SalesTechStar Interview with Joe Palombo, Vice President of Sales and Client Success at AxleHire

Joe Palombo, Vice President of Sales and Client Success at AxleHire discusses more on how recent developments in AI can enable better last mile delivery tactics for modern industries:

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Welcome to this SalesTech Series chat, Joe, tell us about your journey in the B2B tech market and more about being AxleHire’s new VP of Sales and Client Success …

Thanks for having me!

I fell in love with the art of the sale and the intricacies of account management (implementation, growth share, retention, etc.) when I began my sales career 17 years ago. Throughout that journey, I immersed myself in individual contributor and leadership roles that challenged me to become a true subject matter expert and advisor to clients and prospects. However, my sales maturation took flight when I learned how to separate and elevate my company’s overall solution through tech differentiators. My last five years were spent at Flexport, uniquely positioned between Logistics Service Providers (LSPs) and pure SaaS solutions. During that time, I helped craft how to leverage technology to provide a greater user experience and structure and aggregate supply chain data to guide better and inform our client’s movement of goods from the factory floor to the customer’s door.

Those same differentiators rang true when I learned more about the total AxleHire solution. AxleHire, similar to Flexport, has uniquely positioned itself between traditional last-mile service providers and pure tech players. It’s now my job to help enable our hunters and farmers to clearly articulate our key differentiators and juxtapose our solutions against the overall competitive landscape. My core focuses entail driving greater velocity within the sales lifecycle, diversifying our client and segment portfolio, and existing book of business growth through network effects, geographic expansion, and tech deployments.

How in your view can modern sales teams build better business and client relationships: what works well in the B2B tech market? 

Throughout my 12 years within the supply chain/logistics space (and, for that matter, every other industry I’ve worked in), there have been two themes that most prospects and clients want to lead conversations with: price and performance. These are beyond critical to address and solve. Still, it can often result in a very transactional relationship that ultimately doesn’t solve that particular company’s pain points or ability to meet its growth potential.

True solution sellers think end-to-end and engage in thoughtful business discussions that uncover how products move, how systems interact, how data and money flow, and, most importantly, how end consumers engage with the brand itself throughout that entire cycle. Trust is built when a seller truly understands the business, creates impactful and lasting solutions that tech differentiators power, and always has the client’s best interests in mind. After the initial sale, discovery and solutions never end. Sellers must remain nimble, continuously iterate upon the solution, and leverage the voice of the client to guide the tech roadmap for their organization.

The beauty of this all is that peak trust is gained through the best-in-class sales motions mentioned above when the deployed solutions address many things, but mainly how the seller can leverage technology to drive down costs and provide greater performance.

Take us through your sales strategies and processes that have worked well over the years and the salestech and revtech that enabled them?

A few critical things come to mind here:

• Map out the entire prospect/client sales journey. There can be multiple internal parties involved, and continuous handoffs can occur throughout the Sales/Client lifecycle (most notably as you move up the market): Awareness/Interaction through marketing efforts -> MDR/SDR/BDR outreach -> Account Executive engagement -> Implementation -> Account Management/Client Success assignment. Many sales organizations don’t take the time to gather and map out this end-to-end experience collectively. By performing this exercise as a team, you identify and solve for gaps and weaknesses, establish various measurement stages, and create “The Power of We” culture. Individual success aggregates to team wins, more incredible sales velocity, higher conversion rates, and, most importantly, the best client experience possible!

I love starting this process out on a good ole whiteboard for team building/think tank purposes and then memorializing it within a process mapping tool (I’ve used Lucidchart, Visio, Miro, and Canva in the past).

• Narrow in on your ideal client profile (ICP) and be hyper-focused on the specific portion of the market you can best serve. Few things are more rewarding than concentrating your company’s efforts on a defined profile and identified market. This can be a challenging endeavor for a fast-growing, tech-forward organization deploying new solutions and continuously moving up segments but has the discipline to evaluate your best-fit prospects constantly. The market will allow you to be surgical in your sales approach. This also helps reduce strain across the entire organization versus the thrashing when you’re continuously pricing and building solutions that don’t necessarily fit the opportunity/prospect. Avoid the spray-and-pray technique and the pitfalls of being overly excited about a robust pipeline and narrowly focus on what makes the most sense for your organization and the prospects/clients.
• Subject Matter Expertise / Transparent Approach – To be the best, you must have the grit and tenacity to know the most. Becoming an SME doesn’t happen overnight but is a culmination of your commitment to know your overall space, the competitive landscape, the companies you’re approaching, and the overall trends of the industry you’re working within. As you mature and ramp as a seller, it also allows you to have the confidence to say, “I don’t know, I’ll follow up on that,” and inform a Prospect/Client that your solutions don’t align with their needs (and hopefully can guide them to a more appropriate provider). Being viewed as a true Advisor is the ultimate achievement as a seller.
• A few of our favorite tools, in addition to the usual ones everyone knows like Salesforce, are Outreach, ChiliPiper, Calendly, and Seismic. And for research and really building an understanding of the market and individual prospects, I’m a fan of SimilarWeb, ZoomInfo, and LinkedIn Sales Navigator. I always encourage team members to constantly network as well as block out time to read online trade forums and publications. These tools are amazing for teams, and I always stress that the tool is only as good as the strategy behind it and the quality of its implementation. Once you’ve got both, teams are unstoppable.

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Can you talk about the impact of AI on the last mile market and how it’s changing the game for retailers today?

As a last mile provider, we are ultimately in the business of implementing tech and processes to proactively address and/or respond to exceptions management. Some exceptions you can readily see coming; an invalid address, a refrigerated package that’s about to go bad, etc. For other exceptions, it can be a guessing game.

AI is making these guesses more educated, and enabling better and faster reactions. Whether we see them or not, there are latent patterns in delivery data that provide hints as to exceptions that may arise: in inbound operations, sortation, outbound, and at the doorstep. Last-mile providers who are in command of all of their historical data and statistics stand to benefit most from predictive AI. This technology uses artificial intelligence to predict and manage potential issues in advance. By 2024, this technology will become more capable and accessible.

At the same time, the same AI improvements that are reinforcing martech/salestech, also stand to benefit last mile delivery. At the edges, great customer service depends on fluid and responsive communication, which involves the shippers, customers, and the delivery provider. In 2024, we will see AI facilitating more of these conversations, which will enable drivers to stay focused on the road, enable call centers to become more efficient and field more volume, and get customers answers to their issues faster.

In summation for the Retailers particularly, this means fewer missed deliveries, greater communication, and overall happier customers resulting in repeat business and higher lifetime value (LTV).

What are some of the top trends that will drive the B2B tech and SaaS market in 2024?

I’ve recently attended NRF and have Manifest, ShopTalk, and other conferences/shows ahead of me, and certain themes are coming from discussions and panels within our given space:

• AI, of course! AI is already having a big impact, and my belief is that the companies who use it the most successfully are the ones who are laser focused on using it to improve their product and their clients’ experience.
• Sustainability/Corporate Social Responsibility – It’s no secret that the supply chain/logistics industry as a whole negatively impacts the environment. Most companies, and logistics service providers, have sustainability initiatives that continue to drive down these overall impacts. What’s most exciting to see are all of the tech advancements that create greater utilization, routing, automation, etc. to significantly reduce our overall footprint.
• The Customer Journey – Above, I addressed how I like to map out the customer journey throughout the sales life cycle. What I enjoy seeing is the focus and advancement surrounding the total customer journey, from finding brands to the virtual (or in-person) shopping experience to pain-free check-out, delivery, re-marketing efforts, and beyond. All this tooling can be integrated/blended to create a total best-in-class experience for the end customer. It is fascinating how companies identify and pair the options to make them unique for their demographic.

If you had to share a few AI trends that will lead the salestech-martech space in 2024 and beyond, what would you talk about? 

Many are familiar with content creation efficiency for copywriters, but really for any outbound targeted communication. By now, we’ve all probably received automated outreach communication in which AI has had a hand. What they have in common is that it still feels like AI – they seem well-written. They might be personalized to the extent that they know something about your role, business, etc. But somehow, they still feel impersonal and clumsily stitched together. They lack a “savviness” that is hard to emulate with the simplistic GPT prompting of 2023. That will change in the coming year as martech providers upgrade their “prompt engineering” and more capable GPT models to enable the weaving of more context into the content (think of it as ChatGPT but with more “memory” about the conversation).

Part of this context will benefit from improved “multimodal” analysis capabilities that AI will also enable in 2024. AI will increasingly allow companies to digest and utilize everything known about an opportunity for all available relevant text (emails), audio (phone calls, video, recordings), and even images and video to create a capsule of content about the opportunity. That capsule can inform the next steps and utilize performance feedback to shape subsequent reach-outs.

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