Standing Out: A Podcast About Sales, Marketing and Leadership
Standing Out is a show created to help individuals and companies improve their sales & marketing outcomes, as well as their leadership development. Each episode we have an expert who has a unique perspective on sales, marketing and/or leadership providing insights from his or her experiences. And we throw in a few laughs from time to time. Be sure to hit Subscribe wherever you listen to our podcasts.
Standing Out: A Podcast About Sales, Marketing and Leadership
Standing Out with Michael Caney: Strengthening Customer Trust Through Technology
Ever wondered how the freight industry is tackling fraud and ensuring the legitimacy of motor carriers?
Join us as Michael Caney, Chief Commercial Officer of Highway, reveals how carrier identity verification is revolutionizing freight tech. We'll explore the power of data-driven sales and marketing alignment, and the shift to community-based selling for greater authenticity and trust.
Sponsored by SPI Logistics. If you're looking for back-office support such as admin, finance, IT, and sales as a freight broker - reach out to SPI Logistics today! Learn more about becoming an agent here: https://success.spi3pl.com/
Standing Out is a sales, marketing & leadership podcast powered by BETA Consulting Group, created to highlight best practices from industry leaders with incredible experience and insights! The goal is to entertain, educate & inspire individuals & companies to improve their sales, marketing & leadership development outcomes.
What's up everybody and welcome back to another edition of Standing Out, a podcast about sales, marketing and leadership. I'm your host, trey Grigg, so excited that you are here with us today. As we get the show started off today, just a couple of things to shout out. First of all, we're like two and a half months away from the next Broker Carrier Summit down in Fort Worth, texas. If you are a broker or a carrier looking to find like-minded partners, make sure you sign up for that. Go to BrokerCarrierSummitcom and register today. Early bird pricing, I think just expired, but if you use the code BETA, b-e-t-a, you get 10% off there and we will see you in Fort Worth. Do not forget to sign up for the Post and Pray Classic, the best golf tournament in the industry. Again, brokercarriersummit in Fort Worth October 23rd through 25th and make sure that you sign up today. Also want to make sure that you you know we got some announcements coming up for the month of September. We've got a new sponsor alert. Can't wait to talk about that in September coming up here. Gosh, hard to believe.
Speaker 1:Labor Day is right around the corner and if you're listening to us today on Wreaths Across America Radio, thank you so much for tuning in, so excited to be part of their lineup every Tuesday their Trucking Tuesday lineup. If you haven't sponsored a wreath yet for the upcoming event in December to put wreaths on the tombstones of our veterans, make sure you go to wreathsacrossamericaorg forward slash standing out and sponsor a wreath today. We would love for you to be a part of our effort to raise money and awareness for what our veterans have done for our future generation. So again, wreatheseacrossamericaorg forward slash, standing out and donate today. Finally, I want to give a shout out to our sponsor, spi Logistics.
Speaker 1:Good guys up in Vancouver, british Columbia, listen, if you're a freight broker kind of tired of having your back office, or maybe you're a freight agent not happy with where you are today check these guys out over at successspi3plcom. They got the technology systems, back office support and admin to help you succeed, help you stay in your sweet spot. So again, check them out at successspi3plcom, let them know. You heard about it right here on Standing Up All right, so excited for today's guest. As you know, we always like to bring you industry experts and leaders in the fields of sales, marketing and leadership, and today's guest is no exception. A good friend of mine from the company over at Highway doing some amazing things. Please give it up for our good friend and the chief operating officer, michael Keeney.
Speaker 2:What's up brother? What's up Trey?
Speaker 1:I know you like this song. You got to let it run just a little bit. No dancing on your side, man. We got to work on this. We got to work on it. I know Michael Caine can dance. I know you can dance, dude.
Speaker 2:Man, I wish that was the case. I wish it was the case. I tried a lot in college but there was alcohol involved and so, who knows, like my dancing that I thought was great was probably not awesome, but you know, I gave it, I gave it. There's somebody out there that has seared in their brain michael caney dancing somewhere. I can't get yeah, oh yeah, and I feel sorry for all of those.
Speaker 2:It's funny when you play that song, um, like the big song, like probably early 90s, true 90s middle school for me, yeah all I can think about in that song is the scene in mrs doubtfire, when he like, when he like, throws the party for his kids and there's a petting zoo. It's like the straw that breaks the camel's back when Sally Field just gives him the boot.
Speaker 1:Man, I forgot about that. That's right, I forgot about that. That was a great song. That was like a middle school song for me. That was a big one back in the day. Nice to have a little bit of a throwback. All right, man, listen, we're going to talk about highway a little bit today, but we're also going to talk a lot about sales and marketing today, because that's a big part of what you do. You help companies really accelerate growth and we're going to talk about that today, which is awesome. So, as we get started today, just give a little 30 second elevator pitch for highway. What do you guys do in the industry? And man, it's just exciting stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, when we came into the market, really were kind of the category creator around this concept of carrier identity, nobody was really talking about it in that way.
Speaker 2:It was onboarding, it was compliance, there was insurance monitoring, there were these kind of disparate workflows, and what we did was we looked at this from a know your customer, know your business perspective, like what people are familiar with in banking and cybersecurity, and just said, hey, at the root of fraud is an identity problem. And so what Highway does is establishes three core truths, like who's the individual user coming to engage with a broker digitally? Are they actually a motor carrier as opposed to a bad actor, or maybe a dispatch service? And do they really have the capability? And so, from that Trey, we're the fastest growing freight technology company. I think probably we're the largest onboarding company by volume today already and in terms of compliance, monitoring and identity. And then we're also the only people to take that and turn it into load level compliance. So what I was really doing now is delivering real time understanding of a carrier's capability and compliance at an individual transaction level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the analogy that I like to use with this is that I think, historically speaking, they let everybody into the party and then try to figure out who the bad actors were in the party. Now, what you guys are doing is you're not letting them into the party at all, you're making the party much safer and keeping them out, so you don't have to figure it out after the fact. Think that's huge to think. Think through, as you said, the root cause of what's happening with fraud.
Speaker 2:you know yeah, I mean, and historically, like it made sense to like like you I've used that analogy to you're absolutely right like, hey, let's let everybody in and then let's walk around and let's try to train all of our people to be like intelligence agents, to just like, with all of this tribal knowledge, spot the bad guy and it, and it's like that's, that doesn't work.
Speaker 2:And so, but the reason you wanted to let everybody in was because brokers needed to build large amounts of available capacity. And then what I tell folks is like, look we, we solve trade for probably three, 4% of the market. But it's that three or 4% of the market that steals things and does bad things and costs you a customer and pilfers, and I mean they just cause massive amounts of havoc. So to your analogy like for the, maybe like a toll tag right For the good actors, you want to actually get them in as fast as possible. Right, make it easy While keeping the bad guys out. Right. If you just introduce friction across the board, it's two ditches, right.
Speaker 1:Make everything hard or make nothing hard, like neither ditch is appropriate. Yeah, I love to hear that man, I love. I think it makes perfect sense to do that and you know it's interesting because fraud actors out there are going to continue to try to, you know, buck the system, beat the system, those types of things. But when you do keep them out, it definitely makes a lot easier for business to happen smoothly, which is a big deal. Now, this is interesting to me.
Speaker 1:I want to talk about this because you were brought into highway to really accelerate growth. But what I think is fascinating about that and I'm seeing this more and more is that technology companies are starting to bring on operators like yourself who sat in that seat. How powerful has that been for you to say, man, I dealt with this every day, all day, and for you to kind of know what brokers are feeling. We talk about that standing out all the time on this show. It had to be a way to be a differentiator right away. Too many tech companies, I think, have never sat in the seat. They don't know what it's like to be a broker.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think there's a couple of layers to that that we can unpack. So one I think we entered the market at a really unique time when just SaaS, regardless of the vertical, was changing overall. So the hyper grow at all costs throw a lot of AEs, bdrs that model began to shift and I'd been kind of following that for a while and so I was like man, if I ever get a chance to do a tech thing again, I'm going to do it really different. And really I have to give all the credit to Sam Jacobs and Scott Lease. If you work in technology and you don't follow those two guys, you're missing out, and I really just stole kind of a lot of their ideas. And so there's that aspect One we just didn't do it. We just didn't do this grow at all cost hyper-growth thing right.
Speaker 2:So the second thing is I think operators coming into technology companies in vertical specific software works really well. I think when you're kind of horizontal, like if you're just DocuSign selling to everybody, it's challenging. You have to develop a lot of domain expertise in a lot of areas, but that's just not what I do. I've worked in oil and gas software, I've worked in transportation, so all of those have been really domain specific, so I've either been an operator or I've been in domain specific technology platforms, whether it's Sonar, or back when I did oil and gas for a small amount of time, or or or this. I think what you're really talking about is how important it is it to talk in terms of what a customer's going through.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is able to relate Like if you.
Speaker 2:Just I used to keep how to win friends and influence people on my desk Cause I think it's really like you don't read a business book unless you read that one, and, and in that book they talk about how important it is to talk in terms of the other person's interest, and so it's very different when you get some ridiculous outreach. That's like we help companies just like you do these things. Everybody deletes that versus hey. Like I kind of know how that feels. So when a customer tells me that a load got stuck on the rail and they had to go deal with a chain of custody, like and I flew from Chattanooga to Elk Grove Village to Southern California and walked warehouses trying to figure out what happened to my freight. So I think the thing is an operator can viscerally feel those problems that they're solving and that's just a human to human thing, right, like you got to be able to get human with somebody when you're engaging in their story. So that's kind of what I think the operators being in SAS.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it makes a huge difference. I mean, you've walked in their shoes and it comes across different. You speak the right language. It's like anything else. I mean I I played competitive golf.
Speaker 2:I can go three minutes and then you're going to realize I have no idea what I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:We might, we might figure that out, you might. You might get longer than three minutes, but yeah, it might go that way, that's for sure. I think it's important to you know. I was thinking back to what you guys are doing with, with the fraud and starting with identity. As you get more dependent upon technology for booking loads whether it's book now features or all these things where you're really not talking to, even sometimes, the person behind, it's really important to know who they are. You know, I think that that we're trying to make booking freight more convenient, which I think is a great thing, but in doing that, I think it gives the bad actors more cover to do their bad acting unless you know who they are. You know, and I think that's another reason why highway is so critical right now, with the book and now the digital bookings and things like that.
Speaker 2:Fraud needs three things prospect of gain, anonymity and urgency. Those are the three things that fraud needs to flourish. The prospect of gain is pretty simple. I can double broker it and make stuff on the, not pay the carrier. Everyone knows how double brokering works. I can pilfer, I can steal, I can cross stock, I can warehouse, I can shake the broker down and demand money. The prospective gain is fairly simple. And you're right, we created a lot of anonymity without creating any security. Right, like we said, this is great. Everybody, everybody, sign a contract, get an insurance certificate. We don't really know if the truck's insured, but hey, there's a cert and, and you know, we don't know who you're calling from, where you're calling from. But yeah, I mean, if you think about all the reporting, all the reporting was after the fact it was all lagging right right.
Speaker 2:Hey, this bad thing happened to me in the past and now I'm going to go tell somebody and maybe protect the next guy. But what bad actors learned really quickly was they just needed to hold multiple MCs and get ahead of the reports. By the time it got reported, they were using a different MC. So you're absolutely right, the big piece, right. So freight's always going to be urgent, right, and there's always going to be a prospect of gain. But no one had dealt with the anonymity piece, and that was the big part.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So let's, let's shift gears to talk about the sales and marketing efforts of highway which you guys have done, so things you've done a little bit differently. I'd love to hear what you're willing to share about what's been different this time around.
Speaker 2:You said if you could do it again, you would do it a little differently. You're their ideas. What is it? What are you guys doing?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I think every company, and first of all have a great product to sell, like if my stuff didn't work Right, that's number one.
Speaker 2:A lot of people yeah, I still do a little bit of advising and I'll look at decks and I'll look at software and I'll say you know, you could probably sell a million bucks of this, but you're not going to sell 10 million because people are going to figure out it doesn't work after your first million.
Speaker 2:Right, right, you're going to go sell a million dollars in ARR 10 times without getting to 10 million, trying to find product market fit Right. So so that first of all, like that's kind of the big hurdle in getting into market and like getting a product off the ground is is a lot of people don't realize that in getting to 10 million you've sold 30 million of ARR just breaking it and trying to figure it out. So I had to give a tremendous amount of credit to Jordan Graft and the rest of our people that had domain knowledge. We came to market with something that worked. So a lot of what I've been able to do from a go-to-market perspective is because we have an amazing development and product team.
Speaker 2:Having said that, one of the things we decided to do early was we were going to build through community. We were going to build things that worked, and if someone else didn't say it then it wasn't true. We weren't going to go do traditional product marketing that promised things we didn't deliver. So we had this concept early and we called it the first five live. It's amazing. We have over 700 customers, 400 integrated brokers, and I remember when we would get on leadership calls and talk about the first five live, and so our whole thing was like we built something that works. We had a couple of beta buddies and if we can just get the first five live and get it to work, they'll tell our story for us. And that was essentially the thesis. That was it, and that's just what we did. And we just said if we can continue to deliver and we really had three core tenants do we need to stop?
Speaker 1:I got to tap this is recording error. Oh, maybe on your side I have not seen. Got it. Well then, for anybody that's listening, I'm just paying attention to things Technology so yeah.
Speaker 2:So we had, we had we really have kind of three core tenants One like we want to be really responsive, we want to take responsibility for our mistakes and we want to own the outcome. So we just said, hey, we built something that works, then we'll build through community, and so that's what we did. Really different, we hired. We hired big boy, big girl, aes that know how to sell. We didn't do the volume thing and we built through community and we just let the community tell our story.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love that. And you know you're talking about the first five. Live and let them tell our story. I'm wearing this Savannah Savannah bananas Jersey today. Right, I know it's not the highway yellow, it's close, but the idea is very similar and that is when you really build fans. I think that at highway you guys have you have you have customers that truly are fans of yours. They do tell your story. You know, that's what. That's what they do, naturally, and I wonder if you I'm not sure what you would think about this I've made the mistake before of going to a company to sell a product and it didn't work that well and I didn't know. I didn't know how would you advise somebody who's maybe wanting to get into selling technology, or how do you do that whenever you're bringing somebody on, to give them the assurance that the product actually works? Do you think salespeople take jobs because they need a job? Or like, how would you advise them to actually evaluate a product and see if it works, Because it's miserable. Sell a product that doesn't work. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think it depends on the stage of career. So if you're early and you are looking so a lot of times, what happens specifically in people that are probably going to listen to us on this podcast tray is you may be in an operating company and you may want to get into technology because you think it's sexy or you think it's cool, whatever. And I'll tell you that selling technology is as hard as selling freight. It's a longer sales cycle. You don't get the immediate win, so don't always think the grass is greener if you're sitting at a freight brokerage, but if you're thinking about it early, you just have to go get reps.
Speaker 2:Man, if you're an AE and you're just looking to get into selling, you need to just learn the motion of what it's like to sell technology, what it's like to engage multiple stakeholders. There's just some things you've got to learn and for the success of the company, the product matters, but as a personal career move, you just need to go learn and that's how you'll learn what makes a good product, what doesn't make a good product, how to evaluate a delivery team and whether delivery team. Now, if you're a seasoned AE, yeah, you got to really dig in. Because if you're a seasoned account executive or seller is specifically in a vertical. I don't care the vertical. What you're essentially doing is bringing your reputation with you in that vertical Right.
Speaker 1:And you.
Speaker 2:You don't in in our, in our business, you don't. You don't get a lot of freebies. You attach your horse to the wrong wagon, you don't. You don't get a lot of freebies. You only get to do that once yeah, I felt that.
Speaker 1:I felt the pain of a customer calling me and saying this isn't working, and calling me to the office and showing it to me that that is painful. That is painful and it does. It goes to your reputation Cause then if you go to another company and you call them with a new product, they're going to be like hey the last one's different Right, right.
Speaker 2:I know, I know that the last one, but like this one is really different. Like you only get to cry wolf so many times.
Speaker 1:Right, right, right, right. So how did you guys talk about the community aspect of it, because I think that's so powerful now. I mean, community and networking is really everything. How did you tap into that? So you got your first five lives. Then you got 10, 15, 20 customers. The product's working. How did you put those customers in a position to tell your story?
Speaker 2:So go back to raving fans.
Speaker 1:So when.
Speaker 2:I worked in Savannah for a couple of years. I so, when I worked in Savannah for a couple of years, I heard about the Savannah bananas and the way I heard about Savannah bananas was.
Speaker 2:I was just on the floor and they were like hey, kenny, have you heard about the Savannah bananas? And I was like what are you talking about? Oh, it's just minor league baseball team. And it took me a minute to realize it's not. They're more like the Harlem Globetrotters of the minor leagues or whatever Right.
Speaker 2:And the same way that the first broker to ever do this well was Coyote, back in the early 2000s, they were the first they hired this company called Moving Brands and they redid their logo. And so you create buzz but you have to really deliver. And so let's just double down on Coyote for a minute. Like the way that they became who they were was Jeff Silver would call you know Heineken and Coca-Cola and say if you give me this load, I will not fail.
Speaker 2:And so early Coyote it was his personal reputation coming out of back haulers and saying you know me, you know what I do. If you give me these loads, you'll never get them back. Do if you give me these loads, you'll never get them back. And that and it worked. So very similar. I knew I knew a ton of people and jordan knew a ton of people and we called our friends and we said if you make a bet, you have our word. We'll take responsibility for our mistakes, we'll own the outcome. We won't leave you hanging. And we were able to say, because I've paid a lot of freight tech bills, I was able to say I know your current experience, because I've felt it. I know exactly what you're going through and this thing and this thing and this thing that's happening to you right now, you have my word, it won't happen here. And that's how it started.
Speaker 1:I've noticed that a lot of really solid tech companies make that play and make that play of you know making a bet on themselves, um, and coming through, and then that does a lot of the work for them. I mean something the best we know this the best marketing is word of mouth. The best marketing is customers telling other customers uh, getting to that point, I think it's really difficult for a lot of companies because they don't deliver, they don't come through. In those cases, you know which is really powerful. How do you talk to you know, when you're leading your AEs and I know several of them are over there how do you lead them in terms of you know they're an extension of the leadership team, it's not their product. How do you, you know, coach them and teach them to make those promises and, uh, and and to do those things when they're not, when it's not their product as much? I think it gets harder the further down the line you go for AEs. Talk about leadership and training for that.
Speaker 2:Well, one thing I keep it close, so, like I don't, I'm fortunate enough that I don't have a sales management layer between me and my sellers. So I I I was fortunate enough again like not everybody can do it the way we did it, but I was fortunate enough to hire people that I know and that knew the industry. So what I had, that really shortcut success, was they either knew the industry or they knew my system, like they all worked for me before, except for one individual, and so they just knew my system. They knew my expectations, they know what I could tolerate, like my no-fly zones, and so all they had to do was learn to contextualize this product to this domain, because they all knew the domain. So all they had to do right.
Speaker 2:So I didn't, I didn't have a big ramp up. I was like, hey guys, what we did before, this is how we're going to do it here. And then, um, I did a lot of calls with them early. And then the other thing we use we use gong. So if you're selling software and you're not using Gong or Chorus or something, man, you're missing out.
Speaker 2:So I could just go look at keywords, and so I try to do is just shortcut the timeline of feedback for them. I want to give them really quick feedback, and my goal was to hire salespeople that knew how to sell and then all I had to do is teach them our culture, make sure they were aligned with our culture and how I expected them to think about the problem that existed in a freight broker, because they knew how to sell. That wasn't the problem for them, and so you know. I think, as a sales leader, that you have to make sure you're using tools. You know the category of sales enablement everybody talks about it but I think you have to make sure you're using your tools, not to big brother, but to really enable your sales leaders.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you said something really critical there, just kind of tucked it in there and that is quick feedback. I think oftentimes we let people get too many at bats before we we give them you know feedback on what they're doing and then a lot of times bad habits get ingrained. It's hard, to hard to overcome those sometimes, when the feedback is not quick enough. How quickly are you like at the beginning, especially, you know, when you were using Gong you're listening to calls. How quickly were you giving them feedback? Was it after one call? Did you listen to five calls? What was it? A week's worth of calls, how like what's? What was what's your best advice for a sales leader out there to help their their uh, their people improve faster?
Speaker 2:man, I, I think I think you've got to have. You got to have consistent one-on-ones. And I wasn't good at that early because we were moving so fast that we just talked all the time like, like we were just, we were just always talking, right, it was early, it was, it was me and two sales guys, right, and so we were, we were just always talking and and I was always talking to our chief product officer, who you know, and I was always talking to Jordan. And so I think we have to think about in a startup is, when you have early success, you're just always talking about things. And so then when you begin to grow your team, you have to go wait a minute. We're not just going to always naturally talk. How do we create systems for that?
Speaker 2:So then you start scheduling one-on-ones and answer your actual question, I would say, as fast as possible, right, but what I try not to do is have to have my people regurgitate lots of things to me. Hey, how do we get to the thing you need the help with most? So in Gong, like we use triggers, we use, like we've got it programmed to look for certain words in certain contexts and we're just kind of doing an art and science thing we look at is there a lack of touchpoint, is there a lack of engagement from the prospect? And what we don't say is like, hey, what's wrong with the prospect? We're like how are we failing to serve this person? So our question is always how are we thinking? We always start with. In what way have we failed to show the customer value? That's our number one thing at Highway Always start with.
Speaker 2:So Right, even if you've got some know-it-all prospect on the other line that thinks he's God's gift of compliance Not that any of that exists in our business we always start with okay, and how did we fail to serve him or her? How did we fail to ask a question? So that's always kind of the first thing. You start with self. You ask how am I failing to serve? How am I serving? And you try to go as quick as possible and then if something lags, you just start with an apology to that prospect. Hey, where did we miss? I'm sorry, which is opposite than let me find these cute ways to shove my product down your throat, which is a lot of what happens in SaaS, right, this idea of overcoming an objection.
Speaker 2:I don't love that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'd like to hear that, and I want to switch gears for just a second too, because I want to talk about the impact of marketing working with sales. You guys just brought on kind of a quarterback for marketing, a very talented person in our industry, but for a while you didn't have that. How do you, from your perspective, view the impact of sales and marketing working together, and how has that even accelerated even faster where you're at now?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I don't view them as different, so it's hard for me to think about them working together, not working together. I just, you know, I worked in a company where they were different and it was horrible experience. It was like, yeah, and so you know, what I did was I went and got aligned with an agency friend of mine that when we had a chance to work together we were like this should be ingrained, not in silos, and so I mean, he was my early agency and you gave us a lot of advice. And so from the beginning we just said marketing is sales and sales is marketing. We're going to take a data-driven approach. And we just never thought of it different. We thought of it man, we've got to build a brand and build a culture, we've got to make some promises and we have to have good sellers that get to know our prospects and execute on those brand promises. And I have a really hard time separating that in my brain.
Speaker 1:And I think that's why we get along so well because I'm the same way. I've been in companies where there was either marketing over here and never talked to sales, which is a bad experience, or many companies that value sales but don't put any attention into the marketing promotion side of things, and what ends up happening is the salespeople have to just do the marketing. They have to do whatever it is that marketing could help them with, they actually have to do it themselves. And so I'm the same way. I think it's impossible to sell a product without doing some marketing. You know, we talked about this on LinkedIn. I showed us with the cold calling in my is a marketing activity that a salesperson does. Salespeople do cold calls, but they're getting the word out. You can't sell a product without doing some marketing. They really are intertwined and inseparable. So I'm with you, man. I love hearing that from you. I love that. I think too many people don't see it that way. They put all their stock in maybe one or the other and they don't realize how they work together.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think part of the reason it works for me is because I I align myself with people that agree, right, so? So, like my marketing leader, jesse, she's not just figuring out where to go sponsor holes at golf.
Speaker 1:Which she should know, right, I think she was playing golf on Monday.
Speaker 2:But marketing is not just events and whatever right. When we look at our budget and when we look at our conference attendance and where I get invited to speak to, we're really being thoughtful about where can we get close to our customers to not only tell our story but to hear their story? So much of what we think about from a marketing perspective is where do we need to be to listen? At our stage of the company early, it was like we needed to solve a really acute problem, and now we've got enough. We're so ingrained that we have to be really good listeners. So for us, a lot of marketing is not just like. It's not about getting leads. That just happens. That's just like a thing that happens and we do account-based sales. We don't even use the leads function in Salesforce.
Speaker 2:What we really think about is that our marketing function is really to tell a story, is to circle and make sure that we're listening as well, because marketing has to hear from the customer, make sure that we're still aligned with what they want and need. And then we have to market internally. Product has to be aligned. Customer success has to be aligned. So a lot of what what Jesse does for us is messaging. That creates organizational alignment as well as market alignment. Does that make sense?
Speaker 1:It's a hundred percent, it's not just this siloed like.
Speaker 1:let's go to events Like it's not marketing, right, right, right. Yeah, I always think that sales and marketing is like a wheel with a lot of spokes and you have to have all the spokes in order for the wheel to go fast. Like if you're missing spokes, the wheel starts to get out of balance, it starts to not work correctly and I think, like events is one little spoke of that and messaging is a big part of that A lot of people don't realize how powerful it is to have the right messaging for your internal team so everybody's talking the same language and row in the same direction but also for your customers, and that starts with knowing what your customers need, what their problems are, what they're having. I always say this if you're not talking about your customers and their problems, then you lose them.
Speaker 1:You know it's the reason why cable news is so popular they only talk about problems. They don't talk about solutions. They only talk about problems. That's what keeps people engaged. You don't tune into the world news to see how great the day was. You tune in to see what blew up, right. And so people are naturally attached to hearing people talk about their problems. And when you have that and you mess that correctly, then you keep them engaged and, as you said, a lot of this stuff naturally happens, leads, naturally happen. They start to realize these guys know, know what I'm dealing with and not a solve it, I'm going to go down the cable news issue.
Speaker 1:Maybe it's a bad analogy.
Speaker 2:No, but here's what I will say. If you look at the power of social networks, if you look at the power of X or whatever else, the other thing that people want that they're moving away from is a perceived authority that's going to tell me that they know more than me. And so, if you look at the evolution of freight technology specifically, you went through a phase where a lot of venture capital came into the market and a lot of freight tech companies went around telling intermediaries that they were smarter than them, and I think you have a lot of overfunded companies that I'm praying they go away because they don't bring a lot of value.
Speaker 2:And so, yeah, and so now you have is the reason community-based selling works is because people are flocking back to who will tell me the truth?
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Right Like good, bad or indifferent, like there's a lot of things trade we say no to. We say, hey, man, that's not really our lane, we can't, man, y'all should do this Either that's not really our lane or, if I go do that, here's five things that I, that I won't do, that you need me to do to to keep you safe and and to improve your, your digital experience with carriers. So I got to. So some of it's just like about being honest, right yeah. And then creating customer consensus right Like there. I'll have customers call me after you know big boondoggles and be like that was a waste of my time. They don't listen, they just tell us everything they're going to do.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And I just am like, if I ever do that, somebody shoot me in the head because I've failed, Right, yeah, and so I think that's some of what you have to think about is, you just can't get high on your own supply, no matter how successful you are. Talk about all the time like um man, if we lose, we have to keep our edge. But but if you're, if you're a seller, you have to know where to be confident, and you have to. You have to balance that confidence with the right amount of humility to always want to learn yeah, all right.
Speaker 2:So when I think about the sales process, trade, one of the things I've always told people is the best sellers are the best qualifiers. They're not the best clos closers. The consummation of a deal or closing of a deal is a result of a really good qualifying process where you genuinely want to understand not only the person you're selling to how they sit within the company, any competing things that are going on in that company. Deals naturally close when you just focus on the assessing and the qualifying. Yeah, and that takes discipline right. That's harder to do because it means we have to lay our ego down and care more about the person on the other end of the phone than us just getting our agenda across, and sometimes that's opposite of how a seller's wired right.
Speaker 2:Yes, and so a lot of times when sellers go from like I sell a little bit, so I'm really going to be a professional seller man they become as much like a good corporate therapist as they do a salesperson, because they're just listening to all of these issues and everyone's different perspective on the issue, right, so you have to take all that information and synthesize it and then turn around and deliver it internally, to then turn around and deliver the solution. So it just becomes this ever. It becomes this loop. I think marketing sits in the middle of that. I don't think it sits at the top. I think marketing sits in the middle, which is a different perspective than most, but I think marketing sits in the middle as a communications layer between all those things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I agree completely with that. I think too many companies push themselves forward as the hero of the story, talk about great they are. They start with all of these awards they've won or things they've done, when the truth is, every sales engagement that you have should start with questions and conversation. Like I hate when people show up, throw up their pitch deck and start talking about how great their company is and what problems they solve. It's like you don't even know what this guy's dealing with. You know, you don. This group of people is going through what their problem is. So yeah, I could. I couldn't agree more with that man. Like that's a powerful way to say that I love the fact that you shared that. All right, man, we've got to pause for a second. We're going to have a little bit of fun. I got a random question today.
Speaker 1:Now, before we came on air today, you talked about how you had first day of school today. Your son is a this. Do you have some bucket list trips, like with your sons before they graduate? Like a bucket list trip with each son? What? What would that be? Talk through that to you. Is that? Where would you take them if you could take them anywhere? So I have.
Speaker 2:I have bucket list trips with them. I won't be able to cram them in before they graduate, but I did take my two oldest boys just this past weekend to new york city, um saw that.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, yeah, you saw that right. So all my kids are like theater kids.
Speaker 2:My wife's the costume designer for the school, it's, it's pretty cool and so we saw outsiders and we saw a great gatsby. That was great and that was a great like father-son thing. But but I would love and I think I'm gonna go on my son's school interim trip to ireland this year nice but but when I was young, twice I've been to Israel and I've been twice and I want to take my. I want to take my kids. Don't take my whole family there yeah, it's safe enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I went. I went in 93 in 2000 and I would really love for my kids to see that part of the world.
Speaker 1:That's awesome and I've heard from people that go like man, the Bible just comes alive because they're just seeing these things that you read about in Scripture and I think that's really cool. And you know, from the New York standpoint, we just took our kids to New York over Christmas because they're theater kids as well and we didn't see the ones you saw.
Speaker 2:You saw kind of the guys-focused ones, all wicked which is a phenomenal show, and we also know Hamilton uh, we did not see a notebook.
Speaker 1:We did see Hamilton and wicked, but yeah, it was just tremendous. So I love, I love to hear that, but yeah, I mean, that's, that's a, that's such a phenomenal. You know idea to do that. I'm taking a trip with my daughter to Washington next year for their senior trip, so that's gonna be really fun as well.
Speaker 2:But man, we did DC for spring break. Um, and that's I. So I've gotten to where, like, I like to do a couple of things with my boys, like we want to eat, like we just ate our way through New. York city Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Did you get some pizza there? Did you get some pizza in New York?
Speaker 2:So okay. So not only did we do that, but my partner.
Speaker 1:Tim.
Speaker 2:Colbin in a different business. Um, he goes all the time with his wife and they both swore it was the best pizza in New York. So what did we do? We ate at both of them, back to back, and gave our opinion. We had a little vote, we had a little.
Speaker 1:Which ones were they? I need to know. I need to know.
Speaker 2:So I don't know how you say the first one. It's Lindistry or L industry, it's L apostrophe industry. Okay, lindistry the west village. You can walk from one of the other.
Speaker 1:Okay, that's the move man, go eat both, just go gorge yourself. Well, we didn't go to those, but we're big fans of of the movie elf. That's our family favorite christmas movie of all time and of course they got raised pizza there, so we had to go to raise and just try just to see what it was like. It was decent, for, you know, sliced pizza it's not bad yeah grabbing a quick slice like 11 o'clock at night.
Speaker 2:That's pretty cool, but yeah you, york pizza is, uh, definitely anything yes, so we ate a lot, but we also went to the new york public library oh nice and they had, and it's like the first floor is like a museum, so like they had washington's handwritten farewell address. Oh wow, they're the original stuffed animals that were like the catalyst for the winnie the pooh stories the original, yeah, everybody but rue got lost somewhere.
Speaker 2:Um, we did the 9-11 memorial, which is incredibly heavy yeah, but you know my kids those boys are 15 and 18 and so to be able to have those conversations and I was, I was taking a geology final in college. Why I took geology is a completely different podcast, but um, uh, I was taking the geology final, I got in my car and there was the whole thing and so, but, to be able to have those conversations with my boys and then see the hole in the ground and the twisted steel it made, it made for a really a deep day but a really kind of good father Sunday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and that museum's tremendous. We were in there for six hours and it felt like we were in there for one or two, like it was. Just it was amazing displays, exhibits they have. They're absolutely tremendous. That's cool. Hey, you can't get to that museum without some tears. No, no, it's unbelievable. You just can't do it. It's unbelievable. It's a phenomenal, phenomenal museum, phenomenal exhibit. And although the fact that they have the freedom tower right there now, I mean it's just, it's just neat what they've done there. It's incredibly sad to see it. That is heavy. Speaking of musicals, um, my daughter and I just auditioned for newsies together at Missouri Baptist University and we both got in.
Speaker 2:Come on, we get to do one together. What role. So my middle son's second musical. He was less. Oh, that's a great role, man, that's awesome.
Speaker 1:So my daughter is one in the ensemble so she didn't get a Newsie role but she was in the ensemble and I'm Sites, which is kind of the right hand to Pulitzer in the newspaper. I'm kind of a bad guy. I'm a bad guy, but Seitz actually believes in Jack and what they've done. He says they wrote a good paper. He's kind of half and half, which is probably not a bad thing.
Speaker 2:He's a conflicted character he is.
Speaker 1:I'm a peacemaker in life. This actually, I think fits pretty well. Got a couple lines, a couple solo parts, so it'll be, it'll be a good time, but it's a lot of fun. So I didn't realize your boys were off theater. Kids, man, that that's awesome man, such a good thing I don't, I wasn't, we didn't plan that.
Speaker 2:Our school just has a great program and they love it.
Speaker 1:It just kind of happened yeah, yeah, no, that's cool, man. It's great to see your kids find their spot. You know, it's always always fun to do that, which is good. Well, michael, hey, what's, uh, what's on the horizon for highway? Let's wrap this baby up, bringing it for a landing. What are you guys working on now? Where are you headed with things? What can we expect to see?
Speaker 2:Oh man, we're working on a lot. One of the things that we're working on that people will see soon is more around load level compliance, right. So we want to really be thoughtful around every touch point that a carrier may touch a broker. So their digital experience whether it's the broker's native experience or through a load board or through a third party like a parade, who we integrate with so that's a digital, that's a touch point, right. Email inbox is a touch point. The phone system is a touch point, and so we really want to be thoughtful about providing intervention points at every single touch point. It's not like dependent on training a user to intervene. We want to be really thoughtful about that, just keeping the bad guys out. And then the other thing we want to be really thoughtful about is how we so we only sell to freight brokers.
Speaker 2:It's our customer, and so when we think about load level compliance, we believe that their insurance underwriter should treat them differently if they're doing the right thing we're thinking about is how to help a freight broker find efficiency in in their total risk management, right, like hey, if you're doing things you have better losses, like you should benefit from that somehow, right, and and um and and and the people that don't like it. They should be treated differently. I think it's very unfair the way freight brokers have been treated by a lot of entities. Right, the freight brokers have been forced to take on a lot of things that don't belong to them, that should have never belonged to them, and so I'm not going to answer that question today. But the more transparency we can provide and the more that we can help brokers and carriers align, I think we can push some responsibility back to some other parties.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love hearing that, and especially from a load level compliance perspective, it sounds like kind of putting a port of entry at every touch point just to make sure that a bad actor can't get in wherever it is. So I'd love to see that. I can't wait to see that come down the pipe. Michael, you are, you're just a treasure in the industry, my friend, a trove of knowledge and wisdom, and I'm so thankful to have you on the show. It's so thankful to call you a friend. I appreciate all your wise counsel and advice over the years, for me as well, and so thanks for coming to the show, man, I mean.
Speaker 1:Alright, everybody, make sure you come back every Tuesday For an episode of Standing Out with Greatest Like Michael Haney on the show, and also make sure that you go to Reesacrossamericaorg To donate to Rees Across America, our partner, and get involved. Take your team to drop Rees at Tombstones of Veterans Just an incredible experience For your entire team. And finally, a quick thank you to our friends over at SPI logistics for sponsoring the show. Check them out at successspi3plcom. Until next time, don't forget, friends, stop standing still. Start standing out. We'll see you soon.
