Making Moves in 2024: Winning Tactics to Dominate the Supply Chain Market

If you’ve been part of the supply chain and logistics industry, the past few years have felt like a roller coaster ride nobody asked for. Between massive labor shortages and stranded cargo ships, the ups and downs never seem to end. 

However, despite the recent challenges, the supply chain and logistics industry is set for incredible growth in the coming years, with experts predicting a global market value of 18.23 trillion by 2030. 

With this in mind, Chelsea Madden, VP of Customer Success and Partnerships at SalesIntel, and Kara Smith Brown, CRO & Founder of LeadCoverage, partnered on an in-depth webinar to provide supply chain marketers with key sales and marketing tactics to create a commanding presence market presence in 2024.

Read on to learn how SalesIntel makes finding customers easier, keeps your records accurate, and helps you understand which customers are considering going to your competition.

Identify Key People Within Your Target Companies

There are ~20,000 shippers over $50M in revenue in the United States (As per SalesIntel data). The relatively small number of companies within the supply chain market makes a well-defined ideal customer profile (ICP) a critical element of any successful sales and marketing strategy. This means knowing the specific companies, industries, firmographics, and people that represent your best-fit buyers. 

However, building a strong ICP takes more than just company-level data. After all, businesses don’t buy, people do. An actionable ICP requires a robust database of the specific people who influence and make purchasing decisions within your target companies. 

“If you don’t own the email addresses and contact records, you can’t effectively monitor buying intent and behaviors. The data is useless if you don’t have the contacts associated.” — Kara Smith Brown

By leveraging SalesIntel’s robust contact record database, you’ll be able to build laser-focused campaigns to reach key decision-makers within your target companies including:

• Shippers
• Warehouses
• Brokers
• Carriers
• Forwarders

With a well-defined ICP, you can focus your marketing efforts and resources on engaging interested buyers without wasting time and resources reaching out to out-of-market companies.

See Who’s Making Moves in the Supply Chain Industry

Supply chain decisions don’t just happen overnight. Instead, they often require months or years of planning and research before any strategic shifts occur. In fact, it’s estimated that around 95% of potential customers are not in an active buying cycle. 

On a tactical level, this means that if you’re only targeting “active” buyers with your sales and marketing strategies, you’re missing out on the vast majority of opportunities to build long-term relationships with future buyers. 

To tap into the 95% of pre-active buyers, you need to know when those prospects are actively engaged and demonstrating buying signals — before your competitors do.

For example, if a large freight transport company is considering switching its payroll solution, it’s unlikely the company will abandon its existing payroll software overnight. A major decision like this will take months (or, more realistically, years) of planning before a new software solution is onboarded. However, throughout the time leading up to the decision, teams are hard at work researching and providing recommendations on potential new vendors and solutions to key decision-makers within the company. This is where intent data comes into play. 

By leveraging SalesIntel’s predictive intent data you can detect when your target organizations are actively researching solutions, technologies, or competitors.

Rather than waiting for prospects to raise their hands to speak with a broker, you can identify, prioritize, and engage these high-value target companies early in their research process — long before your competitors. 

Once you’ve identified the companies showing buying signals, you can leverage LeadCoverage’s powerful demand generation tactics to build a tailored multi-channel messaging strategy focused on educating and informing your target audience — addressing their specific needs and pain points. By creating multiple touchpoints throughout your prospect’s research process, you can position yourself as a trusted leader in your space and keep your brand top-of-mind when they make a vendor shortlist.

Fight Customer Shift or Before it Starts

Here’s an eye-opening stat: on average, it’s 900 times more expensive to bring in a new supply chain customer than to keep an existing customer. 

While acquiring new customers is often seen as the lifeblood of any organization, building and maintaining existing client relationships is equally important. Yet, it is often overlooked. Sales and marketing teams tend to focus on either new revenue, cross-sell, or upsell opportunities, leaving retention solely in the hands of customer success. However, to build a sustainable and scalable business new customer acquisition is important, but keeping your existing customers happy and renewing is key. 

But how do you fight shift risks before they become cancelation requests? 

Utilizing the powerful intent signals provided by SalesIntel, you can continuously monitor your customer base’s satisfaction and identify those actively researching alternative providers or solutions. 

Imagine you’re a third-party logistics (3PL) provider and you notice someone at one of your largest customers searching for Sawgrass, XPO, and Geodis. While that customer has not yet called you to cancel your services, chances are high that they could be searching for another provider. In this case, you could have your customer success manager reach out to address any potential issues, send a dedicated marketing nurture sequence highlighting the benefits of your service, and even have the sales rep who closed the deal personally reach out to their internal champion to ensure they’re still happy with your organization.

By understanding which customers are at risk of shifting providers, you can proactively engage with those at-risk companies with coordinated retention-focused outreach across sales, marketing, and customer success to address any potential issues before losing share of wallet.

Additionally, aligning your sales, marketing, and customer success teams around the shared goals of both new business acquisition and customer retention allows you to protect your existing revenue streams and ensure you’re not constantly playing catch-up with new customer acquisition.

Build a Rock-Solid Database with Quality Contact and Company Records

So far, all of the strategies we’ve covered hinge upon one thing: high-quality records. 

As the supply chain industry evolves, business needs change, and people leave and join companies, maintaining a comprehensive and up-to-date database is crucial for effective outreach and engagement across the entire customer lifecycle, including the sourcing process.

To illustrate why accurate data is critical to your campaign’s success, imagine this: 

Last year, you launched a highly successful campaign aimed at your well-researched ICP. You decide to run another campaign this year using all the same contacts. An example buyer in your ICP, “Carol” is the head of Procurement at a large retail organization. You’ve spent countless hours of your marketing team’s time, and a hefty amount of your advertising budget to create a beautifully crafted campaign with flawless messaging — perfectly tailored to address Carol’s pain points. You launch the campaign and…. silence. No email opens, no clickthroughs on your ads, and no conversions. Why? Because Carol has left the company. She is now the Director of Operations and a Healthcare startup and is no longer in your ICP. All that time, effort, and resources have been wasted because of outdated information.

The good news is that this is not what your future has to hold. By tapping into SalesIntel’s extensive contact and company records you can supplement and enrich your existing database with decision-makers, influencers, and buying committees at your target companies. Keeping your records database clean and up-to-date on a quarterly (or even monthly) basis will ensure that your message reaches the right buyers and that all the hard work you put into your sales and marketing campaigns drives a positive impact among your target audience. 

The First Link in the (Supply) Chain

In such a rapidly growing and fierce market, leveraging every possible tool and tactic you can 

is crucial to delivering measurable results and driving sustainable growth.

Creating a well-defined ICP will empower you to craft highly personalized and effective campaigns that resonate with your target audience. Furthermore, monitoring real-time intent signals from your target companies early in their research process will enable you to strategically position your brand as a trusted partner in the supply chain ecosystem. Finally, by leveraging intent data to identify which customers are at risk of shifting, you can proactively address any issues and keep your customers happy. 

With this potent combination of high-quality data and cutting-edge demand generation strategies, you’ll be perfectly positioned to truly dominate the supply chain market in 2024 and beyond.

Ready to see how SalesIntel’s quality data can deliver supply chain success?