Your Logistics Marketing & Sales Playbook from 2025 Artwork

Everything is Logistics

A podcast for the thinkers in freight. Everything is Logistics is hosted by Blythe (Brumleve) Milligan and we're telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff and people get from point A to B.

Industry topics include freight, logistics, transportation, maritime, warehousing, intermodal, and trucking along with the intersection of technology and the attention economy.

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Everything is Logistics

Your Logistics Marketing & Sales Playbook from 2025

December 30, 2025 • Blythe Brumleve Milligan

Ready to adjust your messaging to earn new business and better business? In this special 'best of' edition, we're cutting through the noise to bring you your favorite, most impactful marketing and sales-themed episodes. No fluff, no fakery—just what's working right now for the thinkers in freight.

You can binge this one over the holidays for ideas and inspiration to refine your strategy for the new year.

In this episode, we revisit five key conversations:

The Supply Chain is the Product: A solo episode on how to stop selling shipments and start selling your entire supply chain journey as a competitive advantage. Starts at 5:35-minute mark.
TMSA Study Deep Dive: Grace Sharkey joins the show to unpack the surprising data from the Transportation Marketing & Sales Association on what's really happening in our industry—from budgets and sales quotas to the tools marketers are actually using. Starts at 36-minute mark.
The Best Reddit Freight Sales Tips: We scoured the freight broker subreddit for years to find the most valuable, unconventional, and effective sales tactics that are getting people in the door. Starts at 1:47:24-minute mark.
How Marketers Are Actually Using AI: Moving past the hype to discuss the smart AI tools that work when you put them into practice right now. Starts at 2:25:44-minute mark.
A Modern Marketer's Guide to SEO: A masterclass on navigating SEO, AEO, and GEO in the age of AI, finding low-hanging fruit, and answering the question: "should you even be blogging anymore?" Starts at 2:56:15-minute mark.

Whether you're looking for high-tech digital strategies or fundamental tactics that are making a comeback, this episode is packed with useful takeaways to fuel your 2025 planning.

Watch the video versions of these episodes on YouTube:

Feedback? Ideas for a future episode? Shoot us a text here to let us know.

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0:37

Blythe, welcome into another Best of episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers and freight. We are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and I am your host, Blythe Milligan, and in this edition of our best of series, we're going to be talking about our favorite, or really your favorite, marketing and sales themed episodes over the course of the last year. Now, a couple of these episodes are from November of 2024 but because they were released a little too late in the game to be included in last year's topics, we ran the numbers and decided to make the editorial decision to include them in this episode, and so we've got five, actually best of episodes that are appearing in this one, so you can binge it over the holidays and maybe take some inspiration and some ideas of what's working, what's not working, and how you can adjust your messaging in order to earn new business and earn better business. And so those five episodes are the first one is the supply chain. Is the product. Now, this was a solo episode that I did, really focusing in on how you can look at every aspect of your supply chain, or really the supply chain of the products that you're selling, or the supply chain of the products, of the logistics of that product that you're selling to your customers, and understanding the supply chain journey that it takes over the course of its lifespan, so that you can sell that the management of the or the shipment of that freight better. So the supply chain is the product is the first one, the next episode, we have the TMSA so the transportation marketing and sales Association they have in a study that they release every two years that talks about the freight or asks its membership, what sales and marketing strategies are they using? This is another one of those episodes that was released in November of 2024 and you guys just really, really loved it on both podcasts and YouTube platforms. And so we included that in this episode as well. And we go through all of the different data points on who's using what software, what kind of marketing or sales issues are they deploying or exploring. And so we include that episode in this mix. And Grace Sharkey, friend of the show, she's going to be appearing in a lot in this particular episode, because we go through that TMSA study together, and we go highlight all of the different data points that we thought were interesting in the report. Next up, we are going to cover the best Reddit freight sales tips. And that's, you know exactly how it sounds. I am a regular browser of the freight broker subreddit, logistics subreddit, and I save all of the posts that I think that are interesting, especially ones that are around sales and marketing. And so I saved all of those tips up over the course of really years, and then I made this episode of the Best freight or best Reddit freight sales tips. So that's number three on the list. Number four on the list is how marketers are actually using AI. And this is a another show that we did, or another snippet or a segment of a freight Friends episode with gray Sharkey, where we go over the new data and smart tools that actually work when you put them into practice, none of this fluff or fakery or what's coming down the pipeline. What are the tools that people are using right now that they're seeing an impact from so we cover that in the fourth episode. And then finally, for all of this SEO or Search Engine Optimization nerds out there, we got a good one for you at the end, because Grace Sharkey is she was newer at the time that we recorded this episode, she was newer at her job at orderful, which is an EDI company, and she was having some questions about SEO and what she how she needs to think about it, what she needs to do, especially in the age of AI, where there's lots of questions around these fake phrases of AEO and GEO, and it basically, it all comes down to the same principles that we learned from an SEO perspective. So I've done SEO for years, and I've been quite successful at it in my own personal websites. And so this is basically this last segment is me teaching about SEO, and then also explaining how AI kind of plays a role in that process. And then any of the common questions that folks have about how to, you know, find those low hanging fruit opportunities and find those, those winners in this modern sort of digital age, and how you should think about, you know, even, should you even be blogging in today's digital media age? So that is, it's a highly useful episode for anyone. Who's looking for inspiration, whether it's from a fundamental standpoint, because we, I mean, we talk about everything from the digital age and SEO and AI and that side of the spectrum, but then also on the flip side of that spectrum, from some of the best marketing that we have seen in logistics, and some of that comes from direct mail. And so we cover all sort of coins, or all sides of the coin in this one. And I've rambled long enough, so let's get right into it, and let's talk about how the supply chain is the product. Hope you all enjoy. Welcome into another episode of everything. Is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers and afraid. I am your host by the Milligan and we are proudly presented by SPI logistics. And in this episode, I want to talk about a recent appearance that I had on the BBC called a show called What in the world. Now this is an audio based podcast that they sometimes turn into video format, but it's available over on YouTube. I will list it in the show notes, in case you want to check out the full episode, but it was about 30 minute discussion. Discussion centered around how the global supply chain kind of works. I think for a lot of folks, obviously not in our industry, but for a lot of outsiders, there are a few moments over the last, say, handful of years, that the supply chain becomes top of news for them, the ever given getting stuck in the Suez Canal was one of the bigger pivotal moments. This whole tariff conversation was another pivotal moment. And then there was also, whenever the tariff conversation happened, there were a lot of Chinese manufacturers and a lot of Chinese sellers that were taking it directly to Tiktok to go direct to consumer and to basically tell and inform the American people and really the world on where the overwhelming majority of stuff is manufactured. How much is the cost for each of these things, and then it trying to essentially get you to buy direct from these Chinese manufacturers, or to take it a step further, and just from what I understand and from some of the videos that I that I watched and that I gathered is that they no longer wanted to be seen as a country that manufactures the, the cheapest goods they wanted, their their manufacturers and their artisans to be known as people who do very quality work. And that, I think there's, there's definitely a hint of truth on, on that end, and then there's definitely a hint of truth on just, you know, a bunch of, frankly, you know, plastic junk that's, you know, been manufactured because China is the center of the world when it comes to manufacturing processes. So they manufacture a variety of different goods from the lower end, sort of the cheap crap that you know is maybe they're trying to get around that image and get around that perception and shine a light on where they're really their craftsmanship is really taken a foothold, and that's in the designer bag market. So a lot of these videos went viral. They started out on Tiktok, showing exactly how the processes is made from all kinds of different products, but I was mainly talking about the videos that were on designer hand handbags for this particular episode, it basically it formed a new thesis for myself, that the supply chain is really the product, because for the first time in human civilization, we are seeing the global trade re be reorganized right in front of our eyes. You know that over hundreds, sometimes 1000s of years, you know global trade and ports and shipping, and you know where those goods are shipped and who buys them and why, you know has all been decided by a very small amount of people in all over the world, and in this particular case, in 2025 we are able to see these discussions take place in a public format, which I think is just like as a side note, is so fascinating. But then on the flip side, we are now able to see the hows and the whys of these discussions being made. And I want to bring it back to a quote that I heard years ago where Elon Musk talks about how the factory is the product and that you can't have and basically what he was saying is that you can't have a good product that's affordable and trustworthy and dependable, and you know, all the things that you want out of a product that's being made, you can't have that unless you have the factory. I would take it a step further and say the supply chain is the factory. Because the thesis of what and the the point I wanted to really hammer home during this BBC appearance is that you have to. Think about, it's not just, let's use the designer handbag example for a second, because you can't just think about where the leather is. Maybe the leather is brought in, or the threads that is sewing the leather together, the metal that's on the bag. Where is that metal sourced? It's not necessarily the factory that puts it all together. It's the source of the source of the products, of where you're getting all over the world, and then how you're bringing those all under in house, or whether you're using different manufacturing partners or assembly partners or packaging partners. There's lots of different structures for many different kinds of businesses all over the globe, but my thesis is that the supply chain is the product. And so it's basically talking about, you know, the machinery that also is involved, and not just the human craftsmanship, but the machinery. And so this discussion really led to sort of a larger these viral videos, rather, led to a larger discussion around where our stuff comes from, how we, you know, think about national security, and also realizing, I think, some larger trends that are going on in the world. And I think, you know, the point of a lot of those viral videos that we saw, which have since been deleted. You know, a lot of those videos have been deleted for what reasons I do not know. I can only assume, but there is a message behind some of those videos, and that is in, you know, there's, there's only really one country in the world that knows the buying habits of, you know, American consumers, and that's the Chinese they want you to buy more from them. A content creator, James Lee over on YouTube, he's done some fantastic investigative journalism, and one of the topics that he covered was this exact point was being these videos are having the goal of, even though there's this moment of time where everybody is talking about, you know, switching their manufacturing, is it near shoring is it offshoring? Is it trying to build it in America? Is it trying to build it in a friendly country? Maybe a friendly right now country, but the Chinese are trying to get you to still buy from them over the long haul. So I think it's important for and I want to read off some of these numbers that I put together for this BBC appearance. And it's essentially China's dominance and control over a very large portion of a lot of things that are made in the world. Listen to this, that 30 to 40% of global electronics come from China. 40 to 50% of pharmaceuticals. Side note that is not included in my notes, but a side note is from map, human intent over on x. He essentially said, he says that for the overwhelming majority of our livestock in the United States, they depend on a vital supplement that comes from China. And I think over 90% of our livestock in the United States is so is reliant on this one supplement that if these if this livestock, does not have access to that supplement, then they will die. And it's something like they have to have it every, every single day. But then if they go for a few days without it, then they are at risk of not living, of not surviving. So that's a very scary statistic to know that individually, 40% 40 to 50% of pharmaceuticals are controlled by China. But the fact that the our, you know, entire livestock population, damn near an entire livestock population, is dependent on a supplement that comes from China as well. Over 40% of textiles come from China. 50% of robotics, the refining of rare earths, machinery to make the machine, etc. All of these things are part of the supply chain process, and they're mostly being done in China. So another larger trend that I wanted to bring up, so that's that's one sort of larger, large trend that has been trending, frankly, for the last couple of decades, another trend that I think that these videos are really that have really hinted at, is the morality dilemma, and that for many of us this, this tariff conversation, these global trade conversations, this could be a much needed wake up Call on our own consumerism habits. Few more stats that James Lee had in his video, and he said US household debt has tripled over the last three over the years. Per Forbes, less than 1% of urban Chinese citizens use consumer loans to purchase consumer goods, while 47% of all US families have. Installment loans and 46% carry a credit card balance. Remember what my point about? You know, nobody knows the consumer. Nobody knows the US consumer, like China does, and they know that we are big spenders. They know that we are willing to go into debt over some of these consumerism practices. And so the morality dilemma comes into play whenever you think about, you know, some of the, I guess, over the last handful of years, the lack of trust in institutions, especially elite high fashion ones. There's a lot of, you know, a growing concern about where products are made, where, you know, fabrics are sourced. It's sort of a, I think, a lifting of the veil moment for some viewers over on Tik Tok, whenever these videos were released. And, I mean, I had known that, you know, China has manufactured, you know, a good majority of our products, but I didn't know it was to that extent. And I think it's aI you even work in this industry. And I didn't know it was that many industries to that level of extent. And I think that this is sort of lifting of the veil and of our morality of like, what we should be doing, what we should be buying, maybe what we should not be buying. It really is shocking how much of the world China controls through controlling the their supply chain and treating the supply chain as a product. Now, on the flip side, I do think that for a lot of these designer bags, you know, a good move or a good I would say not not a good response, but it was a response for many folks, is that they're just going to go buy direct instead of, you know, going into a Hermes store and hoping that you can get put on a waiting list to be able to have the honor, I guess, of spending 1000s of dollars for a designer purse. You know, maybe you would be able to do something else with that money and be able to, you know, buy direct from a Chinese manufacturer instead of going directly into the the Hermes shop. I do think, though, that there is a certain level of people that for the rest of their lives, they're always in for really future generations, they're always going to look for a way to signal wealth. And I think designer handbags and designer clothes and things like that, some of the quality can still be questioned, the quality, plus the price could absolutely be questioned. And then some of the standards around what some of these companies, their, I guess, their own morality as well, is that something that you would want to support with your own money? And I think what we're seeing is a greater rise in in different consumerism paths. And there's a few trends that I kind of want to pull on here. So if you're not part of that wealth group that wants to signal that you're wealthy, and a designer handbag is a perfect way to do that. There are lots of many other ways. Cars are one of them. Houses are one of them. There is a few different trends that are happening in the United States in particular, and I think that this will help resonate, or maybe it might, you might resonate with some of these different stats, and the one of the points is that rise in vintage shops, in flea markets, and one of the stats was, consumer behavior is a key driver. 70% of global consumers are planning to buy used goods this year, and 86% having bought or sold pre loved items in the last 12 months, this trend is particularly strong among millennials and Gen Z, who value sustainability, with over 1 million Instagram posts tagged sustainable fashion in 2023 now there's another aspect to this trend, and that is the thrill of the hunt. So think about it, from the vintage flea market or vintage vintage flea markets, kind of an oxymoron, but the vintage markets a flea market, these are placed and even to the point of like home goods or TJ Maxx. These are side note retailers that are surviving and thriving in an era where, you know, online shopping has, you know, sort of dominated the landscape over the last, say, five years. But then you think about it from the in person, people searching for community type angle, and that's where thrift stores come into play, and that's where you know being able to find something that no one else has is very key. It's very pivotal. And sometimes people use this as a communication method. You know, fashion is very much a communication style of who you can communicate to and why, of your own personal interests. And so it just kind of naturally makes sense that in a world where things are so especially clothing. Especially fast fashion, is so copy paste that people are looking to stand out a little bit more, and finding something that is a little bit older, it's probably made better. It's better quality. You can get it for much cheaper. And then you can also have that sort of feel good vibe that you're going to wear, something that probably no one else has, none of your friend group, or, you know, people out are going to be wearing and then you can also have the, I guess, the moral compass of, you know, you're recycling something, instead of going and buying a t shirt from Sheehan that's going to last, you know, five seconds, and you're, you're going to wash it, and it's going to fall apart. So there's a little bit of that morality at play, too. Now, if we switch gears a little bit, wait first, I did want to mention this stat, because there's also the popularity of online resale platforms. And that's where I kind of wanted to switch gears a little bit, is to go into the online aspect of some of these different, you know, vintage style or resale type markets, but the popularity of online resale platforms, while not directly vintage shops or flea markets, they also support the broader market with eBay's pre loved apparel sales growing over 400% globally from March 2023 to march 2024 That's an insane stat, 400% globally from March 2023 to march 2024 now, what does that look like online? It's what you know, kind of the going back to the viral videos. It's also a level of information war, where if you can win the PR in the information battle, then you you have a chance to sort of change the trajectory of how some of these policies are being made, what the conversation stems from, who's having the conversations. And so I think that that is the information war is, is a very key part of this trade war as well, or hopefully the trade war is ending. We don't know it's depending on when you're listening to this. Who knows I'm recording this on May 14? We do tentatively have a trade deal with China right now, so it's not essentially a trade war anymore. Will that change in the future? Nobody knows I'm recording this at night on May 14, just in case it changes within the next hour or so, which is sometimes has happened when I've been recording over the last few weeks during all of this T word drama, and that is a tariff drama. Okay, so what does that look like online? Now, what this looks like online, and where we've covered in some previous episodes, is how companies are starting to be more forward with how they talk about their supply chain online. There are some websites that can't that give out that list out their entire supply chain, where your supply chain can become your competitive advantage. And so one, okay, one of the stats that this one company, and I'll mention the company here in just a minute, but they talk about one of those competitive advantages in that one dump truck of clothing is burned every minute of every day, and the average person buys a new piece of clothing every five days. Now these are all the all of these numbers are before, sort of the the tariff drama, which we've seen purchasing fault off of a cliff for sites like temu and Shein, because that, you know, you're only really buying these products because you can get them quick and you can get them cheap. You don't really care about sort of the quality, because you're kind of rolling the dice anyways. And so that that's kind of stems back to the morality dilemma that I think for a lot of folks, we are kind of starting to alter how we spend money. I mean, at least I know for myself, like I had zero problem ordering, you know, 100 bucks worth of sheen clothing, getting 30 outfits and sending 20 of them back. And I would do this probably once or twice a year, just in order to have maybe, like, a summer hall or like a winter haul of outfits. A Floridian, I don't really have, you know, a lot of, like, winter clothes. So I bought a ton of winter clothes. Wasn't sure which ones I was going to wear, but then I just ended up shipping and returning back the rest of them. Now, not so much. I'm not going to do that now, and that is a morality thing that I should have recognized before, but it took all of this sort of global trade drama to really break myself of just instantly, like buying things and just because it's on my phone, you know, social media ads have got me pretty good, especially on Tiktok, those at the way that they can target content and ads is, unlike no other Instagram is also very good when it comes to targeting as well. But Tiktok will get me so much more than any other platform and but since all of this drama has started, it has really, I would say. I cut my spending on social media, I think, has been cut by 80% and that is a dramatic amount of savings. So I don't know if that's happening for a lot of other people, but based on the sales at Sheehan and Timu, I would be confident in saying that that definitely has been happening. And we're, you know, before all of this tariff drama, we were living in a world where we were just buying more and more and more and not really caring about the environment. But an average person buys a new piece of clothing every five days, and one dump truck of clothing is burned every minute of every day. That is insane with how much we're purchasing. Remember, a lot of this stuff. It doesn't last. And so that's where you see the trends and sort of the rising of the vintage marts and the flea markets and things like and the online resellers and things like that. So my my thesis around the supply chain being the product evolves into brands need to really own their supply chain and really use it as a marketing competitive advantage, because people are becoming more aware also of greenwashing. Creators have also made this their marketing strategy. If you've checked out the tanner leather Stein, he tests leather goods and highlights the small brands doing it right. He is a creator over on Tiktok, and you might have seen him taking like these designer bags and destroying them and testing them. He'll cut them up, he'll, he'll, you know, rub the the leather. He'll do all these different quality tests to see if it's actually worth it to to purchase these high, expensive brands. He was doing all of the storytelling as a hobby, and then when all of the tariff drama and global supply chain drama starts dropping, it was kind of a cool moment to watch him know exactly where all of these materials come from. He's he's been shining a light on the brands that have been doing it right, even smaller brands that are less famous and also less expensive, but have better quality and better artisans that are putting together these different bags. He's been shining a light on them. Now, because of all this drama, he has now been able to take his storytelling to another level, where he's building his own products. He's building his own quality, designer looking bags, and he's doing it all himself. His name is Tanner leatherstein over on Tiktok. So if you have a chance to follow him, highly, highly recommend it, because he's he's one of those creators that I felt, that I feel, has been doing things the right way and building an audience and building great storytelling in order to help his audience become more educated, and then, in the process, now he has a, you know, he's able to develop a product of his own. So I just think that's super cool, and it's super interesting. And really, you want to, I want to support people like that, so check them out. I'll list them in the show notes. Let me make a note to myself. Now, there's another aspect of this where consumers are also becoming more knowledgeable about the fibers in the products that they're buying. And so for a lot of folks, I never knew to look at like, thread counts. I never knew to look at the different materials of what, how stuff is made. I would look at it too. I would see like, you know, polyester, for example. I frankly like the way polyester feels. It's soft, it's comfortable. It's in a lot of my workout clothes, but it's also trying to kill me as well. And so knowing that fact, I adjust my purchasing habits accordingly, and then also knowing that fact, I can better investigate things that maybe I want to spend a little bit extra money on, but I also don't want to spend a little bit of extra money just for the sake of a name. So being able to look at, you know, really, I wedding season is upon us, and so looking for dresses online. If a dress is $200 and it's made out of polyester, I don't think so. But if it's a workout shirt, it's $20 and it's polyester, I might think so and so just know, having that different educational awareness that is really sort of stirred up over the last couple of years, I would say now it's in really in the mainstream of where your stuff comes from and the types of products that are being used. That's an educational gap that we are filling. Now, there's another company that I did want to mention that, I think, and I've mentioned on a previous show with gray Sharkey freight Friends episode, but fibers like cotton and wool having the longest shelf life. Like, I mean, I knew about like cotton and I knew like wool. Like, I'm a Floridian, so I don't have much wool stuff. I don't necessarily need it all that much, but there was one company called sheep Inc, where they have transparency and traceability on all of their clothing that they sell. And the way that they do this is that with their they talk about sheep. Sheep ink DNA, and the transparency and traceability are the pieces of that DNA, and they complete the picture of a responsible label. Now, how do they do this? Every piece of of clothing or maybe a coat or something that you buy from sheep Inc, it comes with a tag that's on the code itself, and you can scan that that tag has a QR code on it. You can scan it. And then you can go to their site, and you can see the exact sheep that it came from that's still alive. It's it's still a live sheep, but you can see where the wool was taken from that sheep to make your product. And I think that that is so cool. It's obviously sustainability, and being an environmentally friendly brand, and all of those good things, you can say all of those things. And a lot of companies try to say those things, but this sheep, Inc, takes it a step further, where you can actually see the sheep that your product was coming from, and you can do it, and it's built right into the label, and it's built right into the ethos of the company. So they not only are practicing what they preach, but they're teaching their consumers in the process of where their product is coming from, the supply chain is the product. And that's the point I really want to hammer home, is that this can be a competitive advantage. I don't think that sheep Inc is going to be the last company that ever does this. I think that the companies who are more forthcoming with their supply chain and how their products get to you, how they they charge money and each step of that process. I think that transparency is what people are craving, because they want to know how stuff works. They want to know where their stuff is coming from, and they also want to know that you're not scamming them. And that's another side of the coin where you have a lot of brands who are a little fake about their environmentalism, their little fake about their sustainability goals. They talk a good game, but they don't exactly live up to it. And so if you are curious about, you know any company, there are a couple different sites that can or there's one site in particular. It's called Good on you dot eco. So Good on you dot eco, where you can see companies that are true or kind of fibbing about their supply chain and how environmentally friendly they are. So you can use use that site is kind of like a cross reference in order to make sure that you know you or not, to make sure, but to maybe support a brand with your money that are doing things the right way. So check out that site. Then there's another site called trashy.io where, if you're going through, you know, this sort of springtime right now, you I do this in the fall as well, but you're cleaning out your entire closet and you're making room for new stuff to go buy, or maybe, you know, not buy as much. Yeah, it's neither here nor there. But if you're looking to get rid of some items, there's a company called trashy.io where you pay for a bag. So you pay for, like, a giant bad shipping bag. Essentially, they send it to you. You're typically are paying like, 10 bucks for a few different bags. They do this for electronics as well. And so they send it back to you, you fill it up, you send it back, and then they tell they give you a certain amount of money in partner money that you could spend on their partner sites. So let's use different retailers. For example, we'll partner with trashy to say that, hey, if you're going to clean out room in your closet by donating a bunch of goods, then you're going to get a little bit of cash back, and then you can use it to spend at our different retail partners. I love that they do it with consumer electronics as well. I can't tell you how many damn USB cords I have just everywhere. The fact that a USB cord is shipped with every single product when we all have more than enough of what we need. As far as USB cords are concerned, I sustainability idea is give people the option to ship with or without the USB cord so we don't have to keep going through this constantly. I cannot imagine how much waste is being created every single day based on USB cords that no one is going to use. So trashy does that as well, where they have an electronics component bag that you can send in all of your spare electronic components, so you don't have to, you know, throw them in the nearest landfill or littered or whatever, or maybe they just sit in a drawer somewhere. So put them to good use. So I'll put both of those links in the show notes, just to make it easy. But just the last few points I want to wrap up here based on that BBC appearance, is that the supply chain is now the product. You can use this as your marketing advantage, and then you can also just use it as a morality advantage. It. So transparency, open. I think that that will lead to greater gains in the future for both brands and just the planet in general. So the supply chain is now the product. Every business owner should be aware of it, but you can only focus on what you can control. So prioritizing diversity of sources income and maintaining optionality is key to a lot of phases in life, but especially your supply chain. So I will also link to that BBC interview in case you wanted to take a listen. We'll put all of those links in the show notes, just to make things easy. But I just kind of wanted to spread this thesis far and wide, that your supply chain is now the product, and you could benefit massively by showcasing if you're doing things the right way and if you're not doing things the right way, or you want to support companies that are doing things the right way, there are also additional resources as well. So hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see in the next one. But let's go ahead and move into our next topic. Grace Sharkey and Blythe Milligan here with you. For everything is logistics, presented by SPI logistics. We're going to talk about freight marketing, and there was this TMSA benchmarking study that was released. TMSA is a transportation marketing and sales Association. I'm a board member on that association, just, I guess, full disclosure, but they, every couple of years, they release a benchmarking study, and this year's benchmarking study, I think, is the best one since I've been a part of the TMSA. It's the been the best one that I've seen. So I was really surprised going through some of these numbers. Now, this study is only available in for TMSA members. So that's a membership perk. It's a membership benefit. But we're going to talk about some of our favorite stats from or takeaways from this study. First, I wanted to sort of get it out of the way of like the respondents sort of demographics. So let me see if I can go ahead and bring up the demographics of this study. I always think it's important to show who is answering and why. So here are a couple of the demographics from the study. And so basically the respondents that we had where the majority of participating companies are businesses with less than 500 employees and with more than 5 million in annual revenue. Full breakdown is about 39% of these respondents for this are working for companies that have at least 100 employees. So 100 to 500 which is kind of crazy that it's called a small business, when you have 100 employees, I feel like that's such a large business. But then they the very next demographic is micro enterprises, which is less than 50 employees, and that's about 19% of the sample of respondents. And then for revenue purposes, there are the top number of respondents. It was about 25% of the respondents. Make more than 5 million, but less than 100 million. Again, quote, unquote, small businesses here, just so you can get additional breakdowns of it the type of organization that the respondents were part of. 57% were a three PL freight forwarder, truck broker, carrier, well, actually not a carrier. The next percentage is 13% were motor carriers. Then the percentage after that was consultants sitting at 10% and so on and so forth. So those are just some different demographics, in case you are curious about some of the I guess the specific roles of the people who are participated in this study. Time in current position was two to five years, and so 41% of the respondents have been working in their marketing or sales role between that timeframe and 36% of the sample has five to 10 years experience in the industry, which I thought was was very good. And so I I don't know why I assumed a lot of marketers in this industry just come in for like, one or two years and then bolt and go to another industry. But that was cool to see that 36% of the respondents were at least. What is that? And my math is right, 66% of the respondents have at least two years of industry experience, which is good to see. Okay, so first, so I just did a lot of talking. What is your what is your first takeaway that stood out to you? I've got a lot. Let me see. Where should I start here, also the one place I thought was interesting. So start as the tenure numbers. Let me pull those up too, because I think that's the very beginning of tell me what, what page it was. I'll, yes, I'll scroll to that page. I've, I've got you page right through giving page four. Good old. Great. Resignation. Perfect. Okay, so we're on page four, the resignation. Oh, there we go. Page five, actually, yeah. So I thought this was interesting, just because I think it also follows a lot of like, what we've seen in regards to just what we're reporting at freightwaves as well. Like, that's, I was like, Oh, well, I wish I could. I. Add this or some articles that we've touched on, but to see that there has been for the medium, right? This like two to five, five to 10 year span, to see that the 10 Year has has grown, I think is awesome, right? I think that we'll get into a little bit later. I think that goes a little bit into the training data that we got back and improvements that we can make on that. But a big part of this study too, and we'll, we'll touch on, I'm sure, during this chat, is the technology aspect of things. So when I see these like 10 to 2020, plus years falling off, I think that's really interesting, is it showcases right, how much our industry, I think, is changing, and how maybe some of these again, I'm just speaking on I'm numbers. I'm seeing, but there's a chance that a lot of these older generations, those have been a part of the industry for that long, just don't know how to process the new automated views actually watching this. We're going to fix this. Keep talking. I'm sorry. Um, but like, for instance, like, there's been talks a lot about, like, how companies like ch Robinson have locked let go. A lot of their more tenured employees have been there for years and years and years. And I think that points to, like, a different way that we're moving freight right, like, the more technological focus, more AI automation, and who's going to thrive during those changes, I think, are those who've only been a part of the industry for a couple years, who are younger, right? And are looking to apply that more to their job, who aren't afraid of chat GPT and and see it as a tool instead of something that could take their job. And then potentially, a lot of these organizations, right are looking to to grow their footprint in this industry and continue on that technological drive. And if the 1020, plus year individuals can't figure out those pivots, can't, you know, understand that training, well, let's have you retire, let's get you out of of the situation and spend more time educating training. Are more less tenured individuals. So you see that across the board, if there's if there are layoffs, a lot of times recently, it's been those who are in senior level positions. Because again, I think a lot of our industry has been used to doing things the old fashioned way, and the younger generations are coming in and saying, Why, my God, are we not doing this through automation? I you know, like, why are we calling carriers constantly when there's apps that could easily do this, or text messaging features, etc, and their TMS is and that innovation is starting to showcase, and the 10 year overalls as well. So I just thought that was interesting, because we've seen that when we hear about a lot of the layoffs, we hear about it being more of those who have been at these locate these companies longer, and happy to see that those who haven't are at least staying staying loyal at companies, staying there for a longer period of time, which probably leads to better success when it comes to adopting more tech over time as well. Yeah, cuz it one, as you were talking, a couple of these stats that that stood out to me is a lot of these people, especially the where we've seen growth, as far as time and current position was pre covid, and so right before covid hit, and then after covid, they've chosen to stay at that position. Whereas, if you have less than two years experience, we're in 2024 you probably started in 2022 when the freight market was booming, and then things get a little tight, and things get rough, cuts start getting made, and maybe you decide this isn't the industry for me, but for a lot of these folks that started right before covid, or maybe a couple of years before covid, are sticking around, and they're choosing to solve some of these technology, I Think, problems, or maybe workflow problems, and just the greater adoption of new solutions, new technology, where it's almost like we're moving away from these, I guess, large, bloated systems, into more like niche focuses where you have some like TMS is, for example, that have been around for forever, and they launch A CRM, and the CRM is a glorified email list, and it sucks, and a marketing or sales person can't really use it, right? Whereas you have somebody like a Thai software which shout out to them, sponsor the show, they have a lot of these automation and workflows already built into the system, so you don't necessarily have to rehaul your entire software that maybe has been around for a couple decades, you can instead, you know, jump right into getting sort of modernized very quickly and reducing the amount of clicks that it takes to do a simple task. And so I thought that that was, that was a good nugget to bring up. So thank you for that. Another one. These key insights that I wanted to bring up was the sales goals, or just sales in general, is that fewer companies are reaching their sales goals. And I think that it's kind of let me go ahead and bring up one of these pages that talks about it says in 2022 92% of organizations were were able to achieve more than science 75% of their sales quota. However, this figure has significantly declined in 2024 and with only 45% of organizations reaching the same threshold. So in just two years, it's dropped from 92% achieving their sales 75% of their sales quota to 45% I think that probably has a lot to do with the market, but I think it maybe is a little reassuring to folks in sales out there that you're not alone, that everybody is struggling in this regard. But there's something really interesting going on with sales folks too, and let me see if I can bring this up from a sales perspective, but their budgets are also dropping, and they're also not focusing on their current customers because there's a lot of revenue. Let me see, budgets are on the rise. Probably shouldn't be searching for this stat right now, but it's it's one of those things where they are. Companies are hiring for a focus on new customers, but most of the ROI is coming from a demo they rarely target, and that's their current customers. And so what's happening with hiring is that you're probably hiring a lot of like young, cheap talent to go after new customers, when instead, you should be focusing on the customers that you currently have, because that is your greatest chance for ROI, according to the study. So I thought that that was interesting from a sales perspective, and that backs it up. It goes into on page nine, right? The marketing objectives and you're right, if you're looking you would, you would think, based off of what you just said, that your marketing objective would be focused on more of a customer retention or customer experience, right? But those are actually have decreased in market objectives and the biggest, I guess all of them have decreased, except for brand awareness, has gone up just a little bit, but it's nowhere near if anything more of that objective is still going towards customer acquisition. Then, I always found that crazy, that it's always like bringing, especially this industry brokerage side, it's always like new customers. What's in your feed, right? What do you have coming up? Where I was like, definitely more of a How can I expand this really great relationship I've already built and start taking over more of their their pie? Because that's where you start to flush out the competition. It comes less about price and more just about overall experience. So I think that has been, I don't know, I don't know what I really want to point that to, because part of me all almost wants to say, you know, I think they're hoping for a revenue drive with that, like, how many times I can't tell you, how many times I've talked to investors or things like that. And they want to know how many logos, right, have been signed on? How many new customer new what new logos? How, where are they? What are they? You know, it's like for for me, it's like, well, you know, how much are you concentrating right on, on the companies you already have on I think a little bit goes into the investor side of things. Maybe that's because we've seen that happen more in the industry. But I don't hate that marketing objectives are focused on brand awareness, because I do think that's something that people need to focus on. But when you mentioned the stats you just did on kind of the the customer loyalty and the focusing on customer churn to see customer experience was that 15 two years and 15% down to 7% is like, yeah, and as a journalist, like, I, I'm about to go on like, a tad bit of a rant, like, I, and I'm, you get this too clear. This is like, your life. It's like so many people will reach out to me on articles or even just like, their own marketing initiatives. And my favorite thing, even as a journalist, is, like, case studies, like, and you're not going to do a case study at a new customer. It's a customer that you've had for a long time. So to like, see that, I just think those two things, brand awareness and customer experience are like so close to each other in terms of like, I want to stick with you because of your or. Think of it like, as an Apple user, like, because of the apple experience, it's tied to the Apple brand. So, like, how are, how is this industry so off on understanding that? Well, there, there. I love that you brought that up because there was another factor of, yes, business factors have shifted, and what are the top three factors primarily responsible for your organization losing business from its customer base? And it's the inability to grow or expand as the customer needs dictate or and that that sits at 45% and that's up by, like, I don't know, 23% from 22 or 2022 and the next one sitting at 41% for 2024 is the inability to meet comprehensive needs. It rarely has been price related. So customer, they're not losing business really because of price. That may have happened to 2022 but shipper needs have probably shifted in that in that time frame as well, where maybe they were looking to cut costs. In 2022 they're always going to be looking to cut transportation costs. But this year, the study is kind of hinting that shippers just want their stuff moved in a reliable way, and they need companies that can be able to fulfill that for them, as their business needs change, and for a lot of this lost business, the drivers have been that these carriers, these brokers, are not able to grow with them, not able to solve problems with them. And so I think that that's also a really key insight from this study, is that by 2024 the landscape has dramatically shifted. The biggest contribute contributions to lost business are now the inability to grow with customer needs 45% and the inability to meet those needs at 41% and they have surged by 23% and 26% respectively, highlighting a major change and what drives customer retention and satisfaction that comes directly from the study, which, again, is, like, kind of so crazy to think about in this day and age, because there's so many different ways that a provider can grow with customer needs, right? Like, there's so many ways to partner with here's a great example, like how cargado Right? Like, now it's helping so many different brokerages offer a Mexico a very good Mexico experience. And, like, I see that more and more happening, or think of maybe partnering with someone like pop capacity, who helps you find warehousing capacity on demand, right? Like, there's just maybe I'm like, more mad because people aren't reading my articles and, like, realizing, like, these partners are out there and exist, like, like, I maybe they're just like, that's not hitting them. But like, these companies are, are there to offer logistics companies a chance to have warehousing capability without having to buy a warehouse in an environment where probably your interest rates aren't in favor of purchasing a large asset like that, right? And so I that's, it's, it's mind boggling. Some of this, these results because they're like pushing against each other, and again, like to say inability to expand or grow like I can't. If you told me any type of like industry operation or service that you needed, last mile service, you're me last mile pickup. There's so many different last mile providers that you could reach out to it. Just it kind of makes me laugh that like, you're not able to find your customer need because I there's, I can't think of something a customer to call about, and I would have to tell them, there's no way we could fulfill that. I mean, LTL services, my carrier, like, there's so many different ways to go about it now, and that's a that's a great point, because, like, are these companies, are these brokers, and are these sales reps, account reps? Are they even talking to their customers, like, are they knowing where the customers are trying to go? And that was in the survey, wasn't it? Or something about going to drive me nuts now, oh, yes, I think the very next one, right? Does your organization have a formal customer experience or customer service review strategy in place. And yes, a lot too, 39% is a lot, but that's not going to win you an election. Most of them don't. And yes, an informal strategy exists, business and an election. Yeah, probably the same. 39% sounds large, right? Compared to like, but it's really not. It's like, especially when you add and even the second one is like, Yes, an informal strategy exists, but it's not sophisticated. Okay, that's a no, that's a very nobody's aligned, no one's communicating. And you're talking about that 55% of companies like a formal process to understand customer. Needs. And if we can put two and two together, where, if your current customers are giving you the largest ROI, and yet you're hiring practices and your process practices are not aligning with those customers, they're going to leave you and so let's do the math people as we're figuring out our 2025 budgets, especially when it comes to marketing and sales, we got a lot more for got a lot more for you. We're going to go through a lot more stats, but I would start there. I would start with my current customers. I would interview them. I would get their top takeaways. Where are they trying to go in 2025 and then you have your partnerships manager or your partnerships director that could start to make some of those cargado or, you know, carry your partnerships, you know, things like that, LTL partnerships, you can start making those moves so that you don't lose these customers, and you can continue to generate ROI from the customer base and so they don't leave you. And then that probably changes your hiring practices, where you're not hiring kids that are fresh out of college and have no idea about the industry, because we've already shown you the stat that they're leaving within two years anyways. And so put more emphasis on your people and the people who have already chosen to do business with you. And this is like a perfect example of when I talk I know Ryan Schreiber talks about this a lot, like hidden data within your organization, like in order to answer that question correctly that Blythe is bringing up right like these lost opportunities, what's potentially a customer can do like that also means being able to capture right your every email that comes with a an offering like I can guarantee that your sales reps are putting in every especially when they get, like a long list of of lanes and quotes, they're probably not putting that into a system. So maybe looking at some of these email providers like vuma, or some of these like different capabilities that are different technologies that, like, help manage your email inboxes and actually store that data. So then you can actually pull and see, oh, wow. Like, this is a good I love this. This is, like, where my I, like, really love operations, because then you're able to take that customer, and maybe you're only doing like 10 loads of them a week, but they're good rip loads. They're easy to manage. They pay on time. That's another thing too, right? You have these customers, right? That do that are like, beautiful on the surface. They're like ice. Talk about breaking ice. They're like, icebergs right where, like, the top, you might just think, okay, they're a good customer, but underneath is like, I can't tell you how many times you start to dive into these people and you realize, oh, well, who's handling your inbound, who's handling your outbound, who's handling your vendors that are coming into your systems? How many times a new warehouse pops up. I mean, if this economy does start to turn around here in the next year, people are going to be looking at, you know, building more infrastructure and expanding the the their operations as well. So that's your shippers, right? So, yeah, I again, this is like, in order to to answer that question, it goes back to, I think technology too, is like, do you even have the systems in place to capture what's being lost, not just to see a lot of times I see, like, CRMs, it'll be like, Oh, here. Fill this field out of like, what their yearly spend is, yeah, for sure. But like, do you actually have the lane data and things of that nature to say, Oh, wow, this is, like, clearly a customer that we're missing out on, potentially missing out on more freight from. So I think the iceberg analogy is very fitting for this episode, because you have no idea what kind of opportunities or chaos just sit right below the water and you are missing them. And so Alright, any last because I want to move into a little bit on the marketing side. Thank you. I think you hit most of them the other one, and that kind of actually just goes back to my last statement was there was one on data government. Governance is becoming a bigger focus. What is data governance? Yeah, so data governance is like the ability to know it's the culture behind collecting and managing your data. So for instance, let's say that you, you have a TMS system, and your I'll actually kind of bring up an example from my old position. So we would pull data often, and there's two ways for our reps to put in a load. Let's say it was a load. They got a dedicated load to them, right? They're not fighting anyone for it. I. There was a way to enter that in as kind of like a sale, potentially, you could say. But there was also another way, a faster way, to get loads on the load board that should be used for spot freight, freight that you technically haven't won yet, but you're trying to win it, right? So those are two different situations. Now, at the time, we had a problem with reps only using the spot. Even if they know they had the load, they would use the Spot function because it would post to the load board faster, like that was just in their mind, how do I get my freight to the low board faster? But not realizing by doing that, I don't know what air dedicated freight numbers are, right, because you're entering them into so data governance is like being able to watch over an operation and say, Okay, now that data is wrong because it's not being put in right, or maybe the way that we're pulling it or entering field numbers isn't correct. Like another problem could be like, for instance, let's say that you an expected delivery date is just the 30th, and it delivered on the 31st you, as a dispatcher, didn't hear from the driver, though, until the first of the next month, so you just don't really care about it. You just put in like the first. Well, now if I was your pull data on that lane, it looks like it takes an extra day to deliver on that lane, right? And so it's like building a culture that understands, like, how data is being entered into the ripple effects of it, yes, exactly, knowing, like, what you can pull, what you can't pull, and how all the systems work together, and building a lot of times that, like, integration that you're into, like, Tableau, right? And pulling into knowing, like, what those fields should come back as. So it's kind of like that overall operations of things that makes sense, yeah, and I think that that's, that's probably something that happens so much at organizations all they probably pull something and go, this cannot be right. And it can't it probably, you're right. It cannot be right, but it's because, you know, you put it under a different, let's say, a lot of times, right? You'll have a customer who you invoice their parent company, right? So it's like, you might pull that and it says, Oh, we've never done loads for Kroger, but, like, Kroger wants has you Bill, like some other third party. So it's like, okay, well, that's not Kroger's numbers. It's this one's right? So it's like, I'm sure it happens a lot, and that's where people, a lot of times, get nervous about, like, data initiatives, because they pull things having very little, I think, chattels. And actually, I posted this on LinkedIn today. Like, if you're, like, if you think you're a data company, and, like, you don't have, oh, and your data analyst doesn't know Sq, Scq is, or whatever, which slow, yes, QL, yes, then you don't have a data analyst, like, that kind of stuff, right? It's like the data governance and building that culture and building the infrastructure to actually be able to set up integrations appropriately pull information so that a CEO is getting the right report every time. Yeah, and I think that this is like the perfect time of year to start thinking about these initiatives and how you want to clean up some of these acts and streamline some of your processes and why, and make sure you communicate that to your entire team. Because I imagine you probably have a lot of brokers out there that just want to do things the fastest and the easiest way possible, not thinking about the all of those ripple effects that you just listed. So I think that that's that's a good place to end on. Well, not end but to shift the, I guess, the conversation from like the sales focus to the marketing focus of this study. Because I know you're going to like this next chart I bring up, and it's talking about how many tools are being utilized for marketing automation. And one of your favorites is at the top of the list, I know near the top of the list. So we got chat GPT sitting at 64% of adoption rates and canvas, which I don't know if you saw, but they aren't going to be raising prices as much as they told everyone. So thank you, Canva. We love especially a female CEO that listens to their customers and they make an announcement and it goes terribly, and she reverses it all. So we, we love to see it. So what rounds out? I guess so that I'll talk about the I guess the top four, the top five of this list, because chat GPT is far and away, the most favorite when it comes to tools being used. Canva is second at 46 or 42% HubSpot is at 33% Zapier is at 24% and then Adobe Photoshop rounds out the top five with 24% but the very next one after that is Gemini, which is very shocking to see. Gemini, so new and so kind of questionable, but I think that's just because it's an offering within the Google business suite. True, yeah. So that's, it's like, it's, you know, I'm, I have the poor version of Chachi. PT, so when I saw, like, 3.5 Yeah? So sorry, you reached your max, and Gemini is my backup. So, yeah, goodness gracious. I just gotta use this opportunity to tell people to pay the $20 for check. Do it? It is. It's cheaper than Canva. That's for sure. You know, I will say I got into, like, a really interesting conversation, I won't say, with who we say, I want to expose people, but I did get into a very interesting conversation about AI and some of these tools. And, like, I think, listen to Blythe pay the $20 whatever. But I am very excited to see because the fact that, right, I can, like, be like, Okay, it's true you. I'll just head to Gemini as more of these tools come out. I mean, this stuff's just going to get cheaper, too. Get cheaper and cheaper. Yep, and it's going to get cheap fast. And so we're going to, we're going to investment point. Maybe think about that investors, for all of you invested in AI stuff, the fact that you're just fighting for the who's going to have the lowest price over time. But on the opposite side of it, for all of us purchasing it over time, this stuff is going to become just even more, even better of an ROI thing than than we see right now. So I'm working on a new product right now that I'm going to be publicly launching in the early part of 2025, and the amount of time that using chat GPT, the version like for.io which is like the latest version that they have for the paid plans. It is lightning fast. The responses that I'm getting are so incredibly helpful. I had plans to hire sort of a VA, like virtual assistant for myself in 2025 or maybe even just like an additional marketing or sales person to help out with the variety of tasks that I feel like I'm starting to get to a point where I just don't have time in my day to do them, or some of them, a desire in my day to do them. But chat GPT has helped tremendously with a lot of just really that second pair of eyes, that second, you know, piece of information that I'm looking to bounce ideas off of, you know, at 11pm at night, when no one else is really up, and I'm thinking about different ideas, and I just grandma, Yeah, true. Ralph, just go to chat. GBT, too, when you ask me about it. But I will bring up one stat, especially because, as we're talking about AI that going back to the study, which, again, thank you to transportation, marketing and sales associate TMSA, you can go over to TMSA today.org sign up, become a member, and you can get access to this same report as well. But when we're talking about AI, there's no really rules around AI usage, which is a security concern and a privacy concern for a lot speaking of data governance, because 44% of companies that are already using AI do not have formalized rules in place to govern its use. This lack of regulation exposes these businesses to significant risk, including potential legal disputes, data breaches and ethical challenges. Formal AI governance frameworks can help protect an organization while maximizing the benefits that AI can offer. So that is crazy. 44% have no rules around it whatsoever. So I think I told you about this too at the TIA tech conference whenever I'm gonna throw names out there, sorry to expose you. Said it on stage, whatever happy robot got asked that right? Happy robot? For everyone out there is a really cool system. It's a really great job of, like, replicating a a brokerage phone call, back down to, like, the verbiage it uses the background noise. How it I was gonna say manipulates. But what's kind of getting my thought, how it like barters between the carrier and the the company on load rates, etc. It's really intelligent. But even one of the questions I was asked at the conference for the Shark Tank thing was, well, at some point, well, you have to tell people that this is a robot, and even they said, probably within the next year. So like, is that? What's that going to look like? And I mean, I even had questions like, Is it always going to be a man that answers the phone is there. There's at some point where it's like, let me go ask my boss if that rate will work. Like, that's a lie. You're not asking your boss, you know, like, and to your point, like, I kind of want to know that. Like, I that makes me feel like, kind of Ick. No. Knowing, like you're making up a negotiation that isn't real. You know, in an industry that thrives off of negotiation, and so I think there will be a lot of the ethics side of especially the communication tools and back and forth. And I mean, even Amazon, like, I'm trying to think, if they tell you it's a robot, it's some I want to say that they do. But we should have Mike on this show and ask him, actually about this stuff. Now, I think about it, yes, like what they're doing at codiff, and Mike, over at codiff former yes to the show as well. I think we actually just is speaking as weird. You said that, because I we have been going back through some of our content that we've recorded in the last or in 2024 and just starting to add it to if, especially if it's evergreen, add it to, like a Republican schedule, just to remind folks, you know, a lot of the people that been on the show, but we literally sent out a tweet today about codiff. So I'd be curious to know if they're still focused on the logistics industry, because I know that they had a couple different industry focuses. They're more focused on the retail and E commerce experience, right? So like, where's my product at? When can that more of that situation, but still like it? What? What's the value of that product? And how do you develop that product? If there is a law that comes up and says, hey, you need to tell people like, this is a robot. Like, I think, I definitely think that will happen, especially how quickly the happy row, I think it was Juan was like, yeah, like, that's gonna happen, for sure. So sorry, fruit fly, he's been bugging me, if you've been watching the video version of this show, he's been buzzing in front of my face the entire time, but he's buzzing no more, because now he's it's better than a cat sitting outside your door right now, just whining. So if you've noticed me muting my voice there once when I was because this thing wants to have yowling. But okay, let's move on to a couple more of these stats, as we are running up against the clock here, and we got a couple more topics to get to. So on one of these, there was another stat I wanted to bring up. And I thought budgets are on the rise, but outsourcing is increasing versus hiring in house. So that was another one from you know what? And I will say, I understand the bias of of us too, right now telling you to outsource. Outsourcing is away. Yes, I understand that, but I totally think that, and especially in this industry, if we're talking marketing in particular too, like outsource it like you're I love the marketing people out there, and maybe you have someone in house that's like, helping a little bit with it, but like, in terms of how you're selling the brand awareness you guys are all obsessed with, apparently, the customer service you're not obsessed with, like people like Blythe would be telling you to become more obsessed with that because of their experience. So that's where the money comes from. Think, yes, outsource it, at least partner with someone. There will be some value of it, especially even if it's done guiding your own team and somewhat like get the expertise. But also marketing is is so susceptible to this as well, you have to document your processes. And I know that that's difficult for creative folks to do, but document your processes so you know what you want to focus on, what you want to do, and then you can do the monotonous stuff and you can outsource that. Because according to the study, it says one of the key reasons for this balance between in house and outsource marketing is the staffing structure within many organizations, with 51% of the companies reporting that they only have one full time response or employee responsible for multiple marketing functions, the demand for external support is becoming increasingly apparent. Outsourcing offers a way to bridge that gap and enabling organizations to handle essential tasks like content creation, SEO, digital advertising, things like that. However, the continued reliance on in house team highlights the importance of internal expertise and the trust of organizations that people place, or that the businesses place in their own people to steer that brand strategy, customer engagement and overall marketing direction. So it sounds like you have for a majority of, well, 51% of companies that have one full time employee that's managing multiple marketing activities, which for a lot of these executives that may or may not be listening to the show, like graphic designer is one job. An illustrator is another job. Those two jobs are not the same. A photographer is not the same as a video photographer. A copywriter is not the same as a digital ads expert. Just because someone knows how to set up digital ads doesn't mean they know how to run those ads efficiently. Creating content is just a whole other beast. Are you doing video are you doing case studies? Are. You just doing texts? Are you doing blogs? Why the hell are you doing blogs? Are you focused on SEO? All of these are individual roles that a lot of organizations have placed on the shoulders, and it's happened to me that you place it on the back of one person, usually somebody that's an administrative receptionist or an executive assistant role that they have to do all of those other functionalities, and in addition to run entire marketing department that should have positions for each one of those skill sets that I just laid out for you. So this is where AI is really going to come into play to help a lot of these folks. And then if you document your processes, this is where outsourcing can also help as well. I also think that there's a lot of unrealistic expectations that are put on these folks to be everywhere and all of the things all at once, to be on seven different social media channels and manage them all effectively, and build a website and do all of these. Stop putting so much pressure on your one employee, which does look like they're getting more budget, but I hope that they're not pulling their hair out in the process, because anytime you get more budget, then you're probably expected to do more with with less people. And when you get to a certain level, especially, you know it's not abnormal for $100 million company to have one person that does marketing like it is not abnormal. And if you have $100 million in revenue, just think about your poor marketing person's, you know, just job responsibilities. And the next time you ask them, that's probably why they're obsessed with brand awareness and less obsessed with customer they have no damn time. So true they there's no time to do the customer interviews when you're asking them to be the SEO and the content specialists and the social media specialists and all of these. Oh, and let's start a podcast too, while we're at it. Yeah. Oh, that's like, because you know how this, you know what? I think we should start a podcast. What are your thoughts on that? After, after just cutting your budget on, like, a white paper. Oh, but none of the executives want to be on the podcast, by the way, yeah. Oh, good luck. Oh, just the one executive who's like, blatantly, like big hits and like, likes to walk around and and make sure, like, the women feel comfortable. Like, that's which you might have more things to worry about, if that's if it's always like the one person in your organization you like. Don't want to have a stage. Who wants the stage? You know, I love it. We feel for you. We feel for you. Solo marketers in logistics. Now, there are a few more stats here that I thought were interesting. Which a couple of these. I think we could really go down a rabbit hole on which one of them is, LinkedIn drops from 100% participation in 2022 to 77% it was still far and away the the number one used social media. Oh, page 29 so on page 29 of the study. So LinkedIn usage drops. All of the social media channels also dropped adoption, with the exception of Tiktok, which grew a little over the same time period from 2022 is 23% adoption rate to present day, it's 28% so Tiktok is a lot more difficult to create content for which, I think is why you're seeing us just kind of a small rise in adoption for that platform. But every when every other platform is is seen dropping another stat first, I guess, any, any, any thoughts on the social media usage, which I'm starting to hear more complaints about LinkedIn. Like, it's just annoying, which, I guess it's always has been a little annoying. But it does feel like we, we passed the peak of LinkedIn. I have noticed, like, LinkedIn is also, like, changing some of their algorithm stuff. Like, I've, like, recently noticed I've been getting, like, more backdated things in my timeline. It used to be like Saturdays and Sundays. It'd be like anything random from the past, like 10 days. But now I've noticed that even more so. So it kind of reminds me, remember, on Instagram went from like, we're showing you everything in chronological order to like, trust us. Yeah, trust us. We know what you want to see. And I It feels a little like that. So maybe that's the drop off. I keep telling. I mean, I I think Instagram, here we go. I think Instagram is underused. It should be. It's so cringe. It's not cringing, you know, it's the things that make it to Instagram weeks and months later, after Tiktok, it wouldn't be a problem anymore. Oh, but Tiktok actually makes me happy, like I just it's because I laugh or I cry, like happy. Stories, and then eventually, a month later, like, I start getting DMS from people who are like, you would like this, because it finally made its way over to Instagram, and they sent it to me, and I'm like, thanks. I saw this. Like, I think because we brought up the Tiktok part, I think the problem is, like, Tiktok is like, truly video, right? The least that these are we allowed to swear the least that these motherfuckers can do is take a picture, you know, and make a caption and get it up. So that's what that's more of. My thing is, like, if you are, like, posting images on LinkedIn and Twitter, like, at least, get an Instagram account and start doing that too. Like, unless Instagram just chooses to change their algorithm. For the seventh time this month, they also just said that they the Instagram Adam Morrissey, I think is the Instagram lead, or Instagram head of Instagram, he just said that they're going, if for videos that don't get good interactions, they're going to give them lower quality. So your Instagram videos is, you don't get a lot of love, then they're just going to drop the quality rate from maybe like 720 to like 380 pixels. And so, yeah, they're just going to be like blurry. And they said it's just they're so I feel like I got to do a tap dance every time I get on Instagram, and it's just become a platform. One of the bigger reasons I love Tiktok is because I don't follow any of my friends or family like I it's just the content that I selfishly want to see on Facebook, on Instagram. It just feels like it's my entire family and friends on there, and I have to, like, mentally prepare myself to go on there to just what are they doing today that I don't care about like, for sure. I guess I'm looking at it from a perspective of like, because you're right. I think Tik Tok and just the video aspect might be underwhelming, but it is also like crazy to see how high Tiktok is and how low YouTube is. Like, just, yeah, both of those posts should go on. Both of those like, YouTube was way down on the list, for folks who may not know, and they didn't actually capture this information in 2022 so we don't have really have a barometer of, like, using it more or less, but if you're trying stuff, so yeah, yeah, they and they should, because YouTube just announced that, because used to be that shorts had to be 59 seconds or less in order to be categorized as a short and show up in the shorts feed, and YouTube Now it's three minutes or less, and so I think that that's a really great switch, personally for me, because a lot of our clips are very good when they're like a minute and a half, but they're not so good if they're less than a minute. So selfishly, I'm happy about this, but for folks who are looking for an if you're starting a marketing role at a three PL or a carrier, and you are just focused on, like Google SEO tactics from like 10 years ago, you are going to fail. If you took that same strategy and applied it to YouTube, you will succeed like it is, I guess I should obviously caveats depending on the type of content you're making. Does it suck? Like is it actually helpful for you? There's a lot of caveats there, but largely that statement is true that YouTube is the second largest search engine on the planet. They're showing it with higher priority as far as search results are concerned. So if you are trying to initiate a content marketing plan. Look at YouTube like the YouTube search algorithm is very good. Unless you're Joe Rogan and Trump, then that's not going to show up. But anything else, yeah, which had to make me we are recording this a few days before, you know, no, I think, I think YouTube is, like, one of the biggest platforms out there. I mean, how many of I, in terms of just fighting cable in general, our generation is like YouTube forward. YouTube TV is such a good experience, like I am. I'm a YouTube household, like I watch regular YouTube I pay for, like, the premium version a month or something. I do not have cable, but I do have YouTube TV, having cable, or, yeah, I do, for sure, have cable. It's partly because there was an internet speed I needed for Sirius XM, so it kind of came with a package. But, yeah, I just love my cable. You know, one of the bigger things I've talked about is that cable has missed the mark in their own marketing of just the ease of turning on the TV and having a bunch of things to instantly flip to. With streaming, you have to be so dedicated to what you're watching. There's no flipping. There's no, you know, just sort of browsing. Um, so I think cable has really missed that opportunity of a lifetime to just market the simplicity of cable versus having six different streaming platforms. Though, I do think that YouTube, while we're on this discussion, is in the best position to succeed, versus like a Netflix or Amazon Prime or Hulu, because they don't have to pay for their creators. YouTube doesn't. Yeah, Netflix and Hulu and Disney, plus, they all have to pay massive fees for content that is uploaded to their platforms. Now there's a certain danger with that, because you can't necessarily control all the all of the content that's being uploaded, but I think that that's where easily, like YouTube is winning. So the last one here, as we round out that this TMSA benchmarking study, which I think both of us will will find this interesting, but the drop in trade show events, as far as a budget is concerned, 2022 19% were budgeting for trade show and events. That is down to 7% in 2024 and I think it kind of goes back. I don't know if we discussed this theory like on air, but the we had talked about, maybe people are burnt out from too many events after covid, and that's what we're seeing in this massive drop off from 19% to 7% well, and there is so I love the survey. This, this, I want to, I want to make sure I'm reading this chart right, because it kind of it tried to say that trader shows were showing a 46% still showcasing 46% of respondents said that trade shows did provide a significant ROI, but the chart is, the question in the chart is, which of the following areas, does your marketing organization track results or ROI? Yes, and that is key. Do you see what I'm saying? It's like I have a different question, so I don't know about that. 46% of ROI is accurate, but it is interesting to see that it is something that's being watched closely, and then the statement you just made as well, that we're seeing less of it. So for trade show providers out there, those of us join events clearly, even going back to the brand awareness, like being really, really focused on what people are going to get out of it, and maybe even as a selling point, like providing a true ROI for in some way for people ahead of time, on like what they could do and what That could mean for the business might help, because they are watching their budgets in that area, which I think that chart is trying to say. But clearly, if the results are people are spending less. They might not feel like they're getting the true value out of it then. And this might be slightly related to this part about the the trade shows, because in another part of this benchmarking study, they say sales travel and entertainment budgets are also shown to be cut from 15 to 8% although overall sales budgets increase during the same time period, just less is being allocated to travel and entertainment. And so I think that that's interesting from a sales versus marketing perspective, because for a lot of marketers, and you can kind of see in this next page that, you know, I don't necessarily want to go through all of it, that's the incentive of going and becoming a TSA member. So you can see the rest of this, the rest of these data points, but marketers tend to only track from a marketing perspective, the things that they do or the things that they're going to do on if they can track it. So trade shows are very easily tracked, like you can count the number of people that come up to your booth, the number of sales demos you go on, or that you are participating in at the booth. How many dinners did you have with potential customers? Like those are easily like you can write those down and give that as a report to an executive. You can kind of see on the next page, search ads stand out and digital marketing metrics, search ads, for folks who don't know, are the least likely to indicate overall performance of the company, and the reason why is we've talked about this enough on everything is logistics and various different episodes, but the way that marketing is measured as successful is how many people come to the website, convert and then turn into a lead, or see an advertisement on social media, and then they go, what do they do? They they don't want to click on the ad because they privacy, you know, things like that. They don't want to click on the ad. So what do they do? They open up Google, they do a search for your company, then they go to your website, then they make a conversion, they fill out a lead form, they sign up for a demo. And then what does Google Analytics? Tell you, Oh, hey, they found you through search. And so what do you what is it? Quote, unquote, responsible marketer. You see these data points and you're like, I'm going to go spend way more money on search, not knowing that the people were just why they searched. The beginning, they're just Googling your company and then coming back to the site and making a conversion that way, that does not mean that the search ad or Google search was the reason you got that customer. And so for a lot of marketers out there, like I It says it in this study that search ads stand out and digital marketing metrics, and that is just a philosophical issue that I have for marketing departments, how they measure ROI, how they're reporting this to their executive team. And I would implore everyone to look into this, that what would happen if you just shut off the search ads? Everybody's looking to save a little money, everybody's looking to save some time, save some budget, shut off your search ads and see if your conversion metrics change. And I would promise you that if you're doing the right things in all of your content marketing and you just shut off the search ads, then you're still going to see the same amount of people, the same amount of folks that are coming to your site and making a conversion. Because what are they doing? They're Googling your company, they're not clicking on your social media ad on LinkedIn that you're probably playing paying a premium for to begin with. And then you're going to also do Google search ads that just make your brand names show up at the top when, if you have decent organic SEO, which you do one time, you don't have to do this long sort of$5,000 a month on SEO. You do it well one time, you optimize your static pages on your site, and then from that lens, you can cut off the search ads, and you can have a real indication of how people are finding you online, how they're hearing about you. And then that helps to formulate the rest of your marketing budget on where you should be spending more time. If I doubt this is happening, but like x, if you're get, if your CEO is on x and he is, you know, talking a lot about your company and promoting it and things like that, wouldn't you want to know that in a marketing report? Yes, of course you wouldn't want to know because, I mean, we could tell your executive, hey, go do more storytelling on that platform, because we are getting a ton of leads from that initiative. So it just helps overall. I know, search ads are so easy to track and it's so easy to justify. Oh, look, we just did a brand new website rebuild, and it's sending us, you know, 20 leads a month, when in reality, it's, you know, maybe two or three folks that are on LinkedIn consistently talking about your company and someone, your potential customers, just go and google your company, and instead that's showing up as a credit to Google search so that that's my rant. Sorry, it was a little long winded. No, it's fair. I mean, I can't, like even my favorite restaurants, like, clearly I know, like, it's probably blah, blah, blah.com but I still google it like, every time to go order, because I'm it's just like second nature at this point. So you clearly, freightwaves.com is@freightways.com but even myself, I'll google Grace Sharkey Freightways to find my article. Yes, exactly. So it's just, it's just helping to try to make my goal and my endless mission in life is just to help marketers understand this data better. And when you play, when I see search ads as being like the top ROI, it just drives me crazy, because I know we have so much work left to still do if you're looking for any kind of I guess, podcast on more information on how to track like real ROI, and what, what your expectations should even be around ROI, I would look up the revenue vitals podcast. It's by the marketing agency. The founder is called Chris Walker. I've been listening to him since 2020 and it has completely changed my marketing initiatives, my marketing life, like how I think about ROI and what is reasonable and what isn't, and what you can track and what you really can't track, and just trying to get those valuable, what he calls signals of where your marketing is working the best. And you're not going to get that from like a LinkedIn ads report or a Google search ads report, their goal is to get you to spend more money with them, so they are going to over inflate their importance to your marketing budget. So I just want, just want everybody to be smarter about these kind of things, like just smarter. All right, that. I think that's about it for this one for the TMSA benchmarking study. So let's go ahead and I guess cap off any, any, any last, I guess, final takeaways from from that discussion. No, I think actually looking at my list, we hit everything. So yeah, that's the. A good Roundup, yeah, well, I will say one thing that I did want to as much as you know, when we're talking about ROI, 10% of folks do not attribute ROI, or think that direct mail doesn't have great ROI benefits. Lot of folks, you're sleeping on direct mail. How exciting is it to get something in the mail that is not sort of spammy or spam related? Someone sends you a gift package? Someone, oh, yes, okay, yes, yes, okay. I see. I'm like, Are you about to send me a postcard about your freight tag? Because I do not want that postcard. But the My point is that you would read it. You would read it. Have company that recently just sent me a hat out of nowhere, and it made me look them up and see what they're about. I also wonder how to get my home address. Not going to ask that question. I'm afraid of the answer, but it did make me look them up. So don't, if you're watching this, don't send me stuff in the mail like that's so unless it's like I've been, no, I'll take, I'll take, you know, I've recently gotten rid of some yadis, so I room for more yadis. So, God no. But if you're thinking about direct mail, I did pull up, I'm going to link to it in the show notes, in case, case you want to check out some more stats. But the direct mail industry is not dead. It's projected to reach a market value of 73 billion by 2026 and it just I mean the response rates are insane. So direct mail has an average engagement rate of 95% direct mail response rates are five to nine times higher than any other advertising channel. Direct Mail also has a higher open rate of 80 to 90% compared to emails, which is around 20 to 30% so I think a lot of folks are sleeping on direct mail because they're worried it's a bill. I would apologize. I owe an apology to my father. Those stats are credible, and he is like on the mail every single I check my mail once a week, which for me currently on call for jury duty, got real close, but I'm going to make sure I'm writing a note right now to make sure I include that in the show notes. So y'all can I think it's a justice for direct mail, because I That's hilarious. Just we need justice. Alright, well, let's so we have about 15 minutes left. I'm gonna, I'm gonna call an audible here. Yeah, do we want to skip our favorite freight businesses? Or do you have something you want to you want to mention how? Well, I'll do a favorite freight business and then you do the source support. Because, okay, perfect. Yeah, that works, great. So the only reason I want to bring this up is because I think it's just a really interesting technology in particular. It's not I will tie a business to it that I think I brought up before, but it's recently come out, I want to say at the end of August, the and something sounds like was a big deal and chatted about at the broker carrier summit as well, which shout out to that team over there to get a chance to go to but hopefully in the future. But the FMCSA right is changing the way that they are going to be, of course, keeping track of carriers, etc. So one of the big steps though, that I think is really interesting. Just like, again, I always like to look at the technology we use in our everyday lives, the security of that, and why aren't we using it right in this industry, and that is facial recognition. So part of what the FMC is CSA is going to be adding to verification is over time facial recognition software as well. So being able to tie drivers to the companies that they're actually working for and owners right to the companies that they're starting as well, along with one of the big ones, is going to have on site locations that you have to go to, so like, you have to be the human that you're representing, like the human that runs the company, and the human right that's on the other side of facial recognition. And I think maybe our generation knows this a lot more. It's something I've been like, pushing my mom to add on her phone because she doesn't get it. But there's a lot of we talk about fraud in this industry. Facial recognition does a lot to avoid some of the big problems that we have. It's one of the biggest reasons our biggest proponents behind moving to a more digital type of payment system across the globe, because you actually do have a much, much, much lower chance of having your identity stolen when your banking systems, etc, are backed up by a facial recognition software as well. Of course, the data breaches is another one that you're going to able to avoid. A lot more. There's a lot of, of course work I think the FMCSA is going to have to do, and a lot of probably investment in technology. There is a company, I think they're. Working with that's going to be contracting that piece of verification with them, but it made me think about a company I think I might have brought up last time, but just when we're talking about fraud, you know, there's a different, a ton of different fraud companies, fraud prevention companies out there. Highway is a great one. Carrier sure is another one. We're starting to see companies like even clearly probably working with highway triumph, of course, is watching that too, and the list goes on. But there is one in particular, verified carrier that does use facial recognition for and offers this to brokers and carriers alike to vet carriers, right? So being able to say, Listen, these based off racial recognitions, based off the driver's licenses that we have on file, this driver does drive for this this carrier, and I just think it's one of the easiest ways that we can prevent, clearly, fraud in this industry is something of that technology at that level. So that was, that's basically just my freight business for today. I thought, I thought it was really cool to read about that. Which company is it? So the company that they're working with actually, let me see, because I think it's, oh, you're speaking of it's more like an initiative, rather than like a specific company that's doing it. Oh, so the FMCSA, so verified carrier, is doing it already, but the FMCSA is going to be working with. Let me see, I swear to God that I took a photo of it, but they're going to be working with a special company to offer that, to provide that offering as well. I guess the obvious sort of elephant in the room is drivers are already inundated with all of the tech and all of the in cab cameras and tracking tools and big government. They're already all you know, furious about that. How does this? I would be interested to know how they plan to approach that. I guess stereotype or concern agree with that, I mean. And I think that goes back to again, and I I think, I think drivers are becoming more open to some of these standards, especially if it's going to help them provide like legitimacy, right in this industry. But how many of us use facial recognitions on our phone? Like, why is a technology okay for you personally to use, but bad for something that pays your bills? You know, every week, like, I think, over time, that that argument will start to die down, especially in a situation where it's like, companies are going to want to know who's behind that wheel and who's driving. Insurance companies are going to want to know who's behind that wheel and who's driving. That's the only way you're going to get your insurance rates down over time. It's the only way we can fight for insurance rates, I think, to go down over over time too. So for me, it's more of like, I wanted to bring this up in this podcast, because I want people listening, especially carriers out there listening, like, start looking at this technology now as your friend and see down the line how far it gets your company overall, right? Cuz there are going to be people that fight against it, but those are going to be the people that also lose the lane from Walmart. You know, it's, there's going to be repercussions at once the federal government, the agency that says you can even drive here and or set up a carrier authority in this industry, starts using it too. It's, it's going to trickle into other pieces of this industry as well. So I've always been the type of person it kind of reminds me of, like, you know, Britney over a trailer transport, right? Like she's always been, instead of saying, like, no, let's avoid that. Instead the opposite, like, let's lead with innovation. Do that. Like, you know how talk about brand awareness, like building a care your carrier entity up and saying, listen and we, we hire really great drivers, so much so that we use even to provide legitimacy facial recognition, so that you know that driver for sure is behind that wheel. Like, that's a really great sell, compared to, you know, having to say, No, we don't want to do it just because of of fear. That's, you know, in in my eyes, as you actually start to research facial recognition, is it can be one of the best ways for you to provide that legitimacy, to legitimacy and avoid your identity being stolen at the same time. So I just think again a new wave of technology that carriers might have to get used to seeing, and why not own it now and connect with the companies that are using it instead of avoiding it and waiting? Of the day that you have to to show your face, right? And sometimes, a lot there are economic benefits. Is more money in your pocket, if you would. Yes, that's, that's kind of my point. It's like, you know, when a market drivers are like, things aren't going great, like, I would hate for you to lose a big lane that's run your business just because you were, on top of this, like technology that's going to that's coming down the, you know, eventually, by regulators so and if Walmart's going to do it, that means Target's going to do it. That means Amazon's likely going to do it, Costco, you know, all of these major retailers. It's just a trickle effect. And if you want to choose sort of a line in the sand as far as privacy is concerned, or just, I guess, your personal ethics or your personal morals of what you're willing to accept or what you're willing to give up, then that's that. That's your own choice. I commend anybody who is going to stand up for, you know, a certain thing that they feel passionate about, especially if they stand to lose money from it. But there is that other side of the coin where there's some coin to be made from adopting some of this new technology. And I do to kind of take your argument. I do see it because, for example, right? You see it in the airports now, right? They do use facial recognition. Now, when you are going through TSA, you can tell them, No, they can't use that software, and they have to let, they still have to let you through, they'll probably pat you down a little bit more. But the other side of that coin is like, well, it's there to stop terrorists. It's there to to find bad people. So, you know, it's, it just goes into, like, the good old like, kind of group thought of it is, like, as long as enough people do put into the system, it should help save, save lives or save businesses in this example. But I wouldn't be surprised too if there is an additional step, if that's something that you're not used doing, but I do think it will help protect your businesses as well. Yeah, I mean, and that's it's for a lot of businesses, it's about survival right now, at least until the market picks up, especially after the election, we'll have a more clear, you know, idea of what the economy is going to look like for the next handful of years. And so if you can get while the getting is good, like, you know, choose your choose your battles. I guess, is probably the best way to put it welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I am Blythe Milligan, and this show is presented by SPI logistics. And this episode, I want to do something a little bit different. It's a solo episode, but I want to go through some previous Reddit threads and bring you the best sales tips that I have seen from the freight broker subreddit over on Reddit. Now, if you're not familiar with what Reddit is, it's basically an online forum that has been around for, God, more than a decade, definitely more than a decade, probably close to, like, 15, maybe 17 years. But it's an online forum for niche communities, so a few of them, off the top of my head, that I belong to is like beach combing or sea glass or trucker cats or for relevant to this particular episode, is the freight broker subreddit, which, at the time of recording this, has about 33,000 members, and topics are posted all of the time. And so, as you can imagine, over the last year or so, there's been a lot of conversation around, how do I get new customers? How do I get more business? How do I do cold calling, you know, things like that. And there's so much valuable information that is inside of those threads, and I've been saving them over this period of time in preparation for this episode, because I knew that I eventually wanted to make this episode, so wanted to bring you some of my favorites, so hopefully it can help you and your sales efforts, especially as you know, the the holidays are here. We're planning for, you know, new budgets, new initiatives, things like that. But a lot of times, you just kind of got to use the holidays as a way to reevaluate what methods are working for you. What methods are a little you're not exactly sure if they're working for you anymore, and it's a good time to sort of test out of what you want to try to do in the new year. And so let's break it down from a couple different angles. Because number one, I have it kind of segmented out from a cold strategy and a social strategy. So the social strategy is going to be a little bit later on, but for the cold strategy I want to talk about in person, via phone and via email. Some of these responses. I have about six responses here that can help all of those different situations, highly upvoted. When I say upvoted, that means it's very popular on a particular Reddit thread, for folks who may not. Be aware. But yeah, 33,000 people. So you can imagine that this group is, you know, anytime a question like this is posted in a question, meaning, like, how can I get better at my sales, there's a lot of joking going on in the threads where people are, you know, they're kind of gonna, they're gonna poke fun at each other. They're not exactly going to, some people are not exactly going to be forthcoming with you know how to be better at sales in freight brokerage, as you can imagine, it's very competitive industry, and so people don't want to share their good stuff, which is why it's probably taken a year to save up some good comments. But let's go ahead and get into some of the better ones. Now, the the first thing I want to talk about is an in person, cold strategy. And one of the first questions that was answered is, So can someone direct me to the right sub, meaning subreddit? And so this question comes in and it says, I've been doing, I've been doing this almost said digital dispatch there. I've been doing dispatch for five months now for a very small logistics company, our main account has cut their production by 50% where we normally see 200 bids a day, we are now seeing maybe 30. Last night, I worked my eight hour shift and saw one. Needless to say, it's hard to your company. My boss asked us to reach out to see if we can find contacts and shipping departments to try and land new clients. Would someone be able to put me in the right sub, if it exists? Also new to this industry? Is this the best approach for finding new clients? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Now I have to go back to that remark where he says the main account has cut their production by 50% 50% is a huge loss, if that's your major client. Now, the way I kind of like to think about marketing and sales, especially from a sales pipeline, especially from a revenue standpoint, you never want one customer to fill up more than, I would say, 30% of your overall revenue coming from one customer, and 30% still feels too high. I've heard other people say that, you know, it could be as low as a 5% for each and every customer, but we're dealing with, you know, freight brokers who maybe have a handful of counts, or maybe freight agents who have a handful of counts. And sometimes it's unreal. It's sometimes you have to work up to, you know, getting more than 30 accounts so you can have that really good balance. But 30 accounts is still a lot of people to manage. And so for a brokerage, you'll typically have a handful of accounts that you manage, and then it all funnels into the same business. So what it sounds like here is that this is a smaller company. This person is handling dispatch for a very small logistics company, and so they're struggling with that problem. And one of the responses that was left was really, really good. And or the reason I put it in the in person category is because this person who is a smart assignment 499, I'm going to link to all these Redditors in the comments. So if you want to check out these comments and see the follow up, or see some of the other responses in the post, you can check it out. But their response is, take a drive to the industrial area where you live. Look for manufacturers. Note types of equipment at business, at the business, loading up, also head to the local truck stop, check out flats and step decks, coming in, see what they're loaded with. Usually the manufacturing name is no located on the product that is loaded. In my early days, I just did dry van rates, and rates were poor. But from my experience, dark deck of freight, not dark freight. Deck freight pays well as for reefer. I've never quoted on it, but another user says, I'll second this and add on to it being a shipper. If someone knocks on my door as a true blue local carrier and tells me how they're going to make my life easier by having capacity that shows up and delivers on time, game on, spot on with the equipment types too. The more you can fit a niche, the more loyalty you're going to get, even if it's not something that you currently specialize in. So obviously, that one of those tips is from the carrier perspective, but from the broker perspective. This is something that you could be doing all of the not all of the time, because you still have to work, but on maybe that is instead of cold calling and spending a couple hours doing that, you're scouting the location in your local area for those manufacturers, and going to a certain zip code a certain area of town, and driving around, looking at The equipment and looking at the types of manufacturers, and then being able to build up enough research so then that you that way, you can go back to the office and be able to connect with them more, or if they're if there's someone is on site, you would be able to introduce yourself. There was an episode I posted over the summer with a. Woman called Rust Belt kid. He is one of the shipping managers for a tool called Gator bar, which is rebar, but it's manufactured in the United States, manufactured up in Michigan, I believe. And so he says in that episode, I have only done business with carriers that have come to my office and knocked on the door and shook my hand and introduced themselves. And so just keeping that in mind from the shipper perspective, because they know that the broker is going to represent their company, the carrier sure surely is going to represent their company. That is, oftentimes, the carrier is the person that is meeting the shippers customers, and so they would like to meet them as well. And so being able to form that bond can really turn what was something, you know, driving around a parking lot as cold outreach, that could turn warm and hot, very, very quick. So that was a big reason why I loved to bring up that first one. Now this second one on the list is this question that comes and, well, I'll link to it so I don't have to read off these like weird Reddit names. They always have weird, weird names. So I'll link to them in the comments or in the show notes, just to be sure. But they ask what software solution partner has been the biggest game changer for your brokerage, whether it be a load board, carrier, compliance tool, tracking, software, TMS, what has changed your life for the better, or perhaps changed your life negativity or negatively venting is welcome. So then there's another comment that is left, and it says, I'm literally walking into a business and brokering the loads that they have. Lol, sometimes it pays to go back to the basics when everyone tries to gatekeep or deter you from getting into the game. And so basically, this original question is asking, you know, what kind of software solution has helped you in your sales effort? And this gentleman is coming back. And I'm assuming it's a gentleman, because by the look of their little avatar here, but he says, I'm walking into businesses and brokering those loads because, and they say, so there's a thread that goes on because there's other people that are asking, Well, how do they receive that? Genuinely curious about how a business receives someone that's going to come into their office and promise to broker loads for them. And he follows up with haven't had an issue yet. Sometimes they actually have pallets that sprinters and vans can take that's going local, just waiting for someone to grab. And so that is another area of just or another reinforcement of the power of going in person, when so many people's inboxes and calls are just flooded right now, not just from folks within the United States, but also folks that are doing sales overseas, offshore. There's a lot of trust and verify in this industry that is going on, especially with with all of the fraud issues. And so for a lot of shippers, a lot of brokers and carriers, fraud is at the number one fraud prevention. Is that their number one issue that they're trying to prevent from happening. And so if you can separate yourself a little bit more by doing tasks like this, researching manufacturers, local in your area, and then going and trying to schedule a visit, or just walking into their office can make a lot more waves than trying to send your 10th cold email, or you trying to blast out, you know, 15,000 different emails that all said the same thing, and they're not customized for the audience that you're Trying to get and so those were a few in person comments that I thought were really well received in this group. And it feels like people are genuinely shocked that this works. But anecdotally, the shippers that I have talked to, they want somebody that's going to personally be there, that they can talk to, that they can pick up the phone, that they can shake your hand. And so knowing that, that could be a way for a lot of sales folks in this industry to zig while everybody else is zagging. Okay, so next up in the cold strategy, even though I just mentioned this, that everybody is doing it, but there is a right way to do it, and there is a more successful way to do it over the long run. And so let's go into via phone, like, what happens? How can you really stand out from the fray? And so this new freight broker is really, really struggling. They haven't been able to land any new accounts yet, and they've been on the job for months. And so this one, this response, is going to be a long one, but it's very, very good. And so he starts off by trying to help this, this new freight broker, by saying, as much as I don't want to help, to be helping competitors, I feel your pain. So here you go. Okay, number one in his response is, do your homework before you call. Know the person. And you need, and the products they need. He mentions a tool that says apollo.io is free and will get you that content, contact information. Number two is, take away the sales pressure. Tell them, Hey, John, I know you get a lot of these damn phone calls. Can I have 30 seconds to tell you why I'm calling, and then you and then if you can hang up on me if you want. So that's his opening line that he uses anytime he calls. Number three, do not send emails or leave voicemails. Just keep calling unless there is a legit no way to get them on the phone, or if the company is a good fit, and you're told to kick rocks, email the CEO or the owner of a small to medium sized company. Number four, you're going to get smoked on truckload by TQL, by CHG, CH she, CH Robinson. You will never get truckload unless you already have a relationship with them and they like you. And if they get screwed by either of those two companies, you need to go after LTL, specifically volume, LTL, where you can compete against the major LTL carriers. How do you do this? He goes on to mention and number five, if you are targeting a region for customers, you must locate small to medium sized trucking companies in that region that offer LTL service. You have to introduce to them and tell them that you are a broker trying to break into accounts and service in their area. These companies will eat up two to eight skid shipments all day if it falls into their lanes of service. For example, I have a carrier in PA. They will pick up in PA, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland and Rhode Island, and they all go to the 48 states. I have other carriers that will only go as far as the Midwest. I have Texas guys that come to the northeast. It will take anything going back down to Texas. This is your in go after freight that doesn't hold up to regular LTL, known steel, commodities, paper, low margin shit. Go after machinery, expensive manufactured, good, high class freight. These trucking companies don't care about class. They care about price by the pallet and major LTL carriers will not be price competitive for things that have more than two skids. These local trucking companies will be then number six, he says, when you talk to the shippers, let them know that you have a niche and you are worth your salt. Show them that you didn't pick out their name out of a hat before you called them. You know your shit and you know what you excel in. Get your foot in the door. Provide good communication and service, grow the relationship over time and expand into more opportunities. That last one, I think, just hits, or that last couple of them just hit the nail on the head, as far as being super strategic on who you're contacting and why, and then also your carrier relationships and who you're contacting and why, he closes out this statement with I've had my fair share of being put into a broker email list of 100 other people, and after a two minute phone call, fuck that garbage I'm Reading from this guy, everyone is beating the piss out of each other. No thanks. Your only way to get in somewhere is to be different. Maybe you're an expert in flatbed LTL and have a ton of flatbed carriers that you can offer LTL with. Not everyone can do that well, but please do not be like every other broker. Have a niche something you do better than any anyone else will. If you just copy and paste dat rates and use LTL carriers with $50 as your margin, you are going to get smoked and will have no shot. Good luck. And so he ends it with that piece of advice. And there's so many replies that it's really, really an insightful conversation, especially for someone like me, who was really on the marketing side of freight brokering for so long, and then to be able to see the strategicness of what this person does, this would have helped me so much at marketing campaigns. So if you're in marketing and you're looking for specific things that you're trying to target, I would be going right to the salesperson and being and asking, what kind of collateral Can I help you create? What kind of landing page can I help you create that will help you track the success of some of these different campaigns and see once you start to get something working, like the niche of what he's talking about, then maybe you can help your sales team, you know, be able to replicate those efforts for other members of the sales team, at least the structure of a campaign, just to help them, get them you know, just get them going. Because this poor, poor bastard, you know, started in probably the worst Freight Economy in a decade, and he can't get any new accounts? Well, that is six steps that I just laid out of how you can get new accounts. It's going to take a little bit of work. It's not a spray and pray method. Maybe some brokerages are not going to be fans of a method like this, but if it's about getting long term business, then that is going to be a much smarter company than some. Who's just going to tell you to what do you say? You know, add $50 in margin from a load board. That is, to me, a lot of those tactics will always exist, but it's also not where the best rate never makes it to a load board. And so by establishing relationships with carriers and with your shippers, and you can find those happy mediums for both parties involved, and obviously have a better career for yourself. Okay, last couple here, the next one, this is under the email category. So we kind of keep talking about ways to, like, not do cold outreach, and email has been in first of these two sections, but I think there's a way to do email right? And so the the next response on in that same in that thread that we mentioned earlier, what software solution partner has been the biggest game changer for your brokerage, and we mentioned this tool earlier, but apollo.io and this commenter goes on to say, before we were just using Google Maps and calling the businesses and trying to find out contact info from the decision maker, etc, or looking on LinkedIn, I found Apollo and taught my co workers how to use it, and we've had so much of an easier time of booking meetings. And so really, the process looks like you can either drive around town and find those different manufacturers and see what kind of equipment that they're using to move their freight, and that's one way to get into the door with them, because apparently searching on Google and LinkedIn really aren't having the impact that they once had. Another way is that you can just do your damn research and just ask for referrals, pick a niche, and then lastly, if you're doing all of those things using apollo.io because this was mentioned several times as I was going back through to make the notes for the show apollo.io was mentioned several times. I personally have not used it, but there, there were several people in here that spoke very highly of this solution. So it could be a tool that you maybe want to give a try after you've done all of the other necessary research in order to make sure that it's that your cold call or your cold email is is going to actually be read or be actually answered. Okay, last one that I did want to bring up is for better broker carrier relationships, because it also helps your customers. But this one commenter, it comes from this thread, and the original poster says, as a carrier, after providing good service with great communication on multiple loads, I'm still having trouble hearing back from brokers on the same loads. What do I say to keep the relationship going? Obviously, pricing is a huge factor here, but a couple of brokers keep having shitty experiences with other carriers, but still don't want to pay. What can I say or do so they don't go out looking for another carrier? And the number one comment on this thread was always shoot them an email of where you'll be and when you'll be there. Make it personal, or at least like you're not sending it to dozens of other brokers. I know that I and this is a broker speaking, I know that I always keep a list going of where carriers are and how I can match them up with what I've got. I'll go to these carriers before sending out any available load list I might have and before posting them to load boards. Now follow up. Comment also says I've ran into the same predicament and emailed only going to the new MC speech, that no one mentions having a major hurdle with a truck your insurance Hold on. This complex is kind of all over the place, but they says that one thing that I do know is that in this business, you can't give up, just like in life, when it gets good, it'll it'll be great. And I think for a lot of folks, you're kind of expecting that now that the presidential election has been determined, and we can kind of all move forward with our lives. So hopefully business is going to get a lot better for a lot of folks in our industry. But I did really like the fact that, Hey, be proactive with your relationships, whether it's carriers or whether it's brokers. And this sounds so I think entry level, but a lot of folks just don't know this. A lot of folks are fresh out of college. They sit down at a desk, they're handed a bunch of cold leads, and they're told to do something with it. A lot of them don't have the opportunity to even breathe and sit back and say, maybe there's a better way to do this. And so I think that this is a really good example of being a better carrier and being a better broker and actively wanting to have a better relationship together, which is what I'm starting to see more in this industry. Broker carrier Summit is a perfect example of that. It's a recent conference that just took place in Dallas or Fort Worth Texas, and it's about bringing brokers and carriers together so they can find out the issues, get those issues resolved, find new ways to work together. Network. Networking is one of the bigger pieces of that summit, and so being able to establish these relationships from the jump or as or not from the jump, but as an owner. Ongoing basis, then that will lead to greater partnerships in the future. Because, like the other commenter had said, if, as a shipper, if I know that you were going to have a truck in a certain area, you're not going to give me grief. I don't mind paying a little bit extra for it. I mean, obviously I'm paraphrasing there, but they don't mind paying a little bit extra than the cheapest freight on the load board, because they know they have the peace of mind that the freight is actually going to make it there. So I thought that those were really, really good insights into how maybe you can start rethinking how you approach the sales process. From the cold email, the cold calling, cold in person perspective, there's so many different tools out there that can help expand upon business and help you manage that business, but from getting your foot in the door, it still remains a very delicate dance that you have to make in both the digital world and the in person world. So it has really sounded like the most people that have had success are the ones that those they can use the the research that they've built up online, visiting the facility, knowing their problems before you ever talk to them on the phone, and so having those things already lined up for those prospects can help you develop those relationships that evolve in the future into more business, and not only more business, but can help you move up in the company as well. Next little area that I did want to talk about is from your social strategy. Now, none of this really comes from Reddit. This is more like just my my personal anecdotalness of what I see that works, especially from a sales perspective, and especially online. This episode is really geared around Reddit, but I also see a lot of folks doing really good job over on LinkedIn, and I say not a lot of folks, if I'm being honest, there's a handful of folks that are doing a really good job that I think more people could be replicating what they do on social media and replicating it for their own business. Now, a few people that come to mind, well, I guess I should back it up a little bit. The reason that this is important, I mean, I say yes, it's easy to say, Go on LinkedIn, go on Twitter, go on X, go on Instagram. You know, post what you do, post about yourself, you know, make yourself relatable. All that's fine and well, but at the end of the day, like when you're doing business with someone, ultimately you have to be providing value to them. It helps as a bonus, if they like you, that is where you're building. Your personal brand awareness comes into play, and that's where people should be more focused on how they portray themselves on social media, so people can like you, or the right people can like you is probably is a better way that I want to say that there are a few people and I know that there, I can just say, like, Go. Just go on social media and post, Go, check out the profiles of someone named Lars ward. He works over Shima logistics. He posts lots of a variety of different sales content. He really hones into on the KLT method, which, if you don't know what the KLT method is, it's a framework for thinking about how to post to social media. It's one thing to think about, Okay, I'm going to start posting. And then it's like, well, what the hell do I put hell do I post about having a certain kind of framework will help you out a ton. I know that this helps me out a ton, because then it provides a little bit of balance. And what the KLT method is, is knowledge like and trust, and so knowledge is 70% of the posts that you make on, say, LinkedIn, for example, should be what you know, what you're knowledgeable about? What are you knowledgeable about on a certain niche, on a certain commodity, on a certain lane, on a certain type of equipment? Name your niche, or maybe you want to hide your niche. I don't know. There's ways to talk about it, but show how you're knowledgeable, so that that way other people who need those problems solved can, over time, recognize those messages, and over time, get to know you. And that's where the other two parts of the framework come into play, because it's one thing to sort of spout off a sales message in, you know, a variety of different ways. You know, you gotta get used to saying the same thing 100 different ways. But that's where the knowledge part comes into the framework. The next two parts are your likability and your trust. So likability is what you like, who's your favorite sports team? What type of software do you like? Is such a lame question, but apollo.io, is a good example here. I really like this software because it helps me do XYZ, whatever else you like. Maybe you like Disney, or, you know, maybe you like a certain sports team. It, you know, whatever. It doesn't matter. You get the point. So 20% should be devoted to that, and then 10% should be devoted to trust. And so trust, trust pose, thinking of I screwed up with a customer. Here's how I rectified it. I, you know, got this new customer. I got this prospect on the phone. It turns out we weren't a good fit, and I let them know, you know, several other people who might be a better fit. There is one person that does a really good job, and she had a really great post. Her name is Christina Booker, and so she is, I'm assuming, a broker. I'm assuming that that's her title, but she actually had a post about this recently, and she started off with, I'm just not a good fit. I said this to a shipper in the middle of our discovery call this morning. Why? Because I believe that part that being part of a good freight broker is knowing when to say no. After explaining what I could bring to the table. Here's what the shipper offered, net, 20 no exceptions, competing with other 30 brokerages, lowest rate will always win. Wait times, wait times at pick up six plus hours. And she goes on to say, as a smaller brokerage that focuses on service, saying yes, would compromise my standards, my time, my carrier partnerships and my value, I've been with a brokerage that pushed every sale fit or not, over time, you erode and blur understanding of your true worth and what you're able to bring to the table. You start building on promises, not values. Yes, the market is competitive, but I've also learned that guarding your time, energy and value is priceless. Not every shipper will be a good fit, and the more wrong doors you can close, and the quicker you can close them, the more room you have to open the right ones. And we just what a great post, because I apply all of you. I'm not a freight broker, but I apply all of those things, all of those sort of sentiments, into my own, into my own business. I'm not a good fit for everyone, but I've learned the hard way that protecting your peace and sometimes firing a customer, firing a shipper, can actually lead to more business in the future. And so just having that mindset, knowing your values, I love this post. I'm going to link to her in the comments so you can follow she. She's always posting stuff like this, and what does a post like this do that tells other shippers that this is somebody that I want to work with. Like, I'm going to keep an eye on her. I'm going to I like the way that she approaches business. I like the way that she is going to put me first, even when I don't even know if it's if it's the right thing for me. Because a lot of your customers, they don't know right from wrong. They don't know the wrong situation they're in until they're already in it. And so if you're able to speak to those problems before they even know that the shipper even knows that those problems exist, then you are well ahead of the game. And so that, to me, is one of those situations where she says, I'm not a good fit. This, to me, combines all three of the KLT framework, your knowledge, your like and your trust. And so that, to me, is like a home run of a post, but just to kind of keep it, you know, at a high level, simplified, think about how situations that happen in your day, just like that and that you could document, and then the very next day, you wake up in the morning and you fire off a LinkedIn post, and then you get back to doing your regular job, these types of things, and thinking about it in a framework of that you can share your knowledge. You can share good news. It's like what Cara Brown says from lead coverage, is that she says, says, share good news, follow up, and she's going to kill me for missing out on the last one, but she has three steps. It's basically share good news. And so for a lot of folks, this could maybe not be, I guess, considered good news for I fear that chipper who is going to miss out on a great relationship by working with her, that's probably not great news for them. But you can find different ways of things that happen throughout your day, how you're solving those problems, and then turn it into content that helps you build that brand awareness. I talk a lot on the show about content snowballs, and building up that content snowball so that when buyers become active, when shit hits the fan for another broker or another carrier, and they're fed up. When that shipper is fed up, and they're looking for somebody new, they're going to remember a post like that, and then they're going to come back and they're going to pay and they're going to reach out to her, and she's not going to have to do the cold email and the cold outreach, because she's actively building brand awareness for who she is as a person, how she works, and then brands are going to be other companies, other shippers are going to be attracted to that. And then they're going to want to do business with her, and she's going to win before they ever open up your cold email or pick up your cold call. And so that's why I think social strategy is just as much of an importance as you're. Hold strategy, and so she's one of my I think my favorite ones that I like to follow. Lars Ward is another great one. He works over at Shima logistics. I think I already mentioned that, but I'm gonna mention it again, just in case, because he's really good at his job, and he does the KLT method very well. Another person I really like talking about is Matt Dahl. He is a freight agent recruiter, and he got started off in brokerage. He went on the shipper side. I think I'm getting his timeline right. Worked on the shipper side of things, and so he it was a very unique experience. And he actually documented a lot of this, of what he was experiencing on social media. And so he documented his experience of being on the shipper side of things, and the brokers that do outreach to them, and he was just inundated with emails from all kinds of people every single day, and he really only, I think he, at one point, he said he replaced a handful of not out of a handful of their carriers that they were working with, he replaced two of them, and it was due to performance from the previous person that was handling the role. And so he brought in a couple of, you know, his new brokers that he knew that would do a good job, so based on previous relationships. And so he's another really good one to follow in that regard, especially now that he's on the freight agent side, because he can speak from that perspective, which is more of an entrepreneurial perspective, still speaking to the freight broker role, but then also speaking from the shipper side of things too, and knowing what works and knowing what doesn't. So those are three folks that I think are well worth the follow. I'll link to them in the show notes, of course, but it just it goes on to say, or it just furthers my point of you have to have a multi pronged strategy. You don't want, just like you don't want, you know, any one customer taking up 30% of your revenue. You don't want to have too many of your strategies in the same bucket. And so for that, it's a cold email strategy, a cold phone strategy, a cold in person strategy, and maybe that in person strategy leads to a warmer email introduction, a warmer phone call introduction, but then also from the lens of your social strategy. So if you're looking for examples on the types of content I'm talking about, I'm going to link to both of those three folks in the show notes so that you can follow them and you can check on what they're posting and use it as inspiration for your own messaging and building up your own brand awareness. Now lastly, I will add that I'm going to leave another Reddit thread in the show notes, because I thought it was really important, and I keep this one bookmark to even help myself. But there's and I'm not going to go through and read all read all of it, but it's a thread from the sales subreddit. And it says, what would what would you go back and tell yourself, if you could go back and give your business development rep self one piece of advice? What would it be? Some of the I'll read a couple here. I just lied so, but the first response here is, companies are not your family, and companies that claim they are probably you're not paying you well enough. So that was the number one response. The next one is, I used to be willing to die on the Hill of quality work over quantity. It wasn't until I walked away from being an SDR for a year and a half to start over again as an SDR at a new company, and was being beat by a total fucking loser who said four times the volume that I did, that I was forced to come around, find a balance. But you must be religious about volume. Volume wins. Anyone who tells you that it doesn't, probably doesn't have a job outside of the norm. It doesn't mean blast 200 non tailored emails, but figure out how to blast 30 to 50 kind of tailored emails a day. Hopefully your company gives you something like sales, loft or outreach, oh, and calling continues to be the most effective way to set meetings. And so this person really, I wanted to highlight that comment because I have personally believed in quality over quantity, but I think he finds a really good balance here with 30 to 50. So if you have the same research approach, maybe you're using AI tools like chat, GPT, maybe you're using another tool, like Apollo. This could be a situation where you find that really good balance once you find out what works, and then you combine all of that, you know, sort of sales knowledge that you are building in the trenches, and you combine that with sort of your social selling strategy. That is alliteration nightmare. But if you combine it with that, then that is going to lead to putting yourself into a position where you are going to be more successful in the long run in the short run as well, and then give yourself the ability to earn more and move up. And I think at this point, for a lot of folks, that is exactly what we're all thinking about, is, how do I make more money? How do I afford to pay for all of this stuff, and how can I make myself a little bit more sane in the process? And so hopefully, you know, a lot of these tips have helped you. I'm going to link to that sales subreddit, or that sales thread that talks about what you would go back and tell your former self, because there's a lot of gems in there, not enough for me to read, but I'm going to link to it in case you want to get just an extra boost of motivation. So this is going to be a show notes heavy one for a lot of good resources. But hopefully you found this episode valuable, because been saving these posts like I said, for a while now. So hopefully you guys like it. Let me know if you want to hear more content like this, but until then, we'll see you real soon. And I guess, I guess, go jags. All right. Well, let's move into our next segment, and we're gonna, at least, on my end, I'm gonna blend a couple of these together with our freight marketing spotlights, and then also our favorite freight business. Once again, my name is Blythe Milligan. We are presented by SPI logistics. This is the everything is logistics podcast. We are joined with Grace Sharkey of order full fame. And I have to get used to not saying freight waves, fame, fame. I have to say order full fame. Which does I mean? It has a nice little, you know, roll of the there too. So nice little segue into this next segment, and where we like to feature some good freight marketing, because I think it's kind of it's still rare in this industry to see good freight marketing, so we'd like to highlight those, and then also any businesses that come across our timeline that we think are just interesting. So do you want to go first? Or you want me to go first? Yeah, I'll go first, because this was a fun one. I don't know if you listeners out there go check out this video. So if you haven't heard of the company, load, pay, it is a division of triumph bank. It's, it's basically their, oh, what I did. I did see, so I'm pulling up your commercial. I'm sorry, like started playing. And no, no, you're good. I was just, you were shocked, and I was, I just love micro, yes, yeah. So they again, and we were talking about this prior to the show, starting right like understanding who your your client is, what they're passionate about, what's going to speak to them. And so low pay is this new function of triumph bank. And we'll kind of get into it a little bit more in a second, because it is a part of my cool business initiative as well. But of course, it's a easy credit finance structure for carriers out there to, of course, get invoices paid earlier the factoring services, but more so you do have a physical card that you can use to pay for repairs, fuel, etc. It gives you a centralized place to just watch all of your expenses. So yeah, that that's what their focus is. And of course, they're talking truck drivers. So you know, when you think of a dirty job like trucking, you think, well, who is the dirtiest job guy of them all? So they just recently put out this awesome commercial. It's a minute line we should probably can play the whole you want me to play it? Yeah, with Mike Rowe, if you want to put that out, the dirtiest guy immediately started coughing up dust when you talk about micro, even though I love him so much, I don't know it's side sidebar. He was just on Theo Vons, no, I don't know, just on. But I finally listened to it, and it was really good. So I listened to it on a plane ride. It was ride. It was awesome. I love his initiative. Always kind of thought of Mike Rowe as, like, almost like a TV dad to me, totally like him and Tim Allen were, like, my TV dad's like, growing up. So just like they, I think they just remind me of my own dad. So, okay, so I wish my dad was strong as Mike, right? You know, he's a bra he he's some on Broadway. So he's someone Broadway, and he was also a QVC host for like 10 years. He's got a great voice, fantastic. Let's play the commercial. Hi. I'm Mike Rowe, and today I'm standing in an enormous parking lot with an enormous 18 wheeler behind me and four superheroes. Technically, these men are truck drivers, but make no mistake, without them, nobody anywhere would have anything at all. I know you love what you do, but I'd love to hear why you love it. We get the adventure of the old cowboys. It's never a dumb moment, really. I promise you, it feels great knowing that I'm a young trucker helping out my community, not just my community, but the world. It's not just the community, it's the world. Man, I think a lot about the sacrifice that you guys make. I watched my son grow up from about five or six to eight years old on the screen. Let me ask you the most ridiculous question I've ever asked anybody before, just getting paid. Important, very important. What am I looking at here? The payday accelerator load, pay. What's that mean for you? Load? Pay puts money. In the owner's pocket within minutes. Instead of having to wait anywhere from three days to 45 days, we accrue so many expenses just from driving to point A to point B. It's all about cash flow. I don't want to ask too obvious a question, but just the basic premise of getting paid as soon as you finish your work seems like a good thing. Oh, absolutely. Freelance isn't getting paid when you finish your work, just the best. We love micro. But you know, I do want to point out a couple of like, even like, deep lore positives about this commercial, too. So I would highly suggest, if you're listening to this, to watch the commercial, because, yeah. One, you got a voice that you know your audience is going to trust, right? So that's like, right off the bat, awesome. Two, you'll notice that when they talk about the actual load pay tool or application, they don't have that coming out of the mouth of someone at Triumph or someone at load pay, they have those details coming out of the mouth of an actual user, a truck driver themselves, right? Which I think is powerful too. Having your actual client explain the product like that, I think is awesome. Three, maybe 343, diversity within that group of different drivers, right? And I don't mean diversity just like in terms of like race all that, but also just ages, right? Because like Trucking is going to get into the different generations, and I think it's important. I just feel like I don't see enough of younger truckers on trucker sponsored or focused marketing campaigns, and you're ignoring not only the future of your business, but a great pool of individuals who are making their way into this industry. Last but not least, you might have this is your you're gonna have to watch it to catch it. But they picked influencers, each one, each person they talk to, they showcase their Twitter handle, they pick someone they knew was probably important in their little niche space within the trucking industry. We understand it's fragmented, and it's with that means you have to, you know, find these little audiences. I haven't got a chance to go check out all of their content, but I'm sure they kind of focus on different groups and different types of trucking and it so it's just it. It was executed and planned, I think, very intelligently. And I'm kind of, I'm excited to see how low pay takes off. And to be honest with you, I actually put that down as my favorite business segment as well. Is what triumph is doing with low pay in particular, and what it's doing to expand its financial services. So what really shout out to Cody Griggs over at ch Robinson, just because I know this is something that she's been a part of as well, and we just love a woman in STEM who's killing it. So shout out to her over there, but they're starting to work with Triumph to deliver these extra services through partnerships as well with a trusted company like triumph. They know most drivers are set up with them. Why build our own finance solution when we could just partner with one who's figured it out, who has the infrastructure, who's built this, who has won over the carrier audience, and who, I assume, before they went into this, already had implemented, you know, their whether it's like triumph pay or some type of factoring service with a large number of CH Robinson carriers to begin with, if you watch as well, that recently had come out that not only are they doing load pay, but triumph is going to be basically white labeling their factoring services or brokers, which is going to be huge and well, I mean, I think a lot of factoring companies are going to have to really fight to keep up. That's why you see dat out go. I think that's why you're seeing some of these other companies buying more of these financial firms, because they're realizing, hey, for us to build this and also to finance, that is going to be a lot. So why aren't we working with someone who already has built this. And if you read any of Aaron graphs, like letters to their shareholders, he touches on this like, we've built this already for people. And I think the way that they're running the factoring division right now, from the way that he spoke about it in letters, sounds like it's not you put a lot of work into building that technology. And I don't think it's, I don't want to say it's not paying off, but it's how they monetized. It isn't, isn't as positive as they had thought. So this is kind of their pivot into finding a way to make that division more profitable. Why not white label it? Let's ch Robinson and. Sure we're going to see other big players in that space too start to to utilize that that service as well. So that's kind of my it's maybe favorite business, but just business in general that I'm watching, because I think it's causing a really interesting ripple effect in the industry as well. Yeah, that's a good point, because they also triumph. Just purchased green screens, like, one of, like, the just, I don't want to say up and coming, because they've been established for like, a long time, but they kind of, I think they got started in what, 2019, 2018 Yeah. And that's been evaluation, yeah. And that's a part of what they graph calls their intelligence unit that they're adding, right? It's okay, we have all this payment data. And the cool thing about even payment data too is, like, there's a level of it that's also showing you right, like, where the carriers are, for instance. Like, when we talk about fraud, if I have three invoices that deliver today, and I know that your trucking company only has two trucks, like there's a red flag. I know it's a lot more technically detailed than that, but just to kind of layman's terms, it right. You can use that data for a lot of really interesting analysis in this industry, and they're realizing that that's what we have. And so I'm very interested to see how the data plays of the next like decade go in this industry, because I think people are starting to realize, oh, this is more valuable than I thought, and triumph, I think, is one of them, and they're making moves to correct that and move forward in a more positive direction. So God, data is so hard, I'm telling you, right? I just building like I'm doing totally you get it with the cargo Rex. I mean, it's just so, I mean, even my own building cargo Rex, and then building like search engines on top of it, which I we're on our third crack of it. Now, it third time that we are revamping the search engine around the data set, because it's not just recording the data, but it's the data integrity to begin with. And then how do you make that data searchable plus valuable to the intent of the person who is making the query? And it's just, I have so much more respect for what Google has done. I mean, we take it for granted how we could just pop Google open, or even Amazon or, you know, a lot of these different sites, and you can just put a couple keywords in, and they feed you back, you know, mostly what you want to see. And it's so challenging. So my hat is off to anybody that works in data and is trying to filter through, you know, a lot of this different just large amounts of information and tried to disseminate it to where it's something that is useful to someone. But that's actually a perfect segue to go into my favorite freight marketing and, you know, a quick Business Spotlight that I wanted to put on, and that is, have you ever to import? Yeti, no, I saw it on the notes, and I was like, I almost looked it up. I figured I'd let you so import Yeti allows you to find suppliers for any company. So they were at the recent TMSA transportation marketing and sales Association. We had our annual elevate conference. One of their co founders, Dave, was giving a session there. So import Yeti, I they gave me this mug. I don't know if you can do it's a cute little Yeti that's on the side of the mug. But what's really cool about it is because for import Yeti, where it's useful, it's saying, like, I'm a broker, and I want to find out where some shippers are at, or maybe some new shippers, maybe I've, you know, specialized in a certain kind of commodity, and I want to find more customers like that, because I have a proven track record. Well, you could find any product, maybe it's yoga pants or Yeti water bottles or whatever, and you can go to Import Yeti, and if you have you can sign up for free, but they also the paid plan is much better. And you can search up any supplier. You can search shipment records and import records and find them on so with this mug, what they do is really cool. So they will they have certain target customers that they reach out to with, like, these highly specified marketing campaigns. And then when they have someone kind of in their in their eyesight, of like, this is going to be a really good get for us. So they'll send them a little mini container, shaped box like it. It's painted to look like a mini container. They put this mug in it, and then on the bottom of the mug, they tell you the supplier, the supplier's name of where the person who is making the mug, and the the number, so the number that you can put, I don't know if you can see it all that, but you can then the product ID number that you can put into import Yeti website to find the supplier of the mug that they use to send out to customers. And I just thought that was so smart. I. Is so cool about your marketing like that, like, kind of full rounded, I guess, philosophy, or well rounded philosophy, that you're putting the product number on the bottom, plus the supplier of where you're getting the mug from. Hopefully there's some kind of, like, a trade deal that they worked out there with the supplier that, hey, you know, your company is going to be at the bottom of all of our mugs, you know, give us an extra couple bucks off of the mug and make it really cute. And so they have some really cute branding. But a couple of the other things that he was talking about during his session is that they treat sales copy like a science experiment. They said one example that they had a stat about improving retention by 40% so they they're they're telling their customers that they can help them improve their retention by 40% but his audience, the people, weren't believing a number that high. So dropped the number to 19% and once they dropped the number to 19% like they're pretty much cutting it in half of their own success rate. Suddenly, folks kept reading, and when he says reading like his emails, his case studies, they said that level of honesty and testing was enough of a significant improvement to have them close deals on new customers, because their percent the customer's perception was, or the leads perception was, is that that number is not a lie. You're bullshitting me. And so they dropped their own success rate retention number to 19% and it led to more customers because of it, because it made the stat a little bit more believable. They also make cold outreach fun. So they send out those mini shipping containers. They also will send out flip phones to HR teams, just to prove how broken internal systems are. So it's kind of like the opposite of spray and pray. It's specific, it's relevant, it's memorable. They also use data to pre remove objections. Another thing that they do is, with all of their marketing is inside of HubSpot, so even like their case studies and things like that, if they see readers drop off of a certain page of their case study, they'll rework the entire PDF. So then that way they can improve retention or improve readability. So then that way the consumer is reading until the very end of the case study. So I thought that that was really interesting. Snail mail. Also, we have talked before about how direct mail, snail mail, or like hidden marketing gems in Port Yeti, is kind of proving that, and they're taking a more of a creative approach to that. So I thought that that was super interesting. And then they use HubSpot, like a lab. I already kind of talked about that one, but yeah, that that was especially, I guess, co signing off of the the case study is, you kind of think, like case studies, like nobody cares about case I personally had this opinion walking into TMSA this year, it's like nobody cares about case studies. Stop making them like they're I don't want to say they're BS, but nobody reads them. Nobody cares. Nobody downloads. It's actually the exact opposite. I was so totally wrong in that import. Yeti is kind of proof to that. We had a shippers panel as well at the event, and all of the shippers on the panel. I mean, it's technically anecdotal, but three of them said, I love getting case studies. I want to read case studies. And I was like, Jesus, okay, fine. Like, and I think it depends on the case study that you use to, like, I've actually, and again, I've only been doing this job for like, a month, so take it for granted, but I've noticed that we actually do get bigger responses and from the case studies that we put out compared to just like maybe a blog, but the case studies that I have focused on and have kind of put out there are, Like, famous names, right? So, like, the liquid deaths of them all. And we, oh, like, we did a, I did a PBR, one, pap spruing company on the day before Fourth of July, right? You're like, going into that and, and that's, I mean, even today is like, still doing really well. And so I think it's, I think it's how are you attacking the case study? Who is that case study with? Is it with someone that people are going to instantly be like, Oh, that's a growing company, or that's like a legacy in this industry. That's someone we need to talk about, like being just strategic about it. But now are you making people download them in order to get them? But that's something that we're starting to look into, as well as doing more of that kind of stuff. So now, no, not, not for a lot of them are blogs right now, look at us like but that's something strategy because strategy talk now. Well, someone had asked me the other day, like, do you host webinars at all? And I was like, No, I haven't hosted a webinar for any of my own companies, God, since like, 2021 but I remember them performing pretty well. And the guy was like, well, we just really like it was a potential podcast sponsor. And the guy was like, well, we just really like webinars, because we get a copy of the email address and, oh god, yeah, I guess I need to think about that. I, you know, I just always think of, you know, my marketing mindset has always been just like, just put it out there, put your message out there, and blast it out to as many platforms where people are hanging out as much as possible. And get them into following you get them into subscribing to your email newsletter, and then when they're ready to buy, you're the first one at at top of mind. But you know, as I'm starting to build out a lot of these different marketing campaigns for these podcast advertisers like that's what they're looking for. They're looking for ways to justify their marketing spend to their bosses. Can I provide that to them? So case studies came to mind. I did hear of another recently, this marketer that I follow on LinkedIn. She's really good, and I'm sorry I'm blanking on her name, but she said that she doesn't even write case studies anymore. She takes all of the sales notes, like the sales recordings, and she takes the transcripts of those, and then she turns those into case studies. And I thought, Oh, my God, that's that is super smart. And how she delivers them is she requires, you know, emails, to be downloaded. So that makes a ton of sense, and I probably will start to do I got some content plans in the works for cargo Rex. It's a little bit more of a higher, higher level than, like, a or a higher production level, I guess. And probably will, do, you know, I don't know yet. I'm working on the plan, but thinking of some different roundtable type content that you know will will start after the Labor Day holiday, because I'm not doing it in July and August while we're working on this damn search engine. But, yeah, it's all it's a pain in my ass. I think something that we should talk about, though we'll think for next month, is I'd love to get into the discussion with you on how you're adjusting your maybe, SEO strategy based on instead of Google. If you were again, just listening reminder Blythe of a headache, she probably already it's just, it's so it is fascinating to think that people now, instead of like, I have an EDI, for example, order flow, right? I, who do I go to for or EDI? People are going to Google, right? Less with that question, more to chat. GPT, so how are you popping up? And so, kind of interesting. So there, I don't want to get too much, because I anybody. Let's save it. Okay? Anybody who tells you that they got it figured out right now is lying to you. They have something to sell you. Yeah. So all of these SEO agencies that are, God, I had one of them reach out to one of my clients, and they're like, you're not appearing on the top page for this specific keyword, and we can get you there in four months. I'm like, You're effing lying, because no one can guarantee you certain placement, unless you're paying Google for that placement, because Google doesn't even have it figured out right now, and so everybody's trying to figure out how llms are classifying data, and should you just follow what Google has been doing for years? But then our Google itself is kind of like cannibalizing its own like honey pot, because they're so search dominant, but that search dominance has dropped below 90% for the first time forever, so they have started to make slight adjustments to how they're displaying search keywords. But I think too many companies are still trying to rank for words that are meant for the AI overviews, they're not meant for the really long tail keywords that you should be targeting. And so there's a whole like just snake oil salesmen that are relying off of what you know Google was four years ago, and then you have all of these other new consultants that are trying to figure out how llms are playing a role. And there's a lot of smart people trying to figure this out, but the truth is, is that no one really has it figured out just yet. And where a lot of these llms are going to be going is that you're going to have you're going to have to start changing how you measure things, and you're going to have to start measuring it based on impressions, and not actually click through rates of people coming to your site and so or coming to your brand, and how they find out about your brand. And it's a lot, it's a lot, but I will say there is one gentleman that everybody should follow. On LinkedIn, if you want somebody who's Trump, he's the smartest SEO person that I personally know of, and that's giantano Nino dinardi. He is over on LinkedIn. I'll put him in the show notes, because he had a post just this morning talking about, you know, the llms overview. He said the impact on SEO will be reduced trafficking, click through rate. It's already down by 35% impressions or visibility replaces clicks, citations replace rankings. Brand mentions will become backlinks to point. Oh, which, if you don't know what a backlink is, don't hire an SEO agency. It's all. There's so much. Gae T A, N, O, and then his last name is denardi, but he he's literally been on the front lines of SEO for forever, and he's documenting what he's seeing and who he's talking to. But he's one of the real ones. He's like, one of the ones that like he will tell he had a newsletter that went out the other day of telling a customer, no, like you're not a good fit for me, because you don't have at least, like, 100,000 visitors to your website, yet you don't have at least 250 organic backlinks to your site, which a backlink, for those who don't know, is when another website of high authority links to your website, and then they have to have that link as a do follow. A lot of times. Lot of media companies will do this, that they will mention your company, they will link to you, but you have a no follow link, and so you're not getting that credited back link. Because when you get the credited backlink, then that shows tools like SEMrush, Google, Ahrefs, all of these other SEO type companies that this your brand is trustworthy enough that this other brand is going to link to you, and then your domain rankings come into play. How old is the domain, how many companies are linking to you? How much of your content on your site is internal linking into other kind of like content webs. There's, you know, sort of the wheel and spoke model, where you have one phrase, and then you have all of these, like spin off phrases that you can target that's shifting a lot from what's, how do I change a tire on this car to completely different to what's the ideal tire for this car this year and this model, but I'm going to replace it in two years, that those long tail keywords are where you want to put your money, and then you also Want to make sure that there's intent behind that. So we're trying to solve a lot of those different questions, and what people are answering, and how they're answering and how they're finding the answers, is the biggest one. Trying to tackle that on on cargo wrecks, and we're seeing some promising signs, but it's just if Google doesn't have it figured out, then the llms haven't got it figured out, yeah, and then everybody's just just throwing spaghetti up against a wall and seeing what's going to stick, because it's some of this stuff, like the the shady ideally you want the shadiness to be gone. You want all of the AI slop to not rank. The problem is, is that, over the last 20 years or so of the internet, we've had a certain level of bot activity, and now it's just on steroids, and that AI slop is they're trying to gain control over how you even measure it. And so it's, it's a whole mess. It's, I don't know if there's light at the end of the tunnel. Is it? That's a my my soapbox moment. I think I just You see what happens when you bring up SEO, yeah, next time we dive into it. But this is what I'm trying this is what all marketers are trying to do right now. I just had a client send me a whole SEO breakdown yesterday of, like, the things that they want to address on the site. And I'm like, you don't We don't even know what we're fixing and what we're fixing for. Like, we know what we're fixing, but are we fixing it in a way that's measurable for the Internet of Tomorrow? Yes, and how people are going to be experiencing different the answering of certain questions. And I think for a long time, the internet has survived on answering que. That's exactly why you see like recipe blogs where they give you a whole spiel before they get into the actual recipe, is because that format is what Google has rewarded for a decade, and that format is out the window now, and so all of these different content creators are getting slammed by it, but that's because a lot of their work has been so easily replaceable. And so you content marketers, you're you're just gonna have to get better, and you're just gonna have to have, you know, an authority on the topic. You're gonna have to have your executive team. Team be comfortable giving authority on the topic. You're going to have to have case studies and customers giving testimonials. You have to have them linking to your site. You're going to have to be everywhere on all the different social media channels, and that you're going to have to be on cargo Rex, yeah, you're going to have to be because, let me tell you, some of y'all SEO is not very good. If my listing for your company, I need to finish our profile. I'll send it to you after the recording, but started it last week or something. I just for those folks. If you're looking for John tonos, I think that's how you say his name. Yeah, heard him on a podcast a couple times, so I will link to that specific post in the show notes in case you want to follow him, because we're all trying to figure this out in real time. But at least this guy is like, showing some real data. He works with a lot of different heavy hitters, and he's not afraid to tell a company, no, like you're not a good fit for me to work on your SEO. So I really like him. He comes from, like, definitely, like, the high impact sort of SEO days, but now it's a new world Wild West, and so we're all just trying to figure it out together. Love it. So great. Sharky Blythe Milligan, back everything is logistics podcast presented by SPI logistics, and we're going to get into some SEO tips for busy freight and logistics marketers, because, much like we talked about in our other segment around data, and trying to pull everything in and make sense of that data and where the value is, that's exactly what's happening in the world of SEO, and trying to figure out, what the hell do I do as far as content marketing is concerned, how do I market my company better? How do I placate the SEO gods? But then also, you know, kind of tap dance for the large language models that are out there, even though we don't have a clear defined set of rules for these llms, like chat, GPT and Claude and not Claude? Well, yeah, Claude. I know it's good for coders. I just haven't used it in a while for any other I'm locked into chat, G, P, T, now. So that is the My, my, LLM of choice, but perplexity, you know all of these Gemini, I don't want to, I'm not going to go through and name all of these, but you want to make your company visible in these different large language models. You also still want to placate the old SEO rules, because the majority of the internet is still searching under the old SEO rules. I know it kind of feels like it's all new in the world of AI, but want to kind of give like a high level overview of SEO, because you in your new role, over at orderful, you are in charge of getting some PR for orderful, which is good for SEO. It's great for backlinks. And so we've kind of discussed in previous episodes about helping you with your role. And so as someone who you know builds websites from technical perspective, and then also on the front end, as far as content and SEO is concerned, I want to know right now what I guess your understanding of SEO is in what kind of strategies maybe you're deploying right now, or are you deploying anything right now? So I will say this, Kate, who runs our SEO at orderful, is a goddess. So if I didn't have Kate here, this would be a different discussion. You know, what's interesting, though, is like, for example. So recently, we've been, you know, keeping track of, like, our our keywords, that and how those have moved, I think, is big, and a big part of that venture is that we're, like, redoing a lot of our blogs on our site, for example, like, we have a couple of these like blogs out there that are listing, like, different EDI providers, right? So when people are searching like, who's the best person, kind of those, like tricks, you know, like, I say Google Search tricks, that's, as an outsider, that's what I call them. What a what a trick. So we've seen a lot of healthy results there. I think what's interesting, though, too, is, of course, a little bit of this SEO. And, you know, I saw an article today, it's calling it Geo. I knew she'd hate that for the SEO and geo of things, right? And how are we showing up for each so for instance, like now we're working on our Wikipedia page because chat GPT does pull more of that too, and we haven't, let's be honest, it doesn't really matter too much more of the Google analytics side of things until now, so focusing kind of on these weird areas that we're seeing, chat, GBT pull so when people are asking, what's the best provider for EDI, or something along those lines, we're behaving in a way that they're behaving another big area. Area we found is, like updating our YouTube videos, so they're kind of asking the questions that people could potentially be asking there too. And so I think that's what's interesting, is like understanding, like, how people are searching for things now, what's how that's being pulled but of course, you know how that's leading to, at the end of the day, pipeline, I think, is the big thing. And, you know, here's a question, and we'll start with Blythe, that I've prepared for you as well. Look at this so because this is kind of important to the role that I have as well. So we're talking a little about how a lot of my work is a little bit more bottom of funnel, compared to think a little bit even more of Kate and does is a little bit more top of funnel. In regards from your point of view to SEO, KPIs, outside of just traffic, what should a company be focusing on so that they are seeing lead quality improve, or at least a pipeline influence from it as well. Question, and you might not know the answer to it, but do you know if you're using Google Search Console? Yes. Okay, so inside of Google Search Console, Google Search Console is my, personally, my favorite tool, and I use the word tool use loosely, because there's there's hrefs, there's SEMrush, there's, you know, all of these different keyword monitoring tools. You know, these tools that will look at the volume of a keyword and suggest a keyword that has low competition but high volume. And the problem with those tools is that they're relying on guesswork, whereas Google Search Console is relying on Google, and Google doesn't share that data with anyone except for their own products, and so if you have what's called Google Search Console, typically it's a short little piece of code that your web developer can add into your site. So it tells Google your domain history, your domain value, and your domain value is the URL that you input. So orderful.com in this case, so if you go into Google Search Console, the best reports that you can see, you can look at your pages and you can look at your queries. I love to look at my queries and then to see because your query is not sometimes it could be a short phrase, sometimes, sometimes it could be one word, sometimes it can be your brand name. But what you really want to see, especially in today's world, are long tail keywords. Long tail keywords are, you know, at least five words, three to five words that these long tail keywords are, you know, what is the best, or, you know, best EDI integrator for 2025 that could be a common phrase that folks might be using. And then what happens is, in your Google Search Console, you can see how many impressions you're getting. So what that means is, you're looking at the console and you're saying, Okay, I have maybe, you know, 15,000 impressions for this word. Well, right next to it, they're going to list what the click through rate is, and that means how many people saw you in a search result and then decided to click. If you sort those two columns by the least or the most amount of impressions that you're getting, but the least amount of click through rates, then you can also click on the pages, and you can see which pages are registering for that query that people are ignoring. So when they scroll through Google, what they're looking at is they're looking at what's called an SEO meta title, an SEO description, and sometimes an image, sometimes a video. It just depends on the phrase that you're looking for, and if you have that properly optimized on your website, on a blog post, on a landing page, so you have to have that clearly defined, but it just it kind of shows the point of you have about a half a second on someone's Google search results in order to make that impression that somebody should click on that link. And so that, to me, is low hanging fruit for anybody who's out there, you can go to Google Search Console as long as your domain is verified. You want to make sure that verification is added into your domain. It just tells Google that you own the site and that you have the authority to manage it, so they will give you this data of all of these queries, and you can see which ones that you're performing already good at, and as far as impression wise, but if you just make slight tweaks to the title page and the description, it could increase your click through rate for a phrase that you're already ranking, already getting impressions for. I don't want to say ranking, because you don't necessarily know yet how you're ranking for that word, but then you can also infer so whatever the phrase is, maybe it's like EDI integration trouble, or EDI integration error, something like that, where that is. Something you're getting a lot of impressions for, and then look at the page that is being sent for that so that what that is telling you, what that console is telling you, is that Google thinks that this page is relevant to this query. But for whatever reason, if it's a low click through rate, the audience is not thinking that you can solve their problem with that, with the way that the title and the description are set up. Does that make sense? Yes, and I believe that's like what I was talking about Kate's update. I think that's the journey that she's currently on. Okay, perfect. So that's low hanging keyword, or low hanging fruit, for anybody that's out there that is wondering, okay, where do I even start? Yeah, start there get and we've seen, like, really great improvements from just like the very little re, I don't want to say rebranding, but almost like repurposing of like the blogs and I think those links right that are coming through and making sure that that they are clicking through more often, or whatever showing up right? Whatever content of ours is showing up in that post is relating better, so that click through is happening. And then you could, you could have multiple pages that are showing up for that particular phrase. And so what you kind of want to do is just make a like attack first kind of priority list, and that's what Google Search Console helps you to do, is to make that attack first mentality. And so from Kate's perspective, she's probably going through and making some tweaks on her end, from your point of view, that could signal to you, okay, well, let me look for the queries that make the most sense, for the bottom of the funnel, for the people who are looking for answers to that question, literally looking for, I'll send you the recording somewhere. Yes, we're recording this. Yes. Oh my god, you guys are learning with me. So what you're going to want to want to do is you're going to want to look at because this is the way that SEO is evolving. And it, I'll take it into llms in just a second, where the volume so say, if you went to H refs, it might tell you that that string of keyword, that those phrases gets no search volume. And it will, it'll essentially tell you this is not worth your time to solve. That could not be further from the truth. First of all, they don't have access to the first party data. They only have their own, you know, first party data, to sort of judge by which I do think that some of those tools have their have their place, especially maybe finding some opportunities, I personally, especially for marketing teams that are strapped for time, and your their entire agencies that are tasked with handling SEO, because it's a lot more than just let me tweak this blog post in order to match this query, but that long tail query, if you match it to what your buyer or what the position of your buyer is, are they problem aware? Are they solution aware? Do they even know that they have a problem? If they typically, they know that they have a problem, if they're searching for that phrase. And so what you want to do is you want to then make content in the future around those particular topics, as long as it's relevant to your audience, where previously in my past life, you know, early days of the internet, you know, I was making, I was looking at these tools, and I was looking at, oh my god, like, this phrase has a ridiculous amount of volume and low competition. I'll make a blog article, and I get tons of traffic to my site. Like it's a win, but it's not the right kind of win. Like, I think for I use this example before, like, digital dispatch ranks. I think one two or in the top three for how do I fill out a log book? Digital dispatch has nothing to do with log books. Yeah, we are a website development and management company. I see what you mean. Like, don't try to don't just take that results and, like, make a bunch of content for someone who's not your ideal customer, yes, and that historically is it is why a lot of SEO SEOs, that's what we call ourselves, yeah, a lot of the SEOs out there are falling victim to, or have fallen victim to this, because they're chasing The arbitrary, like, vanity metrics. They're not chasing the keyword phrases that are going to actually bring in pipeline, that are going to bring in leads and book meetings or things like that, and then it's just bogging your sales reps hate you so exactly and so you're set, you're at marketing, you're, that's exactly right. You're, you're, you're sending off shitty leads to the sales team. They're going to try their best, maybe at first, to call some of those leads and to reach out to them. But if it's they're reaching out about log books and you're a web development company, exactly makes sense. So the way that this is transitioning into the LLM world, because Google. Has spent the past 20 years of defining how you rank for specific keywords, and they give out guidance for web developers and designers and content marketers of this is how you structure your website. This is how you structure your content in order to rank better for specific keywords, where a lot of people messed up is that they were chasing these keyword phrases that had nothing to do with their business, or it was just very low value traffic, and it sent, you know, just unqualified pipeline. Now, where it gets a little bit more challenging in the world of llms is that they don't have that clear, defined make sure you put your website, you know, in this technical structure, make sure you're getting link backs. They haven't released any of that. So the best assumption that SEOs can go off of right now is the long established rules of what Google has done. Now there's obviously competition in this regard, because this is llms are a brand new way to search for information on the internet, and Google has been catching up pretty well as far as their own data, their own llms, and how they're handling search engine rankings, and who should give be given traffic and who shouldn't be it's a big problem, and Google hasn't exactly solved it yet. Then you enter in AI content, and they don't know what's being created by real people, what's being created by real companies. So there's all of these different additional technical side of things, which I'm not going to bore y'all about, that play a role as well. But now with llms, it's getting more into a very long tail phrase, I am experiencing data issues with my invoicing from XYZ trucking company they don't want to pay. That is a full paragraph. Yeah, that is what is making companies either show up or not show up in llms. And so there's, there's an argument to be made that not only should you be focusing on the long tail keywords that you have, you know, sort of low hanging fruit in your Google Search Console, but how can you predict what that paragraph text is around that query? And so that's really important, too. And so the ways that you know, some of the SEOs that I thought because I have bookmarked in order to prep for this, in order to prep for my own like SEO plans for cargo Rex, like, I've pulled in like 20 different searches of all of these different SEO experts that I follow and like in depth knowledge. And the commonality among those things is finding the long tail detailed paragraphs of what your audience is asking and make sure that it's bottom of the funnel. Who cares if it doesn't get any quote, unquote search volume? Because what the llms are looking for is slightly different than what Google is looking for. And so if you can tailor that around, built out, because people are probably for I would assume what's happening when you say, like the paragraph, aspect is, instead of someone saying, Who's the best, in my situation, who's the best EDI provider, they're saying who's the best EDI provider for supply chain companies who have less than $100 million in revenue and looking To scale in the next five years to $200 million and then more detail, yeah, Instagram. And then, to be honest, it's if you work internal at a company that could be a little more challenging, because you're used to the jargon. You're used to these market conditions. So that's where customers calls like recording your calls, meeting notes, things like, that's where those can play a pivotal role in this, because then you can find out the jargon that your customers are using and then match it up with those long tail keywords. Because what the llms are doing is that they're they're adding more nuance. They're adding more detail, but the llms have to have something to go off of. So what do you do as a marketer? Well, you want to make sure that you have an FAQ page that is very detailed, an FAQ and you gotta, you gotta have your questions that are, you know, in a certain format from a technical perspective, like by going to some very light physically watching this right now, what you're watching me experience is she brought this up before we started recording, and I'm not gonna lie, kind of went in one ear, not the other, but now it's clicking. So continue. Okay. So FAQ pages are going to be really important. There is also a debate around creating a separate Markdown file just for llms, and now, a markdown file is basically a data repository of all of your website's content. But that's what Google wants to see. That's what the robots are crawling. Calling and checking now, on the flip side, if you make one specifically for llms, and you include a bunch of information about your company FAQs that are being asked, and you just it's a plain text file that allows the llms to have one resource document that they can scan. And so there is a lot of, I don't want to say debate, but tips around, add a markdown language doc to your website that includes an FAQ section, information about your company, customers. You help and add that nuance to that document, and then that way, you can also format an FAQ landing page, because you don't want visitors, you know, finding that in an LLM, and then go clicking on the source page you want them clicking on, like, the nice page that's built around, you know, easy readability, you know, you got proper like, h1 h2 formatting on, you know, the question title, and then you have a full description, or maybe even better, you Have a YouTube explainer video that goes into that as well, because YouTube is the second, second largest search engine on the planet, and there are many people who would much rather go to a YouTube video and watch that versus reading pages and pages of FAQs. So if I were you, I would figure out what those FAQ questions are. I would pull in all of the meeting notes from the sales team. I would pull them in from current customers, especially if they're recording onboarding conversations, because those are the questions that people want answered to before they ever pick up the phone and book a meeting with you. So having that prioritization, I would start with Google Search Console, I would start with editing or auditing, not auditing, but pulling in all of the customer onboarding conversations. And then that, to me, are the two biggest gold mines for how you can make like a Venn diagram of your first kind of initial attack plan for placating not only the Google gods, because Google still controls, you know, I think it's 88% of the search market that has dropped a little because of the LLM adoption. But we're so new to LLM adoption that it's, I think, especially for the logistics audience and for a lot of folks making these buying decisions. They're not using chat, GPT and perplexity and Claude yet. So for a large portion of that internet, they're always going to stay on Google. It's what they're familiar with. They're not changing, and they're sometimes they don't want to even entertain the idea of using AI, which is a whole other, you know, bucket of worms. So I would target those two areas, and then I would make the FAQ pages. I would make some markdown language from a technical perspective. And then I would also make sure that your website is discoverable. And you're discoverable not only in meaning you have a site map that Google is regularly crawling, but you also want to add Bing in there too, because guess what? Bing and open AI, they've had a relationship for years. If you want to be included in Bing's version of chat GPT, then you want to make sure that your site map is also added to Bing, so that they know to crawl your site for these different markdown languages, for these different FAQs. These are easy winners ahead of time. So that is, I would, I would, I said a lot. I don't know if, like, it's, it's resonating, hopefully it is. I'm just taking notes, and actually, everyone should stop watching a video right now. No, don't stop. I'll share the transcript with you, and then you can Okay, so there are a couple of the notes that I was very helpful. That was excellent. No, that was very helpful. I love that. And I like, honestly, I can use it, but I bet you a lot of sales teams haven't even thought of that aspect. And I mean, I don't know about you, but pretty much any conversation I have business related, any conversation I have at this point, I'm recording, yeah, so it's like, and I would assume most sales teams are doing that in some form. So instead of just, like, using that to monitor how good your sales reps are, why aren't you using that to also improve your search. You know, that's a great point you brought because I was just listening to a podcast the other day that mentioned that they store all of their customer conversation, recorded conversations in a certain database, and then they'll have one of their like, admin assistants go in and find you know something about that customer, like, what their favorite sports team is, or their favorite like vodka brand or something like that, and they will use the customer conversations in order to send a personalized gift to that customer. And I thought that was such a brilliant use of using your meeting notes and making a deeper connection with your customers. In your potential leads by using these recorded conversations. Now, of course, you can't, you want to be a little careful. You don't want to, you know, mention specific companies, but you can profile them into different, you know, ICP buckets, and then that way, that's a it's a better resource for you to have where you have, you know, different customer segments that you can classify each of these different meeting notes into the onboarding calls. Are I all in every like freight tech interview that I do for for this show, I always ask about onboarding because I know that's what people they want to know what the experience is going to be like before they ever book a meeting with you. And so if you can give that information, as much of that information upfront as possible, without ruining, you know, any kind of competitive advantage, or, you know, disclosing any, like, sensitive customer data. That is a huge win I briefly mentioned on the technology side of things, or, like, on the, I guess, the SEO tech side of things that that is very important too. Like, you want to make sure you also have an interlinking strategy. You want to bucket your customers into certain ICPs, but you also want to bucket your topics into into different content buckets as well that match up to those ICPs. And so these are different, like, sort of like, 102103 levels. Like, once you get the technical aspect right with your website, then you don't necessarily have to worry about that in the future. So get it right from the jump. Make sure that these search engines are crawling your site, and then start with Google Search Console, and then work with your meeting notes. And then that is a perfect place to get started, and then you can start to, you know, expand from there. The cat has an opinion for those she's, look at your tail. She's like, yes, she wants to hear more about SEO and LLM more. That's awesome. No, I love that. I think that's super helpful. And I would assume like it, it sounds like it's not only just helping the llms, but also just the SEO side of it as well. So that's the thing is, like you Google has a set of defined rules and strategies, and so my theory is, is that a lot of these llms are not going to reinvent the wheel like Google has spent 20 years perfecting who should show up and why. And you could argue, you know, around the merits of some of there's lots of arguing about what they should do and what they shouldn't do, but what they have right now is probably going to be followed by these other companies. And so you might also, I had a client recently that they don't want any of their content scraped by llms. They don't want anything. They want to actually block them. And so it was cloudinary, which is a hosting like DDoS platform. We host some of our our sites with their with their platform, but they allow you to now block the LLM bots from scraping your site and using it as an informational resource. I don't recommend that, yeah, but there are, like, with cargo wrecks, for example, I'm not letting it all. I'm letting a little bit, but I'm not letting it all. I'm not going to have like, strategic advantage is, like, giving that info. You want people come to the site for the information, right? Yeah, exactly. So I don't want to give it all out, yeah. Why would they want to do business with me? I want to prove value in the LLM first. And so we have some different ways that I'm going to be experimenting with that. But everything that I just told you like that is exactly my plan for cargo Rex. And so it's making these blog post guides, you know, getting real world testimonials, not just, oh, I need an article about associations and logistics. Well, guess what? Like, if you I did those research reports, and at best, you're going to find maybe 10 solutions or 10 associations. Not all of them were relevant to what I was looking for. But you know they you want to be able to use these llms to your advantage within reason, but just know that they're working off a very limited data set, because they don't even, they haven't even let like webmasters know what that what they're looking for to begin with. So we have to rely on what Google has told us for years, what the results kind of are hinting at, and then what some you know, early adopters, early experimenters, are finding success with, and that's creating those FAQ pages, and that's creating the markdown page for specifically for llms. So both of those things were deploying on cargo wrecks. So I'll report back if they're, you know, successful or not. But, gosh, I cannot believe I'm blanking on her name right now, but she works over at Avril TMS. I love her too. Oh, it's kind of. Sorry. I can't believe I'm blanking on her name. What company I think you have? Um, is it not Avril, yeah, and that's avrl. Alice, no, Alvis. Elvis, yes, yes. Elvis. God, damn, God. What is her name? She's gonna be so mad at us. I'm sorry, and I love her, so we were going to find out right now, hold on, I always spell Elvis wrong too. I always put the Y and I spot, yeah, it's going to drive me nuts, because we love her. We do love you. And why aren't you popping up for me? I spelled it wrong. I guess maybe I'm on LinkedIn and I'm seeing like other TMS providers. Hold on, she's all over right here I can see her face. I yeah, I see her face because she's gorgeous. Ava, sorry, loving you, I swear. But she just posted a video the other day on on LinkedIn about how you know, she's been experimenting with chat GPT five and how she's using FAQ pages on, you know, the the Alvis, you know, landing pages there, and so, you know, we're all, I think that's the beauty of this space right now, is that there's a tremendous amount of opportunity if you can have these LLM bots scrape your site and source you in the right way that it leads qualified traffic to you. It's going to take some figuring out. And I think that you know that that's what Ava is, is proving. That's what other you know marketers in this space and just you know industry wide, are trying to figure out. We're all trying to kind of figure this out together. There is no real structure into how to win yet, but I think that's part of the fun is like trying to figure out where to, you know, place your flag. And maybe it's not one flag, maybe it's a bunch of different flags. And so if I had any sort of like, lasting advice is just make sure, from a technical perspective, that your site is discoverable in both Google and Bing, because then you know that the llms can also access your site. Add an FAQ page to your website that's pretty simple, pretty easy. Add, for God's sakes, like Team photos who works for your company to your about us page that gives a little extra, you know, sort of trust as creating, like a trust moment on your site, because, frankly, no one's going to book a meeting with you if you have no team member photos on your site, or any kind of just hints that you're a legitimate company, fraud is rampant. I don't have to tell anybody else that. But if you can nail those two things, then it makes going into Google Search Console, pulling meeting notes and making those FAQ pages a lot easier. So I think that's that was a lot. I hope everyone on watch it learn something I definitely did, for sure. I guess if I could ask, Do I have time to ask? Oh, please go. So we're doing, we're starting to deploy some more of our content syndication strategies. For example, what are I don't even want to say, what are some of your like Best Tips For Content Syndication? And I almost want to flip that question. Where do you see people maybe execute content syndication poorly. What do you mean by content syndication, in terms of like doing webinars with different sites, or doing white paper, gated white papers, sponsored articles, things of that nature. Where do you see people maybe not getting the pipeline that they would hope from that from just mistakes that they've made? Well, I would, so I was at the TMSA, and then we might have talked about this in the last episode, but at the recent TMSA conference, we had a shippers panel, and every single part it was for people on the panel, but every single one of them said that they liked getting case studies. And I would have never guessed that as a marketer, a little bit, because I think I brought up the fact that, like, I always see our engagement pop up with case studies, especially if it's like brands that people know, and typically a case study so that that buyer journey is you're gonna probably, you know, create the content with a customer. It's really tough to get customers on record for for some of these things, and so when they they do get the customer on record, typically, they'll post it out to LinkedIn. They'll make a LinkedIn ad. Somebody sees it on their feed. They click on it, they go to the page, they enter their email address, they download the eBook. The problem is, is that for a lot of ebooks, not a lot of them are read. And so even though you've done the hard work of like creating it and getting awareness around it and getting the folks to come and download it, that it's it's one of those things where people, once they download it, they know that they have it. There. It's just, oh, I can go back and read that later. They're not actually, you know, digesting it to the point where they're going to read it in full and then call and book a meeting with you. Yeah. So from that lens, I would say they're still worth it. You should still create them, but you should have a greater distribution strategy around that white paper, I would actually first get the customer on a video interview. I would ask them a lot of those different questions, send the questions in advance so they can kind of think about, you know, for some of these customers, it might have been a while since they went through the onboarding phase and, you know, questions that they asked and things like that. So if you could do this on new customers, this is that, that this is what I would do, is I, as soon as their onboarding is finished, I would schedule an interview with them, and then I hopefully you can get it recorded and they have permission in order for you to share it out. But I would put that video out. I would make a written white paper slash case study from that video, because then you have the video of them talking about it, you have the the transcript of them talking about it on your YouTube channel, which will help from an SEO perspective as well. And then it helps the creepers, the creepers who are not going to fill out, you know, their email address, they're going to make a fake email in order to get that white paper, because they don't want nobody calling them or reaching out to them and bombarding them like people are, have wisened up to this flow. But if you just put the information out there and then you make white paper case studies based on that interview, I would use that as like a combination package, because then your sales team can take that YouTube interview and send it out to their leads, or they can send it out to, you know, specific questions, especially if you have that interview tailored around different questions, you can isolate those clips for all of those different questions, and your sales team can have a content library to send to their leads if they're on the fence or if they have a question about onboarding? Well, guess what? I have the seven minute video where this customer was talking about their onboarding experience, yeah, and are these specific questions. And so then you have almost like an entire library that the sales team can use. You're getting more qualified leads because they're digesting your content, they're reading it, and then they book a meeting, and then they're more qualified to close because of that initial strategy. So hopefully all of that makes sense. No, I think that I mean, and honestly, for small teams too, that makes sense, because you're not only gathering, you're not only fulfilling maybe that that gated asset, but you're collecting a large amount of, I mean, YouTube shorts and I mean to talk about what we talked about right beforehand. I mean, in my head, I'm thinking, Well, you take all the onboarding questions, you do a you record a podcast with some a customer who is open to talk about the onboarding experience. You touch on those questions that pop up more most frequently, and then, not only do you now have content for blogs or whatever to kind of bring in that the SEO strategy, but at the same time, now you have all the videos that you can post out. It's like you've created content that's helping in so many different ways. Yeah. I mean, it's really like you, if you start with the video interviews, or even, you know, pulling in some of your your customer onboarding calls or even lead calls, because that can that's a whole other can of worms that you could target from a customer perspective too, is is answering those questions, because people use your website as sort of like the last line of do I want to invest time into talking to these people. And so what you can use your website as as the the sales closer that works. You know, 24/7 for you. So then that way, you're answering as many questions as possible so that they know when they book a meeting they're not going to waste their time. And if you position it that way, with these different resources, I would be surprised if you didn't see an overall lift of people who are dealing with you know, those common issues, and then focus on your distribution. Get it out on email, share it out on social. Share it several times on social. It doesn't matter if it's the same clip and you're going to post it once a week for the next six months. People, nobody remembers your content like you remember your content. And the fact is, is that if you're posting a clip out on social media, chances are no especially if it's organic, and you don't put any like paid ads behind it, hardly anybody's gonna see it, and a fraction of the people are gonna interact with it. And then, you know, we've talked earlier, you know about like views and what counts as a view, and you know who? Who knows how many people saw that video and didn't actually listen to it, or maybe they saw the video and never unmuted it, but read the text in the post. So all of these different instances exist. And so you can create that. You can create your own content supply chain based on those. Customer interviews that hopefully leads to more customers that are just like the ideal ICP that you're going after, and you're playing in the world of great content. So great original content that can't be replicated by llms, but they can use you as a source to people who are looking for those answers. So totally, that's a lot. I'm worn out. This is, like, I forgot what we're going to cover the rest of the show, damn is less talking about how our personal lives are going to be, asking Blythe how to do my job. I like, literally, I I was like, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna buy your classes. Look at me. Let's go. I don't have any actually SEO classes on on the site. I have been, I've been readjusting how I approach SEO, because I feel uncomfortable selling that as a service if I don't know the answers, and I don't know that anybody knows the answers right now, and so I but I am worried, I I feel like I need to test it on my own brands first, yeah, and then come up with a solution that I can advise other other companies, so that that is just sort of everything that I Know, and the experiments that I'm going to take based on the experts that I follow and just some of the data I've seen. But hopefully you know that this will be something that we can add on, you know, like a LLM technical package to, you know, websites for folks who need it. If you don't have a lot of content in your site, you don't need it, just make sure that your page add an FAQ page is probably the easiest thing that I would suggest, no matter if you have blog content or not, because the FAQ page will help a ton. But if you don't have blog content, you don't need to, and if you don't have the energy or the budget or the staff to do blog and video con, I would focus on video first, I would not focus on blog content, because blog content, it can just be replaceable. But with AI and so you have to, you have to both protect yourself from getting cannibalized by these llms, but also position your company as as a resource for the llms, which is a fine line to walk. Yeah. Interesting. Okay, well, that does it for this segment. I hope you know, freight marketers out there, you know, found some value in this, maybe some companies, or they did, God, I hope so, because I feel out of breath and we still have the rest of the show to do. Thanks for tuning in to another episode of everything is logistics, where we talk all things supply chain. For the thinkers in freight, if you like this episode, there's plenty more where that came from. Be sure to follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast app so you never miss a conversation. The show is also available in video format over on YouTube, just by searching. Everything is logistics. And if you're working in freight logistics or supply chain marketing. Check out my company, digital dispatch, we help you build smarter websites and marketing systems that actually drive results, not just vanity metrics. Additionally, if you're trying to find the right freight tech tools or partners without getting buried in buzz words, head on over to cargorex.io where we're building the largest database of logistics services and solutions. All the links you need are in the show notes. I'll catch you in the Next episode, in go Jags you you.