Hitting a sales plateau? It happens even to the best freight agents. When you’ve experienced consistent growth month after month, hitting a peak you just can’t seem to push past can feel frustrating. But you don’t need to stay stuck and stagnant forever. Our top-tier freight agents share their strategies for pivoting back into growth and building your book of business past a slump.
Evaluate your daily routine
With a critical eye, examine how you spend your day. For a full week, track your time in 15-minute increments. What helpful and not helpful patterns do you notice? Take a look at your daily activities: are they contributing to growth or hindering your growth?
Are you putting yourself in a position for success? Where are you facing distractions you can eliminate? What recurring tasks can be systemized or streamlined? Are you starting your day with a plan? Are you working from a place of organization, or a place of reaction?
Reflect honestly on these questions and put yourself back on the right track to have an efficient and productive workflow if you’ve veered off course. If you plan your day to grow your freight business, you will be consistently setting yourself up to see daily growth.
Look for new business every single day
With the nature of the freight industry, seasons of growth and seasons of decline are to be expected. Due to seasonality, supply and demand and other factors out of your control, even a client who you’ve served with excellence may no longer be part of your book of business.
To get ahead of client attrition, actively prospect for new business daily. Developing leads over time is a key strategy to avoid a sales plateau and plan for growth in your freight business.
Set aside part of your day — every single day, no matter what! — to prospect new business. Make lead generation a non-negotiable aspect of your routine. Reaching out via email, a personal phone call, a note in the mail or even an in-person visit positions you in front of potential new customers. This ensures opportunities for you to book a load, expand into another freight line and increase your book of business.
Efficiency is key
At Tallgrass, our freight agents have the resources they need to succeed, while also enjoying the freedom of owning their business. In the freight industry, it pays off to talk to well-organized agents that have found success. Connect with fellow freight agents who have proven success over time. What are their strategies for efficiency? How have they automated or consolidated workflows? What can you borrow from their success stories to up your own efficiency? Take suggestions, tips and tools from those that have been there, done that, and consider what you can do to thrive in challenging times, to get more organized and you will find that you can be much more productive and successful.
Next, consider task batching. Did you know we lose an average of five minutes every time we’re distracted? Even if you’re only distracted twice a day (and if that’s you, cheers!), that’s an hour lost each week. Enter batch work, where you’ll group similar tasks together to boost efficiency and prevent distraction. Look at the recurring tasks or similar tasks you tackle each day or each week, like customer communication for example. How can you automate or consolidate these ongoing activities? What about streamlining some existing processes to increase efficiency?
Build your team
Building your team is a powerful strategy to increase efficiency, allow more time for prospecting and boost daily productivity. For many freight agents, this starts with adding an assistant.
It’s challenging to release control over what you’ve built. Trust us, we’ve been there and we get it. When you’re proud of your business, sharing some of that responsibility is tough. But with only 24 hours in your day, building your team multiplies your time and allows for scaling. The most aggressive, proactive and entrepreneurial agents understand that to grow as an agent, you have to grow as a team.
With a team, you free yourself up to do what you do best: serving your clients and growing your business. Bonus — the monotonous tasks that are important to your business can be taken off your plate, freeing you up to accomplish strategic work that really moves the needle for your freight agency.
Adding a team member is an investment in yourself, your company and your future. A small cost now can lead to breaking sales records in the future.
At Tallgrass, you’re never flying solo. Join our family, where you’ll enjoy all the perks of being your own boss, plus the joys of being part of a team. Learn more about becoming an agent today.
