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How To Identify
Star Clients For Your Couriers Business!
Article By: Andre
Hendricks
 n
this article I want to talk to you about how to identify
star potential customers. If you get this right
you will save a tremendous amount of time and avoid
approaching the wrong or not so profitable customers for
driving jobs acquisitions.
Let me explain, I did work
for many different companies during my years a s a
freelance courier and what I have found is that
inevitably you are going to get a much higher paying job
from one client while in the process of doing a much
lower paid job form another client.
Here’s the problem – If you have too many low paying
clients in terms of driving job profitability, you’ll
end up loosing or disappointing the high paying clients
with the high profitability driving jobs.
It’s almost like choosing your friends. You have a
choice to hang out with friends that has no ambition for
their own lives or you can associate with friends that
will contribute to your own growth.
When choosing clients to approach
for work, you must use what’s called scalability. In
other words, you need to measure your potential clients
up against a certain set of criteria to see if they will
make the final cut.
I developed this system quite early on in my career
because I had the unfortunate experience of loosing a
high paying client as a result of being occupied doing
work for a low paying client twice in a row when
the high paying client called upon me.
Oh and by the way, you do have the right to fire clients
if they are not putting money into your pocket. I’ll
explain later what constitutes a potentially disastrous
client relationship. For now, let’s first look at the
qualifying criteria when choosing star customers.
The first set of criteria is to
look at the company type. An for the sake of clarity I
am talking about private companies first and foremost.
We’ll get to courier companies later.
So here’s the first qualifying criteria when scouting
for star potential clients.
1. The company you approach must be an established
organization with at least 3-5 employees. If you’re not
sure, how many employees they employ, visit their
website and check out their about page, or call them and
plain ask them. This is important because the number of
employees will give you an indication of the
volume of work they deal with.
Ideally you want to find customers who uses same day
couriers at least 2 – 3 times a week and the like I have
said before, the type of company is the first qualifying
criteria because this will indicate whether they are
likely to use your service more then once a week.
So what type of companies are likely to use you more
than once a week?
The first type of company I want to introduce to you is
CD Duplication companies. I have worked for several
years with these types of companies in London and they
have near enough work every single day. Now this might
be different for you, but I can almost guarantee you’ll
get work from them at least 3 times a week no matter
what part of the country you’re in.
That is because this type of
business are dealing with in-demand services and
products thus the need for couriers occurs on an almost
daily basis. You could be taking a few boxes of CD’s for
a small client of a particular cd duplication company,
or if you own a transit van, a few pallet loads
for a larger client of the same CD Duplication company.
The company I worked with was
called Broad Crest and they are located in Park Royal,
North West London. The key here is to look at recurring
activities performed by the type of company you want to
work for.
As simple and obvious as this may
sound so many freelance couriers get this wrong. The
purpose of being in business for yourself is to simply
make more then you spend and that’s obvious too, but
it’s not always the case. The worst thing is many
freelance couriers never even do
driving jobs
for private companies. This is equivalent to leaving
money on the table.
If you have the insurance and Goods
in Transit, there’s no reason why you can’t do work for
private companies as well as courier companies. It’s
really up to you to put in the effort and implement the
advice we give you.
The next type of company I want to
introduce to you is Printing Companies - These print
menus for restaurants, business cards for businesses and
individuals etc, so they are pretty busy every day. I
have a friend who owns a printing and graphic design
company and he uses same day couriers virtually every
day.
So you can be sure that printing and graphic design
companies are a good match for long term contracts.
Again, the key here is to look at recurring activities
performed by the company. Is the type of service or
product they provide of such that it’s needed on a
regular basis by their clients?
If the answer is yes, you have a potential positive
match. You might be wondering what if these clients are
already using couriers, and for obvious reasons they
more than like are, but we’ll get into that a bit later.
The next type of company I want to talk to you about is
Publishing Companies - These are companies that produces
prints for advertising agencies etc. and since this is
an ongoing process you'll have an opportunity to create
work for yourself on an ongoing basis.
These types of companies also make use of over night
couriers. Be sure to offer this type of service to
publishing companies as well. I recommend you do some
research as to what competitor companies are charging
for this type of service and then adjust your price
point before you approach these types of companies.
Again, the service these companies provide is a
recurring one so this means this type of customer can
support your business on a ongoing basis if you get a
contract with them. So are you beginning to see a
pattern here?
Before I move on to courier
companies I want to introduce one last company type if
you happen to own transit van, and that is any company
dealing with Bio-Degradable Materials. These are
companies that supplies the filler material going in
between packages and boxes. You can find out from local
packaging companies who and where to find these types of
companies, or look on the internet.
There's a ton more but I'm sure you get the idea right?
Companies in manufacturing etc are also good matches
because work is recurring.
So to sum up the qualifying criteria for private
companies again you need to look at the following
points:
1. How many employees does the company have?
2. What type of activity does the company perform?
3. Is the activity the company is performing a recurring
one? and
4. Do they provide small to large volumes of work?
The next type of client I want to talk to you about
is Courier Companies
I would not recommend large established courier
companies like DHL or Parcel Force etc. As a freelance
courier your main target courier company will be
privately owned companies.
The best place to look for these are to use the list at
the back of your manual or go onto
http://www.yell.com and do a search for courier
companies in your town or area.
Once you have found all those privately owned courier
companies, make a list of them and
make a note of the following qualifying criteria of
a "star prospect":
1. Does the company have a website?
If the company has a website it's a good sign that it's
a professional company with regular customers.
2. If so, do they specify how many vehicles/employees
they have?
The more vehicles they have the more work they are
doing or taking on. This is a good sign because herein
lies an opportunity for you to present yourself and your
freelance courier service to cover any overspill work
they get in.
The more employees they have is also a positive sign -
it means they can afford to have and pay people that do
work for them!
3. Are they situated in an industrial area/business
park?
If they have an office in a business park or industrial
site they cater for the surrounding companies as well.
This is great because it has "over spill" written all
over it!
4.Do they specialise in just courier services or do
they do "mini cabing" as well?
Yes you get couriers that also doubles as mini-cabs! By
the very nature of it these are desperate owners that
need to do both to generate an income so they will not
be able to afford you or have any over spill work
...needless to say.
Not every company will be a great match so use this
simple criteria and document your finds to determine who
is "worthy" of your services.
Now that you know how to identify
star prospects, visit yell.com or touchlocal.com and
gather the details of all the potential customers in
your area starting with a long list private companies
that matches your qualifying criteria.
You want to make yourself a chart
where you can list every company under an attribute and
then compare those companies against one another to see
which ones contains more of the attributes that makes up
your qualifying criteria.
For example you might find that company A has only 2
employees while company B has 5 employees. Which makes
company B a more likely candidate. Do the same for your
list of courier companies and you’ll soon have a list of
potentially high paying star prospects that can help you
increase your business profits faster than you thought
possible.
Finally I want to partially address the issue of what if
your potential star customer is already using courier
services. I said partially because this is a whole new
article on it’s own so I‘ll just make a couple of points
and in our next articles discuss this in greater detail.
The first thing you must keep in mind is that companies
are in business to make money. Now if you can’t make
them money but you can save them money, you have a very
real reason they’ll want to listen to your proposition.
2. Companies that’s already using couriers have fostered
relationships with these couriers so you have to
consider the fact that (providing they are still happy
with the service provided by a competitor) they more
than likely will remain loyal to that company. As a
result, you have to earn their trust in order for them
to give you an opportunity to see what you can offer for
them.
If it’s a big client, you might want to offer to
do a few jobs for them free of charge to gain their
trust and to get your foot in the door. I know this
sounds almost ridiculous, but the law of reciprocity
says what ever you do for someone else free will cause
that person to reciprocate the favour. This could
translate into giving you a small job as a “thanks” but
at the same time it will establish you as a giver and a
reliable person, and companies will love you for that.
The third point I want to mention is the use of powerful
marketing tools. This includes direct mail, autorun
CD’s, our marketing branded player tool, the use
video cd rom commercials and a few more.
We can help you implement all of these tools very
effectively but I’ll be talking in more detail about
each of these in the next article.
For now, you have a lot of work
ahead of you. Get on the net and start by making that
list star customers. I hope this article has helped you
understand how to qualify customers .
Best of luck and to your continued success!
Andre
Hendricks
Courier Jobs - Earn Between £450 -
£850+ P/W Using Your Car!
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