiative? In a recent webinar that I gave to a trade association, I really expressed the fact that this is about filling the funnel. So whether you're operating a standalone CRM that you're using for sales, if you have a large sort of cloud-based sales implementation that connects to your operation software, you have to ask yourself,
00:14:41
Speaker
how do I either use this for lead generation or how do I manage it? The thing that people also need to understand is this is not an immediate gratification thing. As much as we see how the internet has accelerated things and we see how easy it is to go from seeing an ad placed or getting an email to buying that thing that we see, we all know that the buying cycle for this industry is a lot longer. Sure, you've got a very minute percentage of people
00:15:08
Speaker
where they're just absolutely frustrated with an existing provider and they'll make a move because they need to make a move. But a lot of times this is thoughtful consideration that's built up over time, that's built up over brand awareness and education. So we can't always just say that clicks and things are the immediate measure, it's what's that engagement. And then tie it back together on the back end for the team that you're working with. Hey, we got this company in, we've been able to
00:15:33
Speaker
generate X amount of revenue. It took this journey through our sales pipeline, through our educational process before they converted. So there's ways that people are able to do this above and beyond just the sheer number of metrics that show clicks engagements or time spent on platforms. So about those metrics and the clicks and all of the different statistics that if you go out there and read marketing blogs and it's a lot of it's about
00:16:01
Speaker
the term inbound marketing, right? And let's be able to sit at our desks and have people just reach out to us. What do you think is the ratio or balance or approach that people should be taking in our industry specifically as far as inbound marketing where I'm trying to pull things out and brand marketing where I'm trying to put my name out there as a support to my sales team? How do you think about those two kind of somewhat conflicting concepts?
00:16:26
Speaker
Companies need to make a decision whether or not they want to look at marketing as a reactive activity or they want to look at it as a proactive activity. So there's been a lot of tumult in the industry of late from either regulatory changes, quick things that are happening to customs brokers, service issues, whatever it happens to be. So people are spending a lot of time having to really live report to the news of the day because it cascades down and it impacts their customers.
00:16:53
Speaker
But they may still have long-term business plans that they're looking at and they say, hey, we're going to open a new branch in the city in the next three months. Hey, we're going to start this new trade lane up in the next six to nine months. How do we sort of work that? And that gets to really a company understanding as well.
00:17:10
Speaker
What's their niche and what's their opportunity? It's sitting down and saying to yourself, you know what, we're going to have to develop a real annualized marketing budget and plan and say to ourselves, you know, what percentage of this do we want to spend on strategy?
Entering the Logistics Industry
00:17:22
Speaker
What percentage of this do we want to spend on being in front of customers or potential customers?
00:17:27
Speaker
So, for instance, you may have trade shows that you attend on behalf of your industry. And we can bifurcate this into things that you're doing to educate yourself versus things that you're doing to educate your potential clients and asking, I'm in this particular industry. Do I need to go to this
00:17:44
Speaker
to this verticals trade show every year. Do I go there with a booth? Do I do go there and become a speaker? Do I go there as a sponsor? So there's a lot of different guerilla ways to be able to go about this. And then obviously whoever you send out as sort of that thought leader, make sure that if they're not the ones responsible for sales follow-up that they're also getting that into the sales pipeline when they go back.
00:18:06
Speaker
So one of the things we like to cover on the podcast here is talking about the people and the challenges that we face from a career development standpoint. So what do you think for people starting out in the industry? What are some of the challenges or opportunities that you see for people just getting into the business?
00:18:26
Speaker
I think we can all agree that at least when you and I started in this thing, which I think was slightly after Alexander Graham Bell developed the telephone, that there wasn't a lot of awareness out there. And logistics still is something that by and large to the person on the street happens in plain sight.
00:18:43
Speaker
somebody doesn't appreciate when they're sitting and waiting 15 minutes for a freight train to go by full of containers that that's what they're going to be going to a store to buy after they get past that train. They may not have an awareness when they get on a plane to go to London or to go to some destination or I mean London, Ontario or London, England that what's underneath them is cargo.
00:19:03
Speaker
that's moving vitally between two points because it can't otherwise get there fast enough or at all if not for air cargo. So there's a lot of different sort of entry points and vectors. Logistics is a very broad swath and I would say that it's getting more and more popular because of that last mile piece of it. It's certainly something that you're working with some of your clients on that I talk with some of mine about of how do you get that into the consumer's
Evolving Roles and Technology in Logistics
00:19:29
Speaker
hands. So really
00:19:30
Speaker
Understanding you're not just moving a pallet or understand that you're moving a container nowadays, but you're actually moving the individual pieces within it to someone sort of changes the different opportunities and entry vectors so you can come in in a warehouse you can come in in an office you can come in.
00:19:46
Speaker
In a trucking facility, you could come in working for a software company. You can have a background in just general knowledge and awareness of computer science, and now you're entering sort of the data science that's associated with understanding how to optimize supply chains.
00:20:01
Speaker
So it used to be sort of a manual moving into an office, moving into a management track has really changed because there's a lot of different opportunities. We see it as well. And here in the Chicago area, and I know in some other places, there is either vocational training where people have the opportunity to work at a port coming out of a high school and go work in
00:20:20
Speaker
the Port of LA or Long Beach or go work in their cargo warehouse. In Chicago, there's a couple of international business degrees or certificates that two-year universities offer. There are now MBAs in logistics and supply chain management. So it's a much more diverse number of choices for people than sort of the traditional entry path of even as little as 10 or 15 years
Data, Automation, and Human Oversight
00:20:41
Speaker
ago.
00:20:41
Speaker
So what do you think that means kind of for the future and for all of us? Is the industry going to be significantly different? I mean, I know we're in the technology space, so obviously we want to tell everyone that everything's going to be completely different in five years. So you have to buy more software. And be ready for our robot overlords. And all the artificial intelligence and blockchains that are going to destroy everything we've ever known. But in reality,
00:21:22
Speaker
The changes for me break down into a couple of different areas. I was having the discussion with somebody about, let's just call them a major retailer whose name happens to also be shared with a rainforest in South America and talking about how things get to places. And for them, it's about data. And there's two great examples for them. This rainforest themed e-commerce and bookseller was looking to open up a store in Chicago.
00:21:24
Speaker
How much do you think this is going to look different
00:21:49
Speaker
And most bookstores just kind of go, okay, we're going to stock it and see how it goes. Well, this particular company put a pin on the map and drew a radius around where they thought their customers would come from and went to their data and said, what are people within this area buying? And we're going to stock that in the store to ensure the highest amount of potential success for this store to have turnover, because ultimately that's what it's going to be about.
00:22:14
Speaker
I think that there's going to be automation in the warehouses. I think it's going to be smarter placement. You see a lot of warehousing space just being gobbled up as fast as it could be built close to population centers. So there's going to be smarter placement based on people's buying patterns and based on the predictive nature.
00:22:32
Speaker
of those buying patterns, but you're still going to need people. You're going to need people to understand and interpret sometimes what that data is saying, AI be darned. And I also think too that the international component of it can never fully be automated. And what do I mean by
Marketing Changes with Digital Freight Forwarding
00:22:50
Speaker
that?
00:22:50
Speaker
As you look at customs authorities and you look at regulatory agencies that decide admissibility, not just here in the United States, but around the world, that process can never really be automated. There's a certain randomness that needs to be introduced for products to be looked at, and it's going to require
00:23:08
Speaker
when there is a problem or when something out of scope happens, talented humans there to be able to solve and adjudicate it. And I think that while the opportunities for some of the more basic manual components of lumping boxes may be dwindling as the optimization is and as some of the handling gets more sophisticated, people who have an awareness of how things connect either domestically or internationally are always going to be in demand. I mean, there's a very large well-funded
00:23:37
Speaker
digital freight forwarder within the industry that has done a lot to revolutionize and come at it from a non-industry background and built it from the ground up. But they still need to have people to be able to solve the problems that come up working with customs, working with other regulatory agencies to get those customers cargo released and into the commerce or released and out to a far away country.
00:24:02
Speaker
So bringing that back to marketing a little bit, when we talk about digital freight forwarding and kind of the consumerization of the product that we sell, how do you think about how that affects the marketing of our product if we're looking at selling it
00:24:20
Speaker
either to the enterprise or to small businesses as a kind of turnkey solution versus the expertise we may have sold before that made things very complicated is it gonna change the way we need to message to our customers i think it will i think that that connectivity.
00:24:36
Speaker
It's not just the knowledge piece, but it's the connectivity of that knowledge that's going to have to come together as well. It's how do we take things that we distillate, discern, or determine, and then be able to translate that into something that somebody can inject into a compliance solution that is safe to be able to use throughout an enterprise. And I think that for somebody who's traditionally been in the business of moving boxes, they're going to need to understand that there's a lot more of this that goes along.
00:25:04
Speaker
for good or for bad. I mean, people will find the same thing on sale in four or five different places, and now there's the ability for people to sort of comparison shop. And the question sort of becomes, once you take away sort of the commodity factor of moving something between one point and another, what becomes the value add? What's the thing that's ultimately going to pitch somebody on it? Is it going to be the visibility of that? Is it going to be the connectivity of the data associated with that?
00:25:30
Speaker
Is it going to be the ability to get that cargo into the hands of your customers faster than somebody else by a process that you're using? I mean, you look at a plane and it shows up and it's got a lot of different people's cargo on it. You look at a cargo ship that holds 18,000 containers. It has a lot of people's cargo on it. And once that arrives at an airport, once that arrives at a pier,
00:25:51
Speaker
That's when sort of that value add
Bridging Gaps Between Departments
00:25:53
Speaker
to it becomes. If somebody's able to get their hands on that cargo and really demonstrate how they can do what somebody needs them to do most effectively with the greatest transparency and for the least amount of cost that makes sense within their supply chain.
00:26:06
Speaker
So one of the things that I've seen over the years through the various companies is kind of a big wall between marketing and operations, right? So sales will sometimes bridge that gap, but the marketing is this thing we do over here and it's logos and it's brands. And then operations is, okay, we have to actually do the work.
00:26:27
Speaker
As things go online, that gets a little blurrier. Are there things or thoughts that you have around how that brand can carry through to the client experience or should it or is that something that should remain kind of separate and this is how you sell it and this is how you do it?
00:26:46
Speaker
Sales is not marketing. Marketing is not sales. Operations people are not necessarily in the business of upselling, but it's something that you can sort of find a way to sort of train and incentivize. And what do I mean by those different things? Marketing is really going to come up with the message. They're going to be the ones that are working with leadership to say,
00:27:04
Speaker
Who are we? How do we want to talk about it? What do we want to talk about? And what is it going to look and sound like? What are the assets that we're going to use and deploy? Sales is going to be charged with taking in and running with that message that marketing in the C-suite comes up with. And certainly sales should have input, but they're the ones that are going to be charged with sort of like going out there and doing it. They are, for lack of a better phrase, deputized with the message of the company.
00:27:30
Speaker
Your operations people really are the ones that by and large are head down and trying to just push that stuff through in what is an increasingly connected and sometimes more complex supply chain, especially as we run into infrastructure challenges, whether they be shortages of chassis in one place, whether it be delays trying to retrieve cargo from an airport or drop it off in another. I always like to sort of think about the operations people and
00:27:56
Speaker
it makes good sense to sort of encourage it. It's not unlike going to a restaurant, whether it be a fancy sit-down steakhouse or pulling up to a fast-through drive-through window, where somebody's trying to upsell it. So you've bought the steak. The question is, now, do you need the baked potato that's as big as a football and the broccoli that will feed like a table of 10? So as we sort of talk about those things, the question becomes, if you're in the logistics business and you're moving
00:28:21
Speaker
If you're handling a piece of someone's cargo, but you see the opportunity to sort of add to that either from a revenue point of view or just to enhance the service that your client has, do you ask for more of that business? Hey, can we move this for you? Can we get you a quote for this? Hey, I see you're not ensuring this thing. We just saw this accident with a container ship. You really should think about cargo insurance. Is this something that I can have someone talk to you about?
00:28:45
Speaker
So there are ways actually even within the existing customer base to sort of add to what you're offering for someone and thinking about that, thinking about how many opportunities can I handle. Because obviously if your company feels strong enough to do it cradle to grave, there's no reason that people shouldn't think about asking for it, but they also need to know how and why and give them the tools to do that as well. Sales is going to understand how to communicate to somebody, operations may not.
00:29:11
Speaker
So is there a role for marketing in internal marketing and education of that operations team to what the company does or what the company's differentiator is? That's an opportunity there for the marketing team to look inwards as well as outwards.
00:29:29
Speaker
I think so. No different than people who are having training on job-specific functions or recurrent training on things. They should have an opportunity to see and understand how to be able to sell or to do things.
Role of Internal Marketing in Logistics
00:29:42
Speaker
And marketing needs to get people excited and explain to them why. But they've also got to give them tools. So, I mean, if you think about content that's being developed externally, you should have that same sort of content developed internally.
00:29:53
Speaker
whether it's something as simple as a wiki, whether it be training videos about how to ask for things, there's lots of different ways to sort of build that apparatus to be able to educate and upsell people internally. Because let's face it, I mean, your best opportunity at a sale is with someone who's already your customer, asking them for ways to be able to do more, asking them for ways to sort of solve the problems. Hey, maybe you've launched a new compliance tool, maybe you've integrated a new denied party screening tool,
00:30:20
Speaker
And those are the kinds of things where you have an opportunity to say, hey, we now have this. I think that it would be valuable because I understand your business process and the way you work because of X, Y, and Z. Can I have somebody talk to you about that? And you've already got somebody who's buying into your brand that's willing to listen because you've established that trust. Now you have the opportunity to use a card playing analogy. I mean, you've got table stakes.
00:30:47
Speaker
I mean, you're in the door with somebody already, that's the table stakes. Anything that you ask for above and beyond this, you've got a higher probability of success.
Episode Wrap-up and Teaser
00:30:54
Speaker
I think that's probably a good spot for us to wrap up today. I think the message that this is a holistic process that it involves the sales and the internal and external sales and inbound and all these things we've talked about.
00:31:08
Speaker
you know kind of highlight the value that a company like yours brings so that those of us who are just trying to get the shipments through don't have to get buried in all of this. So maybe if you take a minute tell us kind of what you have going on what you're up to and how people can get in touch with you.
00:31:25
Speaker
Oh, absolutely. I appreciate it. You can find us online at positionglobal.com. We've got a bunch of different work up there that shows the projects and things that we've engaged in. I'm going to be traveling around a little bit as we enter the fall and sort of early winter season. I'm going to be up in Toronto, Canada.
00:31:42
Speaker
Attending the Air Cargo Forum, that'll be in the middle of October, and then jetting my way across country to fortunately be able to attend WestCon, the West Coast Customs Brokers and Forwarders Conference that the Pacific Coast Council puts on. And then in November, I will be in Miami at the Conference of the Americas, which is put on by the Florida Customs Brokers and Forwarders Association. I'll be moderating a panel down there, and just other sort of like regional sort of travel to things. So West Coast, probably the southeast a little bit.
00:32:10
Speaker
I'm long overdue to get to New York, so I'm hoping to squish something in there as well, but nothing's been codified yet. I'm trying to avoid New York in the snow because the last time I've gone there, I brought just a hellacious snowstorm. So I know that if there's one thing people in New York don't want, it's for me to show up in the wintertime because it's usually a harbinger of bad weather. Well, Scott, as someone who lives in the Northeast, we're always happy to have you. And I would love to have you back to talk a little bit more about this someday, but thank you very much for your time. Cordially welcome. Thank you, Brian. A pleasure.
00:32:40
Speaker
Well, that's it for episode one of Profiles by Chain.io. Thanks very much to Scott for helping us out with getting this first episode out the door. And I look forward to episode two, where we'll be talking to Katherine Cooper, the president of World Connections. Katherine is one of the great minds and great personalities in the supply chain space, and she will definitely be a hugely interesting conversation. So we will see you next time.