What Is a CRM for Logistics and Freight Forwarders?

What Is a CRM for Logistics and Freight Forwarders?

Generally, a customer relationship management (CRM) software is a program that helps you manage customers and leads. It centralizes customer data and communications and tracks sales efforts to help a company convert more customers and increase customer retention. It typically contains a dashboard, sales pipeline, reports, and tools to manage leads, customers, tasks, and deals.

Most generic CRMs have all the features mentioned above, but they need adjustments to be effective for your logistics business. A CRM for logistics and freight forwarders has all the must-have features from popular CRMs and tailors them to the logistics industry. You can think about it as a CRM that is fluent in the logistics language. Without the need for customizations, a logistics-specific CRM has the following features below.

1. All Logistics Customers’ Data in One Place

Between converting new customers and consistent communication with current clients, it can be difficult managing all the sales touches required to close your deals and foster customer loyalty. A generic CRM will help centralize communications and provide some sales information, but you’ll have an incomplete picture of your data. Because generic CRMs are not tailored to freight forwarders, crucial data such as shipment frequency, shipment count, and more will be missing from your data analysis.

A CRM for logistics and freight forwarders allows you to store all your customers’ and leads’ data in one place, log your communication history, send logistics quotes, view logistics reports, set reminders and tasks to follow up, and more. It manages all this while capturing all the relevant logistics data to analyze your sales team’s performance. With all these features in one place, you’ll have 360-degree visibility of all your customers and leads so that you can increase sales and customer satisfaction.

2. Quoting Tool Built for Logistics

Generic CRMs often feature a quoting tool, but it’s not an excellent fit for logistics companies. A CRM for freight forwarders includes must-have quoting features to create the most effective and profitable quotes for your customers. Some of these must-have features include:

• Creating an aggregate logistics quote with multiple services (FTL, LTL, Intermodal, FCL, LCL, Air)
• Including multiple lanes per mode of transportation
• Adding necessary logistics quote data (equipment type, commodity type, temperature requirements, routing information, accessorials, etc.)
• Providing real-time market prices

3. Logistics Dashboard

The dashboard is one of the most important tools in a CRM because it gives you a snapshot of your company’s performance. However, if it’s not logistics-specific, you won’t see a complete picture of your sales data.

A dashboard designed with logistics companies and freight forwarders in mind will include a report/widget to track not just generic data such as profit margin, revenue, and gross profit but also logistics-specific data like shipment count and lanes won. A logistics CRM dashboard can also include a to-do widget to keep you moving forward with sales, a recent activity widget to view your sales team’s activity in real-time, a quote widget to see all active quotes across your company, and an account performance widget to compare the profitability of each account. Relevant dashboard features give you a much clearer picture of your logistics company’s performance.

4. Record Logistics-Specific Data

Every industry has its own jargon, and your CRM needs to speak your language to be effective. The data that matters to you is very specific to the logistics industry, and your CRM needs to report the relevant data. For example, a CRM for freight forwarders will track shipment count, shipment frequency, client ranking by awarded shipments, and more. This information lets you determine your most profitable clients and prioritize fostering loyalty there. You can also find your highest-performing services (FTL, LTL, LCL, etc.), letting you focus your marketing on growing low-performing services or capitalize on best sellers.

5. Logistics Sales Reports

A generic CRM will generate sales reports detailing revenue, gross profit, net profit, deals win ratio, average deal size, and more. These are all important, but you’ll be missing the whole picture if you only have generic KPIs.

A CRM for freight forwarders measures logistics-specific data, such as lanes won, profit margin by lane type, lanes win ratio, shipment frequency, customer rankings, and more. This gives you a much more refined understanding of your sales performance to know what is and isn’t working. With these details, you can revisit your sales strategy and make a plan to expand your logistics business effectively.

6. No Customizations Needed

If you’re wondering if you can customize a generic CRM for the logistics industry, it is possible. However, customization requires a lot of resources and time. That time can be better spent analyzing logistics-specific sales reports and generating more revenue. You can try to adapt a generic CRM to meet your needs, but it is much simpler to invest in a CRM for freight forwarders that already has all the features you would need—no customizations needed.

7. Integrations with Logistics-Specific Applications

Continuing the emphasis on streamlining everything into one central location, a CRM for freight forwarders integrates with logistics-specific applications. This is one major way generic CRMs fall short. Most won’t integrate with logistics applications like DAT, BlueGrace, TomTom, PC Miler, LOADPlus, and more. With a CRM for freight forwarders, you can integrate logistics applications to have all their essential data alongside your other tools for daily operations.

Summary

If your logistics business has a generic CRM, you can make it work, but you’ll constantly need to customize it or use it with other tools. On the other hand, a CRM for freight forwarders gives you a complete picture of your logistics customer data. This allows you to make informed business decisions to secure more shipments, improve your sales, and retain more customers.

If you’re looking for a CRM that has all the tools your logistics business needs, take a look at this CRM for freight forwarders.

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