When you make shipments through either FedEx or UPS, when was the last time you thought about how much of the shipping costs you could actually be saving? In reality, one of the easiest ways to save money is to focus on reducing your shipping costs. We’ve gone over a variety of ways you can be saving your company money on shipping from parcel audits to instructions on how to write a shipping form, but another important way is to understand the language used by the carriers that can better help you talk to carrier representatives, especially during carrier negotiations.
Some of this shipping language mainly comes during the carrier negotiation process. As you continue a relationship with a particular carrier, their goal is profit driven with incentives and goals the carrier representatives are set to achieve. Because of this, the carrier negotiation process becomes highly subjective since there is no one system or calculation that the carriers use to determine incentives from one shipper to the next. Instead, the representatives will constantly use ‘relationship’ or ‘value-added services’ to try and create a favorable deal without any improvement on rates. The solution is to make sure to address this issue with your representative. Although value add services and a good relationship are great to have, great discounts and better rates are even more important and imperative to getting a good discount. Making sure to vocally acknowledge this note can go a long way to helping secure reduced shipping costs in the future.
We at Source Consulting can make sure that you are well-prepared for all aspects of a carrier negotiation and can help you on your way to discounts. Along with helping you prep for the negotiation and what to expect, our experienced employees with carrier experience and amazing, innovative tools will help give you the proper analytics and research to help build up a case for shipping discounts. The best strategy to reducing shipping costs is a full-proof one!