Dockhand can help you prepare for a roadtrip by finding customers in your ICP, finding contacts at the relevant locations, and mapping your route.
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Freight is a relationship business. While email and calls help us break in with our customers, nothing compares to the trust built and knowledge gained when visiting prospects and clients in person and seeing the operations first hand.
Most of the sales reps we work with routinely drive to meet their existing customers where they work. These trips take time. We've often heard of people driving 2+ hours to meet a client for one hour!
Over and over again, we've heard the refrain "I want to make more of this trip. Can you help me find prospects that are nearby so I can bring over doughnuts?"
What's the best way to make the most of it?
Find 8-10 prospects in your ICP that are near your target customer
Map out a route that lets you visit each office in the amount of time you have, cut prospects that are too far out of the way
For each prospect on your route, find contacts that work in the office you'll be visiting.
Reach out to those contacts ahead of time so they know your name!
Before Dockhand, sales reps have used Revenue Vessel's Zip Code and Radius feature to find nearby importers. However, it ends up taking several hours to build a list as sales reps toggle back and forth between Revenue Vessel and Google Maps. Once they find a list of importers, they need to find appropriate contacts that are actually based in the office, write an outreach sequence, and start reaching out.
Several hours is too long! Most reps we talk to know that they should be doing all of this prep, but they don't have the time to execute on it as they juggle existing customer fires, cold calls, and internal meetings.
Enter Dockhand:
Dockhand can find prospects in your ICP on your route, build the path for you in Google Maps, and identify contacts that work in the branch office you're going to visit. Dockhand runs this research in the background for you so that your total time spent is less than five minutes.
We recommend starting with a simple prompt that asks for exactly what you need, such as:
I'm visiting newark next week. Build me a target list of importers receiving cargo in or near there that fit my ICP. e.g. chemicals importers doing 200+ TEU/yr, with their volume, top lanes, current forwarder/broker, and a contact to reach who is likely based in the newark office Sort by fit so I know who to prioritize. Then send me a Google Maps link I can open on my phone with the stops mapped out.
You can use the above prompt directly, just adjust it as needed to your ICP and location!
Dockhand then gets to work. Dockhand will run in the background, meaning you can focus on responding to existing customer asks, attend internal meetings, and do the rest of your work while you wait.
Finally, Dockhand can give your a list of all the prospects it recommends:
If you want, you can ask Dockhand to make adjustments. For example, Dockhand flagged that three prospects on this list would require me to cross the various bridges around NYC, and I don't have time for that traffic. It adjusted the list for me, and then it gave me a Google Maps route to follow.
The new route avoided bridges and tunnels, so it felt far more achievable in a day trip!
With Dockhand's help, I have a list of prospects and contacts to start reaching out to, and I have a map ready to follow on the day I'm driving.
Try it out yourself next time you have a roadtrip coming up, and follow best practice in five minutes, not three hours!
But wait, there's more!
We've all heard the grizzled veteran on our industry telling us to do our research, "This is an industry where people know if you don't know what you're talking about", or some variation of that idea.
Dockhand can run research for every single account for you on the trip. You just need to ask.
The actual Account Brief goes into detail on the company and their supply chain:
It can even pull out contacts that are likely decision makers:
and Dockhand can do this research for every single prospect at once if you want it to!
Don't just schedule a road trip. Walk into every meeting prepared. That's the magic of Dockhand.
