Last year Bill had to give Jim, one of his employees, a difficult performance review. Jim wasn’t getting the job done, and Bill was hoping that he could use the review to get Jim’s performance back on track.
To make a long story short, after 30 minutes Bill could see that his message wasn’t getting through. Exasperated, he said, “Jim, I just don’t get it! You’re a smart, talented and capable individual that should be able to handle these projects, but your performance is unacceptable! Are you ignorant or apathetic?” Jim responded, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”
For the past couple of months, in our Perfect Storm webinars and at our Perfect Storm Transportation Center, we’ve had the CEOs from major transportation companies share with our audiences that strategic shippers have transportation rates as much as 10% - 15% lower than transactional shippers.
Given that 10% - 15% can be a big number and a big deal for your companies, some of you got back to us and asked a very simple question: “How can we determine whether or not we are a transactional or strategic shipper?”
So we created a brief pop quiz designed to help your company find out where it falls on the scale from being a very transactional to a very strategic shipper. We offered this pop quiz in a recent Two Minute Warning and we received outstanding feedback from some of you who have already taken advantage of this quick, free, and extremely useful tool.
But, truth be told, there are a whole bunch of companies out there in our audience that could benefit from taking this pop quiz. Hence, the story about Jim and his performance review.
I realize that for many of you, it may not be ignorance or apathy but simply a lack of time that has kept you from taking the quiz.
If that is the case, may I close with another question? If you want great results in managing your transportation costs, isn’t it worth taking five minutes to take this quiz in order to understand where your company is at on the transactional/strategic scale?
Investing just minutes may yield tremendous insights, facilitate some interesting dialogue, and launch your company on the path to becoming a more strategic shipper. And since strategic shippers get better rates, more capacity, and can build a supply chain that is much more efficient than their competition, take the quiz and have these five minutes prove to be a valuable investment of time!
We provide all of this because we’re on your team, here to help and passionate about seeing you be successful.
