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
Bryce Williford: Transformative Sales Strategies & Leadership Insights
Get ready for this episode of Standing Out featuring Bryce Williford, Senior VP of 3PL Services at BlueGrace Logistics. Bryce dives into how external perspectives are transforming sales and communication strategies, and the game-changing role of technology in overcoming supply chain challenges. This lively discussion covers everything from community initiatives to the power of mentorship, all while highlighting the human side of leadership and the importance of collaboration in building successful teams. Don’t miss these insights that are reshaping the future of logistics!
Thank you to our sponsor, Salesdash CRM – A CRM for Freight Logistics. Salesdash CRM is built for freight broker & agent sales teams. Manage your shipper prospecting and follow-ups. Organize your carriers and the lanes they run. Learn more at www.betaconsultinggroup.com/standing-out
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.
Oh my gosh, why do we do those things as kids? That's actually harder than you think. My friends Haven't played Chubby Bunny in a long time. Welcome to the show, everybody. Welcome to Standing Out a show about sales, marketing and leadership. I'm Trey Griggs, your host, so excited to have you with us today. We've got a big show. We've got a guest that's been around the block and has done some pretty cool things, which wegroupcom. See how we're helping companies with their sales outcomes.
Speaker 1:A lot of times, just having an outside perspective is so valuable in order to get clarity on what you're doing, your messaging, how you're communicating. So check us out at betaconsultinggroupcom. Click on the little button in there to schedule a call with yours truly. Tell us about your company and we'll help you with your sales. Also, I'm going to do an announcement. I can't believe this.
Speaker 1:We are just weeks away from the next Broker Carrier Summit in Fort Worth, texas. It's this month, october 23 through 25. Down in Fort Worth, we'll be at the beautiful Renaissance Worthington Hotel. Listen, if you're a freight broker or a truckload carrier, this is the event for you to come and build relationships, meet people across the aisle, have a meal and this is where deals get done. So go to BrokerCarrierSummitcom to sign up for that. Use the coupon code BETA B-E-T-A to get 10% off. And don't forget to sign up for the Post and Pray Classic Golf Tournament to kick off the Broker Carrier Summit. That's going to be on Wednesday at Texas Rangers Golf Club. It's a phenomenal two-person team event. You don't want to miss that for sure.
Speaker 1:And finally, before we bring our guest on, I want to say thank you to our friends over at Reeds Across America, so excited to be a part of their Trucking Tuesday lineup. If you're listening to us on Reeds Across America, thank you so much for tuning in today and thank you for partnering with us to sponsor Reeds for their annual December event. Go to reedsacrossamericaorg. Slash standing out and sponsor Reeds today. We'd love to have you a part of our organization, a part of what we're doing in that regard. And finally, a big thank you to our sponsor, josh Lyles, our good friend over at Sales-CRM, for sponsoring this show. Listen, not all CRMs are created equal. Most CRMs are not created with freight brokerage in mind, but Sales-CRM is. It's built by freight brokers exclusively for freight brokers. So be sure to visit sales-crmcom or go to betaconsultinggroupcom. Forward, slash standing, dash out and you can request a demo right there and have Josh show you what they're building and how it's making an impact on freight brokers.
Speaker 1:All right, everybody, let's jump into the show today. Very excited to have this guest on the show, somebody that I don't know very well, but our colleague Coleman knows very well, and so we got introduced and wanted to bring him on to talk a little about sales today. So please give it up for our guest today from Blue Grace, the senior VP of 3PL services, bryce LaFord. Hey, what's up man. Hey, trey, thanks for having me. Good song, I like this. This is a good one. You know, one of the fun things about this is that I never know what songs are going to be on the show, like what walk-up music people are going to have, and that's a good one. I like that. Luke Combs is tough to beat man. He's good.
Speaker 2:I've seen him twice in concert. I was there in Nashville last year with my wife and then, we took our daughter to the concert here in Phoenix earlier this year, so I love Luke Combs and love that song.
Speaker 1:I've heard he's a phenomenal artist. I mean, he seems really down to earth, just kind of a good old boy from somewhere probably over, I think, in like the Appalachian Mounds or something. I don't know where's he from, I don't even know, but he feels like he should be from it. That's my guess.
Speaker 2:I agree, Great music puts on a great show, usually has great opening acts.
Speaker 1:So we enjoyed both concerts and we'll try to do it past. You know, whether it be Foo Fighters bringing up little kids to play drums or play guitar, or whether it's bringing up people who are getting engaged or just stuff, it just feels like that. Have you felt that way as well? Are you a big concert, goer?
Speaker 2:I'm not a huge concert goer, more of a sports event person, but in the concerts I've been, I would agree with you. I think that you know, whether it's social media or just technology, in general access and connection between celebrities, performers, artists, athletes is greater than it's ever been and I think that translates, you know, into into how performances occur.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love it when artists or athletes or whatever like take somebody's phone and do a selfie or a real or something like that. I mean, that's like that's a pretty cool moment and pretty, a pretty neat thing that you know 20 years ago just couldn't even happen and now it's like becoming pretty mainstream for these concerts, which is a lot of fun. So pretty good stuff. Hey, I learned a fun fact about you. I didn't know this. This is actually pretty cool. All of your kids are named after famous spies. Is this correct?
Speaker 2:Yes, yes, so tell what? You got Two children, sidney and Ethan Sidney. I'm a big spy novel fan, and so Sidney is named after Sidney Bristow, which was Jennifer Garner's character in Alias. This is my fun party fact Whenever somebody asks me to give me two truths and a lie, or give me a fact about yourself. And then Ethan is Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible.
Speaker 2:One of the best spy franchises in my opinion of all time. So we stopped at two possible One of the best spy franchises in my opinion of all time. So you know, we stopped at two. So I didn't get a 007 or anything but something like that, but yeah so Sidney and Ethan are named after spies.
Speaker 1:You could have gone the Elon Musk route and literally gone 007. There's got to be a kid out there named 007, which is interesting, but I'm sure it's got to exist.
Speaker 1:I haven't met him yet, but that would be interesting For sure, and you're also a big baseball fan. You're from the Bay Area, a big fan of Oakland A's baseball. You're down in Phoenix now, love minor league baseball. Which minor league baseball is so great? What are your thoughts about this Oakland A's moving out of? I mean, it's weird to me to think that they're not going to be there. Now I have, and before the Oakland A's were the Oakland A's, they were Kansas City athletics and then they moved to Oakland and now they're moving to Vegas. So I feel like you and I both can share in the remorse here of the athletics leaving our hometowns.
Speaker 2:It's sad. A lot of formative moments in my childhood with my family friends going to A's baseball games at the Oakland Coliseum. We watched the Warriors leave the Oakland Arena a couple of years ago, moving across the Bay to San Francisco. They're still there. They're still in the Bay Area, but definitely a changing of the guard. It's sad to see them go but it's exciting to see that Las Vegas has done very well with the Aces and the WNBA. Obviously the Raiders are there Exciting to see a new city get a new team. I'll be an Ace fan wherever they go.
Speaker 1:It's an easier flight to Vegas from Phoenix than it is to San Francisco, so you could probably hit some more games now. So there's a silver lining in all of this, that's for sure, but it's pretty sad to see that happening as well. So, finally, before we hop into a little about sales, I saw on your resume that you went to Georgetown and MIT. Listen, I feel very intimidated right now. Okay, those are two quality institutions. I went to a small school, william Jewell College in Kansas City, not quite known in the same spheres. Tell me about getting to Georgetown and MIT, and do you know the 10th digit of pi? I feel like I should ask this question Do you know that? I don't.
Speaker 2:I never thought that I'd end up being a freight broker or in sales, but I went to Georgetown after high school class of 2004,. Graduated from Georgetown, wanted to do something different and growing up in California, going all the way across the country, was something that was new and exciting and had a great experience. Love, love the school, love Washington DC, the energy there is, unlike anything else, I think, with politics and Capitol Hill and everything we just took our kids there last summer spent a week doing pretty much every tourist destination possible there and also hitting some of the old food spots that I like.
Speaker 2:Favorite sandwich of all time is still the Burger Madness from Wise Miller's Deli in Georgetown.
Speaker 1:It's still fantastic.
Speaker 2:Tried to recreate it and haven't been able to. So I was able to share that with my kids for the first time, which was exciting. I did a supply chain micro masters program at MIT during COVID, so it was online. Five courses took about two and a half years. I finished the fifth course, I'm going to say in 2002. Don't quote me on that. I I had to go back and look at the actual date, but just again started during.
Speaker 2:COVID when I was home a lot and didn't have a ton of ability to travel, go see customers. Teams were remote and it ended up being a great education for me, so that was my MIT experience. Yeah, that's awesome, and Georgetown is a phenomenal campus. We took our kids there. We were there for 10 days and we still didn't feel like we touched everything that could be done for me.
Speaker 1:So that was my MIT experience. Yeah, that's awesome, and Georgetown is a phenomenal campus. We took our kids there. We were there for 10 days and we still didn't feel like we touched everything that could be done in the DC area and Georgetown and all of that. So a week there. I'm sure your kids are probably wanting to go back and do it again.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and there's so much to do. It's changed a lot. You don't realize. I'd say I went back every year immediately following graduation and then probably had four or five year gaps after that, and every time I go back there's a new building, there's some new resource that's been put on campus it's exciting to be there and the city itself. Lots of development and new places to go, new places to eat, things like that. Got to do an internship on Capitol Hill when I was there and take the bus or the train from Georgetown down and back, it was exciting as well.
Speaker 1:So just a great energy in Washington DC. Yeah, and sadly you were there a few years too late to catch Allen Iverson in a Georgetown uniform. That would have been fun.
Speaker 2:I did get to see AI play in Philadelphia. We took the train up. That was something we did, my friends and I. We saw a Sixers-Raptors game while I was there. Sophomore year maybe I don't know, I'd have to go back and look, but I did get to see. Ai in person, just as a pro.
Speaker 1:Man, pound for pound. I still think he's one of the best NBA players of all time. I mean the guy's 6' maybe 160 pounds maybe. And he I mean the guy's six foot maybe 160 pounds maybe. And he's competing with Jordan and Kobe and all those guys and they're holding his own and obviously made a mark on the game. So pretty impressed in that regard. All right, let's talk about your career for a little bit. So you graduate Georgetown, you get into banking, you do that for a couple of years and then somehow you get into freight brokerage. Please tell me this story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I had four years in banking two different banks in Chicago, wanted to move somewhere else and moving sort of halfway home. I had a real good friend of mine from my high school days that wanted to move to Chicago. We spent a year as roommates. He ended up moving back and getting married and lives in San Diego now. I stayed in Chicago but I enjoyed the sales aspect of my banking career but wasn't really the perfect fit for me. You made a lot of great connections and really had some great mentors. But had the opportunity to meet a general manager at CH Robinson and came in for the day and did you know, just a shadow sort of half interview, half shadow kind of see if I liked it, and I sat next to a sales rep that don't remember his name.
Speaker 2:I don't remember if he was even there when I started after they hired me, but he had just landed a customer that shipped root beer and he had all these little pony kegs of root beer that the customer had sent him sitting on his desk. And I'd been in a banker. I've been going to work in a suit every day and I'm sitting there with this guy and he's got his jeans on and he's calling people and I was like I can do this. This is fantastic. It was in Lincoln Park, it was exciting. It's big. You know. The CH Robinson office at the time was, you know it's called, a thousand people in one room, right, tons of energy, very exciting. And so it took me about two seconds to decide that that's something I wanted to try and been off and running ever since that was 2008. I started there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a wild transition from banking to a freight broker and making the calls, but I can understand how that would be quite appealing. I mean, I think, being in a suit, especially for some of us. I mean I've had to wear a suit a couple times to jobs I've had. I hate it, it's not for me, so I want to be in a polo, I want to be relaxed, and so I'm waiting on that. What were some of the things you learned in the banking world, though that's helped you, cause now you're, you know you. You obviously done a lot of work in sales. You moved up in the kind of corporate ladder and more of a leadership role. What are some of those early lessons from banking that still stuck with you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean from a sales standpoint. So break it down into sort of a couple of areas. From a sales standpoint. In banking, I always felt like and I think I probably couldn't have told you this at the time, it's looking back on it now there was a lot of trying to create demand for, for the products we were selling. Right, should you have a savings account? Sure, that's smart. Should you have access to a commercial line of credit? Probably Right, gives you access to capital if you need to expand your business or buy something new or make an investment or something. But you don't need it. Right, it's not necessary and that.
Speaker 2:So there was a lot of just trying to create demand for the products we had in logistics. So translating that to coming into freight brokerage, pretty much everybody we talked to is already shipping. They're just doing it with somebody else and so the sale becomes personal. It becomes about building relationships and establishing trust, which I really enjoy, and that's, I think, one of the ways I was able to be successful in my sales roles throughout my career and I very much enjoyed that about the sales and logistics space. So that was a big difference and I think those early experiences of trying to create demand as opposed to just we're focusing on relationship building. It kind of helped get me to the point where I was able to be successful once I moved into logistics. From a leadership standpoint, I just had a fantastic mentor at both my banking stops. The banks were Oakbrook Bank, which was a community bank, was purchased by MB Financial 2006. I think I don't quote me on that, something like that and then went to a startup at Evergreen Bank Group.
Speaker 2:My boss was a VP at the time at Oakbrook and is now the CEO and runs Evergreen Bank Group. Darren Campbell was an incredible mentor to me. Taught me a ton about leadership, taught me a ton about building a business and some of the things that. I've learned from him. I'm still doing today as I interact with my employees, as I build teams, as I work on training and holding people accountable to the goals and the commitments we make to each other.
Speaker 1:So how much when you think about sales when you first started, to where it is now, what's changed in the last 15 years and what's stayed the same?
Speaker 2:I mean, technology is better, different, right. There's a lot customers and prospects, uh, certainly a lot more ways to get information about the people we're calling, whether that's services like a zoom info or something like that that you're paying for, that's aggregating information and data, or social media, um, services like linkedin, obviously, um are, uh are, are bigger and bigger pretty much every day. Um, so you have access to more information and more ways to connect. The medium we can use to interact with our customers is different today than it was just even when I started. What stayed the same? It's still about relationships, right. It's still about trust. It's still about following through with the things that you commit to and being able to deliver on the services that you've promised. Being able to find ways to create value in the services that you're offering or the products that you're offering to your customers, and differentiating yourselves from the competition.
Speaker 2:The freight brokerage world is, you know, competitive. There's a ton of providers, whether it's other brokers, whether it's asset based providers or other third parties. Everybody's got some things they do well, some things they don't do as well, and many companies out there. It's about finding those right strings that you can pull and show that, hey, here's something I do that brings you value at the time you need it, the right timing in that process, and then we're going to be able to adapt and evolve with your business as you grow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think relationships will ever change because at the end of the day, there's a person on the other end making that decision about to buy or to not buy, or whatever it might be, and so that's never going to change that regard. But I'm curious do you remember the first CRM that you ever used? Did CH have their own CRM? I'm sure they probably did. Maybe the bank had a CRM that they used. Do you remember the first CRM you used? Yeah, so we had our own homegrown crm at ch.
Speaker 2:Uh, from pretty much my entire career, they were making a change to microsoft dynamics, uh, when I left, but I never. I never got a chance to experience that platform, um, and I'm not sure what they, what they use today. Uh, we had a homegrown system here at blue grace when I started. Uh, that was built by our it team, um, and then we migrated to salesforce a few years ago and now we use Salesforce and then my sales team utilizes Gong as our sales enablement platform and we run our pipeline and everything through Gong and it sits on top of our Salesforce CRM.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's cool. I just want to talk about that in just a minute. My career started at DAT and we had an Oracle product back in the day called Siebel. I don't know if you remember that, but Siebel it's a serum that it's kind of like the green screen it's not quite green screen, but kind of like the AS400 of freight brokerage, something like that where things kept plugging along. It did a good job for the most part, but it certainly didn't look very new or modern in that regard.
Speaker 1:But I do want to dig into talking about going, because you went from doing sales to then, eventually, sales leadership, and I want to talk about that transition first, and then I want to jump in and talk about some of the tools that you guys are using to be most effective. I think a lot of companies struggle with that transition from individual contributor to bring somebody into leadership. How was that journey for you at CH Robinson and what did they do to make sure that you were successful as a leader? Because, as you know, being a leader of sales is way different than being an individual contributor of sales in terms of skill sets. So how did they help you make that transition Look?
Speaker 2:I had great mentors. I was very fortunate in my time, both at CH Robinson and here at Blue Grace, to be surrounded by some great people that have helped me along the way. I think that the only thing that I can tell you for sure at any moment is that I don't know everything and that having other people around that you can bounce ideas off of that you trust, that have been through different experiences, even if it's not directly related to logistics, is extremely helpful. I was in a really great situation at CH Robinson when I started. I had a great mentor who'd been around for a long time and his big thing was build relationships, build your brand internally, externally, and that was something that I really took to heart. I had great relationships with people in different offices and at our corporate office. I tried to at least maybe a few. Maybe some people would say that's not true, but I felt like I did.
Speaker 2:And I've stayed in touch with a lot of folks that I worked with when I was at CH. Now that I've transitioned somewhere else, we've got quite a few people on our team here from CH Robinson, but we've also got a really diverse crew of people from other companies like Coyote or TQL, from the asset community, from the LTL community here, and so bringing those ideas together is incredibly helpful, Moving from being a direct contributor to managing direct contributors or individual contributors.
Speaker 2:that was probably the hardest thing that I've done in my career Going back and landing customers, just being responsible for myself or the people that were working on my business. Um was easy in comparison. Um, and because I could, I was in control of what. What I did, I I could solve a problem through my own resources, through, through reaching out and asking for help, through through the hustle of the business right.
Speaker 2:This sales and logistics and sales anywhere I would say, is, you know, a huge part of it's just your hustle and you're willing to continue to work and to find new relationships and to work on your existing relationships. And once you're a manager, a leader, you've got to learn how to to get that output out of all of your people. And that's I found that to be very challenging, really fulfilling, when it happens, when you see somebody have success, land their first customer, win their first big deal, make their first big commission check, those things are so rewarding, more rewarding than being the individual contributor and landing the deal yourself, at least for me. But that's been a challenge and I will tell you it hasn't been a perfect process for me. I've, you know, two steps forward. Take a step back, learn something new about how we develop our people.
Speaker 2:Having great frontline sales managers is critical. If I ever did this again someday in a future life, I'd say that if it's not priority one, it's priority 1A Just having really good frontline sales managers that can be in the deals with your reps, that can teach them, coach them, you know, keep their spirits up right. It's not all about the business all the time, you know, sometimes our employees are humans, our team members are humans. They have stuff going on in their lives more so today than maybe than 10-15 years ago in our society now, and just you know, being there for them is important. So, um, that that's been very important. And then I'm fortunate now here to be surrounded by just a fantastic team, um, the.
Speaker 2:The gentleman that runs our sales organization for me, jonathan swart, was a ch guy originally um and and made his way through a couple of stops at asset providers and was at anthem logistics who we acquired in 2020 um jimmy kensalino in 2020.
Speaker 2:Jimmy Kanzalino runs execution. It's funny, he's from Coyote and when I started I had a contact that told me this is the guy you should hire. And I said to myself I'm from CH Robinson, I'm going to find someone from CH Robinson to hire for this. And I didn't hire Jimmy. And he has been, you know, sort of the two of us doing this together since 2019 now, and so the three of us run the 3PL services group to serve your traditional brokerage at Blue Grace, and then we have our you know, our teams that execute everything. So about 160 or so 145 employees in the 3PL services group here.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, that's huge and when you talk about it hasn't been an easy transition. I think that that's the honest truth is that it's actually very difficult for an individual contributor to become an effective sales leader, because you do have to. You said you had great mentors, you had people that helped you through that. How did you shift your mindset from focusing on your own quota and your own like what you needed to do and being a doer which is what individual contributors are to being more of a leader and being more of a manager and helping people through it, knowing that they're probably going to fail or they're going to do things differently than you would do it, or not pick it up as fast as you did, or whatever the case might be? How did you make that transition effectively? What really worked well, what were some things that were shared with you? Some encouragement, some lessons that you can, you can impart.
Speaker 2:So I always felt I always fall back on the fact that at any moment I need to be able to pick up the phone, go to a customer meeting, get on a deal and help help somebody either close an account or deal with a problem, or or execute something. I still know how to build a load in our system, right. I'm still working on Saturdays. We had a project this weekend I was working on with the execution team, right. So making sure that I can continue to be a leader that doesn't just sort of sit back and tell people what to do, but actually can do the work and get in there with my team is something I pride myself on and try to continue to do on a you know, not daily, certainly weekly basis. Um. The challenge by people to put me on calls with them so I can do sales calls with our frontline sales reps um, use those as opportunities again. You know some of our technology to help, you know coach our managers and our other leaders um and also learn from.
Speaker 2:You know those, those folks as well. We've got some great sellers that I learned from. To this day, I hear the way they present some of our solutions in a way that I would not have, and that's great. I got to file that away and use that in the future. We've just got some fantastic sellers that I learned from.
Speaker 2:So continuing to maintain the ability to and the desire to be on the front lines when it's needed to jump in and lead by example, is something I've always fallen back on as a core tenant of what I do from a leadership standpoint. You know, I think that I've had several people along my career path talk to me about making hard decisions and, as a leader, that's something you have to be able to do. You know, some of the choices I have to make are both outcomes, are not things that I would choose. Right. You know we're something's going on with the business. We have to make a tough call. Somebody is not performing the way you want them to perform, or something has happened that changes the direction of the organization. And those decisions are tough and challenging and it's my job to make them or to work with the leadership above me to figure out what needs to happen here and then actually make those choices, and I've been fortunate again to have people along my career.
Speaker 2:Bobby Harris is our founder and somebody I work with on a weekly if not daily basis and have learned a ton from. Gave me the hard thing about hard things to read and I think I've read it twice or maybe three times now a lot of notes in it. It's on the shelf behind me somewhere and you got to make the hard choices as a leader and that's difficult sometimes, but those choices fall to me to make.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, I think some leaders also make the mistake of staying too much in the trenches because they just like doing it so much and they fall behind on their leadership and admin responsibilities. Some kind of go too far the other way and don't get in the trenches at all. How do you balance it out? Like, what percentage of your time do you try to be with your team in the trenches, being intentional about that, and how much of that do you need to focus on more of the managerial admin? You know leadership aspects of your job.
Speaker 2:I mean, I want to be there every day at some point, right. But I think that what I've tried to focus on now in this role, since I've moved into this SVP role, which has been about a year now, is how can I take that effort and turn that into also developing the other leaders in my organization, so, you know, delegating to them, making sure that they have the tools to do their jobs, teaching them and helping them grow into the leaders that you know? Somebody has my job at some point. Is that? Can that person come from my downline? And I think the answer is yes, and. But I focus on developing the people in my downline as well.
Speaker 2:I had a real formative moment in this role for me in, I'm going to say, december. It could have been January, but I've been in the seat for maybe two months, two and a half months, and one of the gentlemen here that I trust a lot called me and he's like hey, you got to trust us to do our jobs. Right, you got it. You're trying to do everything. You're not going to do anything.
Speaker 2:Well, if you try to do everything, you know the role is new and you're trying to take on a lot, but, like focus on the things you need to focus on from a leadership standpoint. Let us do our jobs. We got your back and it resonated with me. It's something I needed to hear and I've actually shared that story with a few people now internally at times. I felt like they needed to hear that. So you know being able to take the time with my sales managers, our directors, those the folks that are doing implementation or running our account teams that do internal execution and helping them develop as well you know I'm doing that every single day.
Speaker 1:So these are the sales managers that you're now leading that were like hey, listen, just let us do our job, you get comfortable in this role. And they understood the balance and the roles that they had. To me that's pretty impressive, because I think a lot of times in organizations people are always kind of looking out for themselves, or the tendency is to look out for yourself or to criticize other people, but in this case they're like hey, we got your back, you know, that's good. I think that speaks volumes to the leadership within the organization that you know mid-level managers would have that perspective about somebody in a new position.
Speaker 2:Well, and we have a great team right and our part of the organization is just one piece of Blue Grace right we have several other divisions that do different things, offer different services and and we have good relationships across those leadership teams as well. Um ability to collaborate, whether it's on on specific deals or projects, uh, find ways to, you know, bring the right services and the right expertise to our clients. And you know, supply chain world that like the only constant in our world is that it's constantly changing. And we've got a port strike going on right now on the East Coast that is every minute that it goes on will have a bigger and bigger impact on our industry Hurricane and just some disaster areas. We're a company, we're based in Tampa, we have people who were impacted Just a horrible situation and we're trying to do everything we can to help.
Speaker 2:And then, obviously, we're a global shipping company. We ship internationally and certainly there has been no shortage of conflict throughout the world. So there's always something going on that the supply chain touches. And you asked a question earlier about what's changed. The importance of the supply chain, I feel like, has become, you know, much more in focus. Covid certainly helped or caused that helped is the wrong word, but caused you know more of a focus to be on the focus, for sure, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I I'm here in part because when I was at Georgetown and I was in the business school and I wasn't sure what I wanted my major to be, at the end of my freshman year there was a global logistics course and that was something new operations and information management major track for the business school of Georgetown and I went and listened to the professor who was leading one of the global logistics course speak and I was fascinated. He was speaking about getting relief aid into different parts of the world and this is fascinating. It's absolutely something I want to be a part of. So um shows that, as my major did that with international business. And now here we are supply chain is not boring.
Speaker 1:Some of them may think it is definitely not boring. Uh, when it's almost like umpires, like when, when you don't notice it, that's because it's working well. Uh, you know, when it's not working well, that's when everybody seems to notice. Uh, in terms of what's going on in that regard, let's turn our attention real quick to technology. Then we're gonna have a little bit of fun and we'll get you out of here. So you talked about making sure that your team has the right tools to succeed. What are those tools for you guys? From a sales perspective, what do you guys have in place? Technology we need to continue to grow our business.
Speaker 2:Even just in the six years that I've been here, I've seen just massive steps forward.
Speaker 2:Our TMS platform is an in-house system Blue Ship that we develop and maintain internally. We've got a great team of IT professionals that have built that system and continue to roll out, update after update, advancement after advancement, which is just really exciting to see Coming from CH Robinson. I was there for Express, which was the system that was there when I started. It turned into Navisphere and watching the evolution of different platforms and connectivity between platforms through intermediaries direct connectivity, edi, api et cetera. All that's been just so interesting to watch those systems develop over time. But having our own homegrown system here is just really exciting to see the continued output of our developers as they put out new products.
Speaker 2:I mentioned Salesforce. So we switched to Salesforce a few years ago. It's our CRM. Now we use the service piece as well for some of our execution. That platform has been a game changer for us from being able to manage the sales process and our client base and then our team started utilizing Gong a couple of years ago as well, initially just the call recording. We had salespeople kind of in disparate areas some here in Phoenix, some in Tampa, some in Chicago, a few remote employees areas some here in Phoenix, some in Tampa, some in Chicago, few remote employees and getting everybody the same training and the same experiences was challenging in that remote environment or that not centralized environment.
Speaker 2:And another part of our company was utilizing Gong for the same feature, and so we tried it and it worked really well, and as time has gone on, they've rolled out additional features and they rolled out the Engage platform, which is sales enablement, sales process, deal team creation. We manage our pipeline through the deal board.
Speaker 2:We have flows for our sales reps to follow, depending on different initiatives, different services that they're trying to sell, and so the sales process itself, our reporting, our performance management, all of that is run through Gong and through Salesforce for the whole sales organization.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's phenomenal, and I haven't had the chance personally to use Gong, but I've spoken with so many leaders that have implemented it and the impact that it has not only for training and reporting and just keeping everything moving along in the pipeline. That seems very impressive, and so I love it when companies are willing to invest in those technologies and those tools to make sure everybody has what they need, and I think that the end users seem to like it as well. I mean, how do your you know sales reps enjoy using gone?
Speaker 2:they seem to like it. Now, I mean they know I like it. Some could be a little bit of telling me what I want here sometimes, but I think you know the change management piece was something that we had to address. When I speak to you, know other peers or folks in the industry that are considering making a change or utilizing the tool. That's typically a topic that comes up how do you manage the change for our newer?
Speaker 2:reps or some of our more technically savvy employees. It was pretty easy. The tool interfaces really well with Salesforce. There's a lot of back and forth communication. We've been able to remove a bunch of redundancies and repeat work through that communication between the two platforms, which has been great. But look, we have legacy sales reps who have been doing this for a guy that was on the American Backhaulers team before.
Speaker 2:CH Robinson, so getting everybody to want to adopt technology is change, and that change management has been challenging but effective, and I think it was the buy-in of our frontline sales leaders and the rest of the sales leadership team, along with these newer reps that were sort of kind of born into this platform by coming to the company and that's just all they knew. And then they started having success. Some of our more senior reps were like, wow, that person's new, they're having success. This is exciting, but we continue to manage the process on a weekly basis. We put out a lot of reporting I'd say weekly basis. We put out a lot of reporting. We continue to roll out either new features or new visibility to resources that are available to our sellers and we've been able to create a lot of positive momentum through all those efforts.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's huge. We could spend a whole other episode talking about change management and the challenges that are in there. That's a whole process and I think it's one of the reasons why a lot of technology implementations don't do well is that companies struggle with the change management. They don't do it very effectively and then they end up going why are we paying for this? Nobody's using it, it's not effective, it doesn't work, whatever they might say. So that could be a whole other show, so we're gonna skip that for now. Let's have a little bit of fun. Sometimes it's a serious question, sometimes it's a fun question, sometimes it's a good question, sometimes it's a dud. Who knows? Let's see what it is. Today's random question of the day is did you ever think you had superpowers as a kid? Oh, that's interesting. Tell me if you had any or did you want any superpowers? Either one. Did you think you had them or did you want them?
Speaker 2:I want superpowers as an adult.
Speaker 1:So yes.
Speaker 2:I would have wanted superpowers. I don't know that I ever thought I had any. I don't know that I was anything other than just kind of standard run-of-the-mill kid growing up. I played some sports, did pretty good at school, had some friends, not a ton. I was never the most popular kid, I was never the best athlete, but I was always sort of involved in different things. What superpower would I want?
Speaker 2:Yes, that's what I want to know so many good choices right, and I feel like I had this conversation with my kids recently. Being able to go back in time would be real interesting right, yeah, yeah. Doctor Strange, like manipulating the time, stone or whatever.
Speaker 1:Where would you go, like, what time period would fascinate you? Where would you want to go if you could do that just one time, or you know, I mean so many points in history, right to go back and see.
Speaker 2:You know, go, give me some ancient history, some pyramids, some mesopotamia, whatever right, like I'll go way back.
Speaker 2:take me back some good historical, historic, you know, events for the for our country, yeah yeah, um. For for from a sports standpoint, as a big sports fan, I would love to go back and see some of the seminal events in the sports world as well. So I don't know, I might go back and spend more time. My maternal grandfather died when I was a teenager and would have spent more time with him if I could. So I think there's a lot of choices. I'd love to be able to fly like Iron man.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you can't do that as a superpower, that's mine for sure, but fly around like Iron man would be pretty cool as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I always felt flying was my favorite. I just think I love to fly in planes. I still think it's a phenomenal thing that we figured out how to do and now it's like the safest form of travel, and it just happens every day. That we figured out how to do, um, and now it. Now it's like the safest form of travel and it just happens every day. I just think it's incredible. But I will say this I'm currently recording my daughter's history book for her.
Speaker 1:I'm reading her history book and recording it because she can have the audio, because she listens, she learns better audio wise. So I'm currently reading about the roman empire and about greece and, uh, the byzantine empire so many things. I missed these things growing up. I did. I did not capture them very well. So I'm learning a lot of history and these are fascinating moments. It'd be interesting to go back and be a part of some of those moments in history that we only read about. You just don't get the full feeling of what it was really like, whether it might be a baseball game, like Babe Ruth hitting a home run, or whatever it might be. We just can't capture that now. So I'm waiting on that. I think that'd be a pretty cool superpower to go back and do that Very cool. So what's new for Blue Grace? I did hear that you actually had some leaders Samantha Scala and Dana Ricksecker just honored recently with 2024 Women in Supply Chain Award winners from supply and demand chain executives. That's pretty cool. What else is going on with Blue Grace? What's new?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so Sam is one of our frontline sales managers. She's in Tampa. We have two sales leaders there that run our Tampa sales team at our headquarters location. Sam came to us through a couple of other logistics companies. She was a TQL at one point there in Tampa and has been with us since 2019. Dana was part of one of our franchises in Chicago and she is now our leader for our drayage product, which is an ever growing service for us. It's one of the focal points for our go-to-market strategy. So dana runs that from a sales standpoint, um and is on and a part of any deals that we're working on that have a drayage component to them. Um, and yeah, they were. You know, 2024 women in supply chain was pretty cool. Honor to see um and uh, excited for both of them to to to get that award from from a company standpoint we did just wrap up.
Speaker 2:We had a team at CSCMP in Nashville, so we had a few folks there. We have a comic book marketing program. We've put out three editions Now. I wish I had them.
Speaker 1:That sounds fun. I need to see that. That's cool.
Speaker 2:We had our booth was the third iteration of our comic book. We have a service line that focuses on the transportation of temperature control products, specifically produce and fresh protein, you know, meat, chicken, uh, poultry, things like that, and then um floral business. So that the third comic book was based on that service line and there's a couple of villains in there, one of them was the spoiler right, it could spoil me on the spoiler.
Speaker 2:That's a good villain name. Our marketing team is awesome and they're always coming up with great new stuff, so we just finished that. And then we opened an office in Guadalajara in January of this year. It was our newest expansion and we've got about 60 people down there. Now We've got an awesome VP that runs that and is our head of our country program down there, jose Fernandez. That came over from. He was a Coyote at one point and had a stop in between. I don't remember where. It's my fault, but he's built that team up and I was down there about a month ago and got to see.
Speaker 2:you know the effort that's gone into that just absolutely fantastic group, so looking forward to spending more time there and growing that team as well.
Speaker 1:Wow. Well, there's a lot to cover there. First of all, on behalf of myself, please apologize to Sam for me butchering her name. Pretty sure I got her last name wrong. There Are either of them going to be at Broker Carrier Summit or Women in Trucking down in Dallas.
Speaker 2:I don't know if we're going to be at the Broker Carrier Summit Our chief capacity officer, Mark Ford, who has been here since 2016, was a Robinson guy, was a Coyote guy, so tons of experience runs our carrier sales apparatus. I actually sent him a note yesterday. I was like, hey, are we going to this? Not sure yet, but certainly something to look into. And if we are going we'll definitely have a presence there from some of those folks.
Speaker 1:Make sure they come up and say hi to me, and if Sam and Dana are like women in trucking, I'd love to meet them and congratulate them. That's pretty exciting. I'll be down there as well, supporting that, the comic book. Is this something you guys do in-house? Are you outsourcing that? That seems pretty legit. That's pretty incredible. All the concepts and everything are done in-house. I think we have a third-party company that actually produces the physical book itself. I was going to say you got an artist, you got somebody who's creating that. That's pretty amazing.
Speaker 2:I just don't have any right here I can show you, but I'd get you a copy Send it to us.
Speaker 1:I'll highlight that. That's cool. Yeah, I'd love to see that. That's a pretty cool, bryce, having you on the show and just sharing your experience with your work at CH Robinson and now Blue Grace and Sales Leadership. We appreciate all that. You'll have to come back and see us again sometime real soon. I'd love to Thanks Trey. Thanks for having me. Awesome Bryce, thanks so much. Everybody. Make sure you come back every Tuesday for another episode of Standing Out with great guests like Bryce.
Speaker 1:And the tip of the week this week is simply this effective social media is about getting people to stop scrolling long enough to engage in your content. So think way outside the box, be willing to take some risks and have a little bit of fun with your brand. Get people to stop scrolling. We also want to give a big thank you out here as we head out, to our sponsor, josh Lyles over at sales-crm. Appreciate him and his support of what we're doing here. Make sure you check them out. Sales-crmcom Phenomenal product, especially if you're a small to medium-sized broker. That's just getting started and you need a CRM. It's built directly for freight brokers, so make sure you check that out. We appreciate that and hopefully again we'll see you guys down at the Broker Carrier Summit in just a few weeks Again. If you haven't signed up for that yet, go to BrokerCarrierSummitcom. Use the coupon code BETA beta that.
