Some time ago, commercial director of the company Vervo, namely Andris Zigurs, has reached out to me.

He reached out through my website form. He needed experts, specifically he was looking for someone who could help with full cycle CRM implementation.

Their business is brokering freight. They connect customers with haulers. They focus on FTL (Full Truckload) and LTL (Less Than Truckload) shipping.

The Challenge

Vervo’s main challenge was high operational costs. They were drowning in detail.

When a client makes a shipping inquiry, the process has many painful steps, more specifically two main areas:

• Collect everything from a client about the cargo Dimensions, weight, type (temperature-controlled, hazardous, etc.), origin address, destination address, and timelines.
• Find the Hauler for the cargo. Vervo uses its own fleet but mostly relies on a massive network of subcontractors. This link had to be organized.

The sales reps made too many mistakes, since work is very detailed and was done in large…no, rather say MASSIVE volumes. Humans are just not designed to handle that much small tasks.

The biggest time-waster was getting quotes.

How things work. A client sends a request. That request goes out to multiple haulers. The haulers reply. Every reply has to be saved, compared, and stored for future statistics.

This high-volume communication funnel created massive friction.

It ate time. It ate money through operational overheads. Just image having couple hundreds quotes per day, that generate at least two, but normally up to four inquiries sent to haulers.

Deals are not closed immediately the same day, so you still have to follow up on the inquiries from couple of previous days, which stack up in thousands of ongoing communications, often with the same people.

Sometimes, cost of processing an order—the time spent getting quotes and managing emails—was higher than the margin on the job itself.

The company was rapidly growing. Order volume was up. Revenue was up. But operational efficiency was sinking. They were profitable, but nowhere near as profitable as they should have been.

…

Want to read the full case study? Drop your name and email below. Since I’m sharing sensitive project details, I’d love to know who I’m sharing them with.