7 Reasons Why CRM for Freight Brokers is Critical

What is a CRM for Freight Brokers?

Customer relationship management software, or CRM, helps freight brokers track leads and current clients in one place. You’ll also be able to keep track of your carriers and other partners. With so many contacts and deals to manage, a CRM for freight brokers is the easiest way for your entire team to stay on top of communication through the entire logistics process.

Here’s why CRMs are essential for freight brokers and how they streamline your operations.

1. Manage Leads, Customers, and Carriers Efficiently

For freight brokers, consistent communication is key to success. When you’re juggling both leads and customers as well as communication with your carriers, it’s easy for tasks to slip through the cracks if you’re not careful.

A CRM helps your freight brokerage manage all of these important contacts very efficiently. This enables you to provide better customer service for your clients and ensures you never miss an important sales touch. When you work using a freight broker CRM, you’ll spend less time manually organizing things and more time securing shipments.

2. Have Accurate & Real-Time Data in One Place

One of the biggest challenges for growing freight brokers is tracking client information. Your sales and customer service teams need consistent access to accurate data in order to do their jobs. However, without a CRM, it’s challenging to stay organized for freight brokers.

CRM software allows you to keep all your client contact information, quotes, and related communication tasks in one place, so everyone can access the same data. No more digging through you and your team’s inbox or trying to decipher confusing Excel sheets to find the information you need - instead, you’ll see everyone’s to-dos, communications, and contact information in one place.

Also, connecting your freight broker CRM to your email & VoIP server lets you find each team member’s email and call exchanges with customers in real-time. This provides accurate first-hand information since the CRM captures the information directly from your servers.

3. Centralize Your Communications

Consistent and reliable communication is a hallmark of great customer service. As a freight broker, time is of the essence, as your customers need to get their shipments out as quickly as possible. To provide this top-notch service, your team must work closely to avoid confusion and redundancy in your communications with clients.

Having all of your sales and customer service communications logged in the same place will help your team work together cohesively to provide better service and secure more shipments for clients and carriers. Additionally, team members can leave notes about each contact directly in the freight broker CRM to stay on the same page.

4. Streamline Quoting

The process of creating quotes for new clients can be very time-consuming, especially if you’re frequently juggling new inquiries. A CRM with a logistics quoting tool will help you speed up the quoting process so you can win clients faster.

It’s important to choose a CRM for freight brokers with features that support your operations. If your CRM doesn’t have freight-specific features, you’ll have to spend extra time creating quotes in a separate tool.

This CRM features a sophisticated logistics quoting tool specifically for freight brokers. In three minutes or less, you can generate quotes with FTL, LTL, Intermodal, FCL, LCL, air, and warehousing services. Additionally, you can find real-time market rates within the application while creating your quotes.

5. Implement Better Sales Pipeline Management

CRMs are particularly effective for managing your leads as they move through your sales pipeline. A freight broker CRM makes it easy to track your pipeline visually, from the initial lead stage all the way to the customer stage. It also facilitates better sales practices and communication with each contact, regardless of where they are in the process.

In your CRM, you can set up stages to represent where your leads are in your sales pipeline. By placing each of your leads and customers in the pipeline stages, you can systemize the process of moving your leads from one stage to the next. To learn more about the sales pipeline, you can read this blog.

6. Analyze Logistics Sales Through Reports

There’s always room for improvement when it comes to sales strategy. CRMs provide important analytics tools to track sales metrics and generate helpful reports. For example, you can identify effective salespeople by looking at their average awarded deal size or monthly sales conversions.

With all these analytics at your fingertips, you can identify your organization’s strengths and weaknesses to inform your strategy moving forward. This is particularly helpful for pinpointing effective and ineffective sales techniques because you can tie them directly back to information from your freight broker CRM.

7. Enjoy Better Visibility for Management

Sometimes managers lose sight of the ins and outs of their sales teams. Implementing a CRM gives you more visibility into what your reps are doing day in and day out. You’ll be able to track exactly what’s happening with both customers and shipping partners so you can easily step in when necessary to provide support.

Freight broker CRMs also provide a wealth of valuable data for management. Sophisticated analytics tools will not only give you a look at your sales metrics, but they’ll also give you an insight into your organization’s general productivity and responsiveness.

Conclusion

The largest freight brokers in the industry are using a CRM to capture more market share. If you’re not already using a CRM to manage your operations as a freight broker, now’s the time to start to stay competitive. By managing all of your sales tasks and client management in one place, you’ll be able to work more efficiently, secure more shipments, and compete with the largest freight brokers.

If you’d like to get ahead of the competition, be sure to choose a CRM with logistics-specific features.

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