Cerasis is a third-party logistics company providing a web-based logistics management system and integrated transportation services program. They provide tools matching a company looking to ship a package with a freight carrier. Their tools provide customers with the lowest shipping cost in the most efficient way. They give away the transportation management system software, and Cerasis makes their money on the margin of the value-added services they provide—like a stockbroker who provides a free stock-trading application but assesses a charge per trade. Cerasis is a service and software company brokering a transaction between a customer and a provider. They compete with multibillion-dollar multinational corporations like UPS and FedEx. How do they stand out and flourish when they have far fewer resources and are competing against publicly traded behemoths?

They became an inbound organization.

Six years ago, Adam Robinson arrived as director of marketing and immediately saw that the company had a problem: Cerasis worked in reactive mode. They would wait until a customer had a freight claim for damage or loss and then go about trying to mitigate that claim, reducing the cost to the shipper and carrier. He also observed that Cerasis was playing in a market dominated by large, multinational companies, a situation where focusing only on a reactive response put the company at a competitive disadvantage.

Adam started an inbound marketing program focused on being helpful both to the shipper and to their carrier partners from the very first connection. The company began providing advice, support, and content educating shippers about minimizing shipping damage and freight claims for all shipping programs, regardless of which carrier they selected.

Instead of blasting the same outbound messages to all their customers and partners about why companies should be using their shipping service, they started a freight education blog on the company website and created lots of focused content designed to help everyone who used freight shipping services get better information and solve their problems. Cerasis designed content to make shippers aware of the opportunities for cost savings and efficiencies before their products got to the shipping dock and then to ensure the freight got to the right destination on time and undamaged. Cerasis was providing value via this educational content, before extracting value by charging customers, while building awareness for their brand and their freight software and services. Their philosophy was help first, not sell first.

By switching their mindset from optimizing transactions in reaction mode to a philosophy of expecting employees to invest their time and resources into being proactive, customers started to view Cerasis differently. Educating and helping everyone who needed shipping services positioned them as a company that cared about people first, not doing deals as their primary focus, and by extension they became known by more prospects in the industry.

Robinson says:

Changing to an inbound marketing approach by creating helpful content forced us to think about how we could best add value to our customers, carrier partners, and to our internal team. We learned that our customers don't like pushy salespeople, but they like helpful advisers. They didn't need another software tool or shipping management system; they needed expertise. What they valued was help with their real-time, end-of-line packaging and shipping issues, along with a way to find the best shippers at the specific time on a moment's notice. So, it made sense for our team to move to a proactive mindset that focused on problem avoidance versus a reactive mindset of problem management. The only way we could deliver on the brand promise of educating and helping was if the entire company bought into this philosophy and committed to delivering it.^*

The Cerasis leadership team understood the changes in the marketplace (more competition) and buyer's behavior (choosing a vendor who would help them, not only sell to them). Cerasis realized that to create differentiation and competitive advantage they needed to be different than their large competitors and embrace a scalable strategy for providing a unique experience. Being proactive in their approach to their customers not only brought them back to their entrepreneurial roots, but it also reenergized the entire company.

The results of this shift are impressive:

1. Increase from 45 to 100 employees in five years
2. 100% revenue growth
3. Website visits increased from 4,000 to 200,000 monthly
4. 1,500 well-qualified leads from the website and blog per year
5. $3 billion of opportunity per year
6. 60% of Fortune 100 convert on the website as inbound leads
7. 20,000-plus blog subscribers
8. 130,000-plus manufacturing persona blog visits per month

The move to inbound and the commitment to helping people prevent shipping problems rather than fix them gave Cerasis strong intangible reasons why customers preferred to work with them other than price. This became the basis for deep customer relationships built on a better customer experience. Cerasis started to stand out in a commodity industry.

Robinson continues:

Product parity ruled our market. Everyone reached a similar level of technology and product features around the same time. What stood out for us (and still does) is our reputation as the thought leader in our space, our value-added relationships with everyone in our ecosystem, and the superior customer experience we deliver. These are now our competitive advantages.^*

For Cerasis, their expertise at problem solving, expressed through hundreds of examples of content on their website, formed the backbone of their competitive advantage. They use a “hub and spoke” strategy to share their content internally and externally. They use Cerasis Central to share documents and tools to everyone in the organization. Everyone uses the same CRM system, so everyone has access to the same customer and prospect data. This keeps everyone on the team on the same page with each contact and allows the services team to understand what is going on with the sales team and the support team—they have a 360-degree view of the customer. Externally, the website, blog, and social media allow them to share information with their ecosystem. All communications and messaging use the same customer language of freight claim avoidance and continuous process improvement.

Cerasis realized that a siloed team structure that left customer service people without decision support systems led to an inefficient and ineffective customer process and made it impossible to deliver on the promise of helping and educating. Service people were defensive and stressed out from having to deal with freight issues alone all day. Moving to a team structure based on cross-functional skills and varied levels and types of expertise helped both internal morale and provided better customer service.

Robinson explains:

The inbound, collaborative approach to team building resulted in a better customer experience and a more enjoyable environment for our people. Our people knew they had a team behind them and could focus on making sure everyone won—the customer and us. This structure also led to a bottom-up information flow where the best ideas and solutions to our customer's problems came from the teams that they worked with and shaped the way we offered our products to other companies. The team structure led to even more positive customer interaction, which in turn led to better product development and improvements to our business.^*

Cerasis follows a company culture philosophy program called FISH, produced by Charthouse, modeled after the Pike Place Fish Market. FISH is a technique to make happy individuals alert and active in the workplace. John Christensen created this philosophy in 1998 to improve “organizational culture.” FISH represents these core values the people at Cerasis commit to living and showing:

1. Be there—be present for people.
2. Play and have fun—be creative, be innovative in all you do.
3. Make someone's day—serve or delight people, choose to be the type of person that serves others.
4. Choose your attitude—help others internally and externally.

Cerasis holds regular company internal events to emphasize to the team how important these values are and to reinforce them with new team members.

Robinson issues a warning about transitioning to an inbound organization, though: “Inbound is a mindset, it is not something you turn on and off. Inbound can't be about the way you handle your marketing. To be successful, inbound has to be a culture change and something you live throughout the company every day.”^*

Moving to an inbound approach led Cerasis to measure more customer activity and response times, generate team reports, and create shared metrics and scorecards between departments, even back-office functions like finance and accounting. The goal was to make sure everyone that communicated with a customer followed the same playbook whether they were talking about a shipment or an invoice or the product tools.

Robinson says:

We use a common language in communication to customers, whether it's legal talking about contract terms or finance talking about accounts receivable. Our carrier relations department manages our carrier partners who Cerasis works with to match to shipper customers. We are a freight broker, and it is vital we use the same inbound approach with those carrier partners to get the best service for our customers. We even pay the shippers before Cerasis gets paid, so we are building relationships on trust and sharing a commitment to solving the problems of our customers.^*

Cerasis believes in building an ecosystem of success that includes anyone they come into contact with, even competitors. Here is Robinson's take on building a network of relationships:

You should think of yourself less as a marketer and more as a leader of a community with a bunch of different constituents, noncustomers, and other service providers who are in your space, but not competitive, but have a similar target audience. And then, of course, your employees, and then, at last, your customers—all people working together and you at the center, thinking of them as equals and pursuing the idea of always creating value through education and openness.^*

Cerasis even allows companies with similar offerings to contribute articles to their educational blog as long as the content is valuable to everyone in their audience. They want to be a conduit of value, the place to go for logistics and transportation management information, and are happy to allow similar companies access to their audience if they agree to help and have the same philosophy. Building trust by sharing relevant information is more valuable to them than restricting information because it reinforces that philosophy of helping before selling and putting the customer first.

Cerasis's ultimate goal is to help their entire industry see carrier costs as an investment and not as a cost center and to help manage that way. Everyone wins.

During an internal review process, Robinson asked his team to describe what they do. Here is how one employee described what the company does:

Without taking a long time to write an answer covering the “measurables,” I will give a more philosophical take on what the value we bring is. In today's world, regardless of industry, we are all flooded with too much information, whether it is the news (real or fake), emails, direct marketing, texts, other people's opinions, internal company politics, etc. It can be impossible at times to know who to believe, who to trust, what is real, what is important, what isn't important—the list goes on and on. Who can honestly keep up with the information overload at times? Our customers face that struggle both personally and in their daily work environment. It can be very lonely in that respect.

We provide something that in today's world is almost invaluable. Who cares if we are great at auditing, or negotiating, or if we have the best tech? What we offer is access to a larger community, peace of mind, and a calming voice in a cluttered industry/world. With us your world changes; you instantly have a team of people to support you, you have people who are interested in your success. We have a technology that helps you to enable better decision making, and, most importantly, you have experts on your team immediately that don't just understand your business, we understand the market through the eyes of thousands of clients. By working with us, you are plugging into a new collaborative community (Cerasis employees, customers, agents, carrier partners) that you won't have access to if you continue to work in your own bubble. If you work with us, you're not alone. You are joining thousands of others who chose to work with us too. That's pretty awesome, in my opinion.^*

Cerasis is an inbound organization.