How DATTCO’s response to online brokers turned into an industry-leading customer-facing quoting technology.

DATTCO has been selling charter services in the Northeast for over 55 years and we, like any operator, know that there’s an incredible number of moving parts and data that go into every trip. What starts as an idea in a customer’s head must be translated into move details, checked and double-checked, confirmed and then changed and then confirmed again. At DATTCO our salespeople have always spent most of their time gathering data, entering it into legacy software systems, and delivering responses to waiting customers, who seem to always want whatever they want…“right now”.

Before starting down the path looking at how we could use technology to make the sales team more effective we knew one important thing. Technology was never going to replace a sales team, but it could possibly help make them more effective and free them up to do what we really wanted them to do… sell. We envisioned a world where customers could get quotes more quickly and easily and sales teams were empowered to spend their time on more valuable things than data entry. We were open with our sales staff about our intent, and we spent a lot of time discussing what it was that they hoped that a technology solution could do that would make their jobs more effective.

One of the things that came up in those discussions was “live” or “instant” pricing. To be honest, there we some real concerns at DATTCO about the perceived challenges of the task.  We had all the same questions that most companies do. What if the system quotes the wrong price? What if the customer enters wrong or incomplete information? What about our more complicated business? How would a software system handle multi-day trips, extended tours, or complicated shuttles? We realized early on in our efforts that much of our fear was driven by the prospect of losing business because an online robot priced us out of the market or because it gave someone a price that was so low, we would lose money on the move.

But then we saw a turning point in our discussions around this issue as we realized that we weren’t considering the possibility for growth that technology represented. The actual moment of change for us was when we realized that while we may want to hold on to our legacy, manual, quoting process, we were already being attacked by brokers who were delivering instant, or near instant, prices to our potential customers. We recognized that our business was already dealing with this through discount requests and lost business as these bottom feeders were setting market prices before our sales team had ever entered a keystroke into our quoting system. 

Once we had that realization our conversations moved from “why would we ever want to do this” to “how can we do this”. The first thing we all agreed on was that no matter what the solution was we were not going to try to build something designed to handle 100% of our quotes. This was liberating because it changed the conversation from “what if they want to do something complicated and the system chokes?” to “when a complicated quote comes in, we will use technology to push them out of the automatic system to the sales team”. This not only brought a comfort level to ownership and management but to the sales team as well.

Once we crossed this bridge, that’s when we went to our design board, a board that always had our mission as the focus. “Make the sales team more effective at closing and generating new sales.”

At this point we decided to break our quotes into three piles. The first was what we called simple quotes: these quotes are just that…simple. Airport transfers, single day moves with basic needs, weddings, school moves, etc. The next bucket was what we called slightly complex moves. These were moves that were typically a bit longer but still fairly simple, or what should have been a simple move but had some little detail that made it more complicated. Our last bucket we called complex quotes. If you are in the charter business you know what these are, they are the headscratchers, the ones that need not only someone experienced to help book but that need a lot of back and forth with the customer to ensure that the quote is accurate.

Next, we went back to the Dattco quoting system and looked at how many of our historical bookings fell into each category. In rough numbers it was 80% simple quotes, 10% slightly complex quotes, and 10% complex quotes. With these numbers our team realized just how exciting this project could be. What if we could automate the pricing and quoting process for 80% of our quotes? What if our sales team could capture all that time, they usually spent doing data entry on simple quotes and do meaningful sales?

And that is what we did. That was the genesis of the SalesDriver tool. A widget that for the last 24 months has lived on the DATTCO.com website and allows our sales team to refocus their time on the quotes that we weren’t comfortable with technology providing, on getting people to book their quoted moves, and doing business development.

We have also seen some exciting side effects of this technology. The first is that our customers love it. Let’s face it, we, the group transportation industry, are really the last to the party here. Book a hotel, a plane ticket, even rent a vacation home and you can get instant pricing without anyone emailing you back at some later date. DATTCO customers have responded that they love being able to shop, see prices, change details, see what different vehicle choices would do to their price and more. They report feeling empowered by the technology.

The second benefit is that after over 5,000 quotes that over 750 of those are clicking the “request booking” button. No price haggling or discount request, no desire to talk to a salesperson, nothing. Just a request to pay their deposit and book the move.

But the obvious and most important benefit we are seeing is that our sales team has been transformed. Now 80% of our quotes come through our SalesDriver dashboard having already delivered a price to our customer and the lion’s share of the other 20% use the online interface to gather the data that the sales team needs to generate an accurate quote. In the DATTCO sales department, before SalesDriver we planned on a quote taking a trained salesperson on average 12.5 minutes. This took into account the time it takes to enter the data, ensure that they had the right information, verify the quote and send it on.

We’re seeing that in an average 8-hour day this new process is giving each salesperson back between 3-6 hours. That’s between 60 and 120 hours a month per salesperson to focus on getting business closed and on landing new business.

During COVID related staffing shortages, this has meant that not only can an individual salesperson do more in a day, but as we spool back up to pre-pandemic staffing levels it doesn’t require us to only hire trained charter bookers who know the industry and are good at data entry, but we can target salespeople who can help us get more business closed.

Combine this newfound time with the SalesDriver interface that allows our sales team, and management, to quickly visualize the sales process for all the open quotes and to prioritize the follow up based on the types of business, the value to the move, even the departure dates, and our sales process has never been more effective.

It is not overstating when I say that SalesDriver has changed how DATTCO thinks about charter sales. What started as an idea that could help deliver simple quotes to customers has truly revolutionized our entire approach to the sales process and how our sales team is spending their time. It has given us more control of our prices, more ability to be dynamic in our pricing strategies, and a level of visibility that has been maddening to try to get from our legacy software solutions. This is a new day for our customers and for DATTCO, one that we are excited to continue to explore.

We have helped over a dozen companies make this same transformation in their business. If you are ready to experience this shift in your company’s sales process TBN can help you make it happen. Call us today and let us show you how you can empower your sales teams to sell more and quote less.