LxRoadFreight is the first customer relationship management solution designed specifically for U.S. trucking carriers and brokerage firms.
Lanetix, a San Francisco-based provider of customer relationship management software for the transportation and logistics industry, has unveiled what it calls the first CRM solution ever designed specifically for the domestic U.S. freight market.
LxRoadFreight aims to provide both asset-owning trucking carriers and freight brokerages with an “out-of-the-box” software solution for managing both contracted and spot rates. According to Lanetix, the solution will help trucking operators increase asset utilization and help brokerages better manage their relationships with those carriers.
“Domestic freight brokers are facing a highly competitive market to balance shipper demands with carrier capacity, while juggling the predictability of long-term contracted rates with the traditionally more profitable spot market,” the company said in a statement. “Similarly, asset-owning trucking carriers seek to increase utilization, prioritize and win the most profitable RFPs (requests for proposals) and retain drivers while holding shippers accountable to committed volumes.”
According to Lanetix, the LxRoadFreight product can help small trucking companies and brokerages with as few as five employees gain the same kinds of insights and increases in efficiency as their market-leading competitors.
The primary benefits of the new CRM offering include tracking and predictive analytics around volumes, revenues and profitability, as well as RFPs, streamlining carrier relationships and improving exception management processes, all without expensive data storage fees or platform customization.
Troy Goode, co-founder and chief technology officer of Lanetix, said that prior to the development of the company, freight transportation providers had very few options when it came to CRM solutions that actually took all of the complexities of their sales processes into account.
“We think the issue is that a lot of the technology that’s been built over the last 15-20 years has really been targeted at a different kind of industry, not just a different industry,” he said in an interview with American Shipper. “When we look at traditional horizontal CRM platforms, for example, they’re really targeted at discrete manufacturing — Cisco selling routers or Herman Miller selling chairs. But when you look at a services business, which is what logistics is at the end of the day, the tools that are being provided aren’t really meant for the logistics industry, or at least weren’t built with it in mind.”
The result, according to Brian Everett, president of the Transportation Marketing and Sales Association (TMSA), was that trucking firms have generally been forced to choose which metrics to track, rather than tracking everything they do.
“Do we focus on automating the spot market or contracted rates?” he said “Do we use technology to manage our shipper accounts or prioritize the carriers? How can we apply our customer retention strategy to driver retention? Lanetix solves for the complexity of the industry with a beautiful user interface that feels more like Instagram than a CRM.”
Goode said he and the other founders of Lanetix built the company and it’s initial CRM offerings on the same basic premise. From the beginning, Lanetix worked with some of the largest players in the industry — DHL, C.H. Robinson and Kuehne + Nagel, to name a few — as well as mid-market forwarders and found that standard CRM solutions simply didn’t cut it for them.
“Long-term rates, contracted rates and tenders are typically a very large percentage of a logistics or transportation company’s business, but we’ve consistently found that those deals aren’t even tracked in a CRM,” he said. “And what we’ve consistently seen is that because you have so many different kinds of sales approaches and models, and so many kinds of services that are very different — because the way you sell a spot quote, for example, is wildly different from the way you sell a contracted rate, even who is involved in a given deal can be wildly different — an out-of-the-box CRM isn’t really built for that. They don’t really have what you would need to use to track all those complexities.
“So what always happens is one of two things: either a) the logistics company just picks one and says ‘OK, this is the only thing we’re going to track,’ and everything else just stays in Outlook and Excel or b) they have to cut a check to a company like Capgemini or Accenture for hundreds of thousands of dollars — maybe more — to customize those platforms, and basically throw everything that came out of the box away and build something new from scratch.”
He said that neither solution is ideal, but the first scenario is most common due to the high cost of building a custom CRM solution in house and a general lack of budget for investment in technology on the part of logistics companies.
“But if you’re throwing away all those other things and saying, ‘We’ll just keep that in Outlook,’ you can’t properly track and report on it and you’re not actually deriving any value from that data,” he said. “They say data is the new oil, and we’re spilling it like in those old movies where you’d see the oil rig get set up in the fields in Texas and they’re just letting oil spray everywhere because there’s just so much of it.
“And that’s what’s happening with data today. Logistics providers are saying ‘Spot quotes are our highest gross margin opportunities, so let’s track those in CRM,’ but that means most of your revenue is going outside of CRM, which means you’re not actually getting the insights and analytics and insights that you need.”
Goode also noted that one of the largest and most well-known names in modern CRM software, Salesforce.com, was an early seed investor in Lanetix, treating the upstart firm more like a part of a diversified portfolio approach than as a direct competitor.
“If we look at other verticals that are less suited to Saleforce’s out-of-the-box cloud product, like pharmaceuticals, for example, that’s a really complex space where you’re not really selling direct to customers,” he explained. “Pfizer doesn’t go door-to-door and sell you the actual pills. They go to the doctors offices, but when they get there are they selling the doctor pills? No, they’re selling them on the idea of that particular medication. Does the doctor then buy or sell it? No, they turn around and prescribe treatments to patients, who then have to go to the pharmacy and ultimately it’s the pharmacy that handles the actual sale transaction. So this is a sales cycle that’s very different from selling Herman Miller chairs or Cisco routers.”
Given LxRoadFreight’s relatively low cost — $75 per subscriber per month on an annual contract — and the fact that it operates as a browser-based cloud application, meaning no additional software is required, Louise Gunstone, managing director of Eyefortransport Ltd., said the CRM platform has the potential to be a “game changer for the domestic freight market, which has often been underserved by modern software providers.”
Lanetix also recently teamed up with transportation management systems provider 3Gtms in a partnership that, according to 3Gtms Vice President of Marketing Chuck Fuerst, “will bring the best of cloud-based innovation together to streamline front-office processes with operational back-office visibility and automation.”
Lanetix launches CRM for domestic freight providers
