Opportunism

This previous summer I worked for a 3PL (3rd Party Logistics) company doing carrier (trucks/ trucking) sales. I along with all the other interns were assigned to specific regions of the country to focus our efforts on for the summer. The regions were split up into groups that resemble the power-5 conferences in college football- Big 10 East and West (midwestern states), PAC 12 (west coast), Big 12 North and South (Southwestern and middle America states up to the Dakotas), Big East (Northeast), ACC (coastal states and other non-midwest states like West Virginia etc), and the SEC (Southeast). I was assigned to the SEC and focusing on the southeastern states as well as 5 other interns.

We all are assigned mentors to shadow for the summer and to learn from as we go and learn the nature of sales and cold calling. We each receive a list of potential carriers that have worked with our company (meaning they used us as a broker to receive and transport one of our customers loads) but haven't been assigned to a specific rep within the company. Getting quality carriers assigned into your name is one of the main goals in the way we do our brokering and sales. This is because once the carrier is in your name no other reps in the company are allowed to contact them and try to sell them any freight. The way you get a carrier assigned into your name is to find one that is not assigned and run atleast x5 loads with them in a week and then atleast x3/ week after they have been assigned to keep them in your name. This system allows for 'hungrier' reps to poach potential carriers from each other in a 'co-opetition' (competitive cooperation) manner if one rep isn't giving enough attention to that specific carrier- they become un-assigned again.

When myself and the other interns in the SEC started we were given a list of recently un-assigned carriers in our region to start our search for our own carriers. A few days before we started a rep with a large book of carriers had quit making all of his previous ones un-assigned and they left them open specifically for us (interns) to call upon. The largest one of all of these was called Red Classic Transit, a huge carrier company in the southeast with hundreds of trucks and drivers moving per day. All the full time employees joked with us whoever got Red Classic into their name would most definitely win the intern sales challenge (a friendly competition between all interns to see who can sell the most) and that is exactly what the 6 of us started trying to do.

The thing about this carrier Red Classic is that they had been working with the same rep for the past few years now and were very used to his style of operations and brokering to them- so they were almost rudely hesitant to want to start listening to a bunch of interns telling them what to do. Also, a lot of the employees at the company had been there for years and were very understandably 'stuck in their own way' of doing things, making it somewhat difficult to try and give them a hard sell with minimal sales experience. However we all started calling on them daily asking them what they were working on, where they had trucks located and where they were trying to go, etc -- but to no avail. We (interns and I) each would sell them one or two loads max per week for the first few weeks but no one could sell enough to get them into their name.

Eventually people stopped trying to deal with them seeing the opportunity of working with these 'grouchy' dispatchers as a waste of their time and they moved on to other leads. This worked straight into my hands luckily. I did not go above and beyond or anything for this carrier, I just gave them a call each morning inquiring on potential business. Finally midway through the summer by some divine work Red Classic cracked and actually brokered 6 loads through me in one day- making them assigned to my name for the time being. A huge moral victory for myself just from staying persistent and not getting down on myself from being rejected on the phone for weeks straight. I worked with them for the rest of summer and ended up in the top 5 of 60 interns in sales for the summer- mainly due to my 2nd half of summer deals I made with Red Classic.

The missed opportunity here was on the other 5 interns in my region and I believe 'good things come to those who wait' explains this scenario pretty well. The rest of the interns got tired of dealing with their dispatchers and calling them everyday to only be rejected, and reasonably decided to focus their efforts on carriers who actually wanted to work with them. I happened to just be the most patient and caught them at a perfect time where another broker bailed on them on multiple loads with no warning- and no other interns calling on them that day. I speculate that the other interns just decided during their brief summer period at the company they wanted to hone their sales skills more and get the satisfaction of getting smaller, much easier carriers into their name. Also, I believe that they just ran out of patience and decided, "oh, there are thousands of other carriers I can be working with I am wasting my time here...." or good things come to people who wait.

I believe that the three separate explanations for opportunistic behavior (or lack thereof) are different. The 'good citizen' reason is more of a personal, moral reason for not taking an opportunity. Some scenarios can be objective to different people and they may think they are acting almost altruistically by being a good citizen and not taking the opportunity- but some others may not think that line of moral thinking applies there. Also, the unethical reason one can more be described as putting self-interest ahead of other interests when the opportunity presents itself. Being a rational, self-interested individual are some of the basic assumptions of economics. The good things come to people who wait in this case worked in my favor, but that is because I saw the scenario differently than the other interns. Where they were thinking, "this company is hard to deal with, I'm done- good things will come to me in the form of other carriers if I just wait" where in this scenario the exact opposite happened for them.