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Recently met with someone who graduated college in 2022 and has spent the last 2 years at a large, top-rated third-party logistics company.
Her story & experiences are fascinating and it sounds like this industry could be a great alternative to a traditional BDR role for several reasons (which you’ll read about below).
Let’s jump right in!
Brief overview of her background
Before graduating college, she accepted a SaaS role at a company that offered her a $75k salary. She quickly signed her offer and launched her career shortly after graduating college.
She knew it was the wrong fit immediately after starting her onboarding process. The deal cycles were long, orientation was boring, the culture sucked (especially because all of her colleagues were AT LEAST 10 years older than she was) and she had no one to relate to. Yikes.
Instead of wallowing in a bad-fit role, she left after 2 weeks, moved home, and spent a month figuring out her next move.
A recruiter at the logistics company called her, and as soon as she spent time in the office and met her would-be colleagues, she knew it was a great fit to start her career.
Overview of the company
They’re a large player in logistics & shipping and are an authorized resller for UPS which provides them the ability to offer customers better pricing than they’d receive directly from UPS.
Plus - customers receive MUCH BETTER service from them than what they’d get by calling a 1-800 number at UPS.
And, given almost every company in the world ships SOMETHING out, virtually everyone can be a customer of theirs (even if they currently work directly with UPS).
With offices all over the country, they offer employees the ability to move from city to city which is advantageous to her because she can try out new cities without leaving a role & company where she is having A LOT of success.
Day in the life
Her day typically starts at 8am and ends at 4pm.
When she joined, she focused all of her attention on finding customers. At her company, salespeople work full-cycle and are rewarded with promotions as they reach new quarterly revenue thresholds (she’s received 2 promotions in the last 2 years!)
What I found fascinating is how efficient she is at booking meetings with potential clients.
When she started, she booked 5 meetings over her first 100 calls. In SaaS sales, those are unheard of numbers for most people/industries.
Now, 2 years later, she spends 50% of her time on new business activities which typically results in 5 meetings per week which translates to roughly 4 new customers per month (she has 67 currently in her book!)
The other 50% of the time is spent on engaging her active customers (which can include supporting them when shipments are damaged & delayed) along with simply calling to foster deeper relationships & grow their accounts.
At first, she prospected smaller customers, but as her experience and confidence has grown, she’s going after larger companies and works closely with presidents and CEO’s.
She runs all her meetings herself, works on pricing proposals, and receives dedicated account management support for each customer that spends $1k+ each week.
Earning potential
She wasn’t shy to say that her base salary isn’t large, but the earning potential is very lucrative, especially as someone builds their book with large customers.
She has one colleague who in his 5th year, should exceed $500k in earnings. Sure these numbers are not “normal”, but it shows the potential with the right attitude and ability to bring on (and retain) large customers.
One of the things I loved about her company was that commission rates increase as your book grows. New team members start at 3% of profit (she’s currently at 13%) but rates can be as large as 30%.
The average commission rate in SaaS is 10-15% (The Quota Hunter’s benchmark)
And there are weekly contests that are extremely lucrative…in fact, there’s a current contest that blew my mind:
- Top 10 salespeople will each earn a trip for 2 anywhere in the world
- The 11th-20th best salespeople each get $25,000 cash
Those are the types of contests you don’t typically hear about in SaaS!
Final thoughts
Here are the top reasons why she loves her job:
- Surrounded by salespeople in their 20’s
- Fun and collaborative office culture
- Every day is different
- She’s build deep and fun relationships with customers
- Incredibly lucrative job in terms of earning potential
- She’s making a huge impact - customers often tell her that working with her has helped them reduce their shipping work from 8 hours per day to 2 hours per day. Wow!
So there you have it - if the world of shipping & logistics sounds intriguing, I invite you to check it out further. There are a few large industry players who might love to hear from you!