Here are a couple of thoughts right off the top ….
- A bunch of letters is only going to confuse and distract senior management at UPS. How many do you think would actually get sent anyway? 100? 1,000? Those numbers are not significant enough. The people that can make this happen are extremely busy and don’t have the time or the interest to sort thru a pile of letters from individuals. Whether a form letter or some derivative there of, they will simply be turned off. These people care about one thing, their quarterly revenue numbers. Our ability to organize will not impress them, and a pile of letters will never get read by anyone with the ability to make this happen.
- You don’t really need “permission” to supply UPS with contact information for Rich and Jeff. They own highly visible public websites, if I can shoot them an email without permission, UPS can as well. It would be courteous to give them each a heads up, but in the end it is up to them to either help or not if UPS were to contact them. A phone call or email is about all that UPS would probably do to verify facts presented to them. It is unlikely that they will spend man hours doing their own research looking at websites. Everything must be handed to them and factual, and those facts have to be EASILY verifiable.
I think you should look at this thing as a business development relationship between the herp community and UPS. Good for our collective businesses and good for theirs. UPS has a vice president of business development (not necessarily that title, but certainly someone in that role). Business development is worked as a one to one relationship, so you will need a single person (or very small group, 3 – 4) to contact their bus dev vp.
The standard procedure for making this happen is a brief letter requesting a meeting. The letter would explain who you are and who you represent, as well as a summary of what you are proposing (your current internal contacts at UPS will help grease the wheels with this person to get you that meeting). Once the meeting is set, an 8 – 12 slide PowerPoint presentation (these people live and die by PowerPoint) explaining what the benefits to UPS are accompanied by hard numbers. You must show a significant increase to UPS’s bottom line if they are going to go for it. If you can show a 1- 2 percent increase to UPS’s gross, they will not be able to say no. Some of the things that should be highlighted in the presentation are:
- Market size (number of POTENTIAL annual shippers over the next 5 years)
- Average annual shipment size per person (in dollars, err on the high side here)
- Stats on year over year growth of the herp industry
- Safety plan (for UPS employees especially)
- Insurance (they make huge profits with insurance, this angle should be explored and stressed … talk about how the airlines do it)
- Legalities of transporting from state to state, protected species, etc (first thing their lawyers will ask)
- The fact that they will draw new customers from FedEx, Airborne, and the airlines (new customers always gets people excited)
- Acceptable packaging requirements, weather, preventing loss of animals (they will be terrified of the PETA crazies when discussing this internally)
I really think that this is an easy deal to get done if you can show a 1 – 2 percent rev increase. If not, it’s going to be tough. I have not done any financial research on UPS and don’t know where they stand against other carriers or how they are performing, but that will be important. If they are doing well and at the top of the pile it might be easier to go after the company on the bottom first (and certainly mention that you are talking to the other carriers at the meeting, tell the company that your meeting with that you’d be willing to be exclusive with them and not even talk to anyone else if it goes thru).
I have worked and closed bus dev deals with fortune 500 companies and have seen some really shaky stuff get done. With the proper presentation and good revenue increases for UPS this has a strong chance of happening, but you have to speak their language.
Wow, I think I’ve rambled on enough.
Thank you for listening again.
-Adam
