Logistics is feeling the current developments too

After years in which many companies barely knew where to store all the goods being delivered, or how to secure enough transport capacity and containers, the picture today looks different.

Some mid-sized companies are fighting for survival, and once again we see the strong growing stronger while the small give up or get “swallowed” by the large groups. A typical scenario in times of economic uncertainty.

Whoever has a well-maintained CRM database today has a clear competitive edge

As a CRM consultant, I have seen more than once how the relevance of well-maintained customer and pipeline data rises in times of economic uncertainty. Whoever can monitor operational data per customer and project through data integration has a clear advantage.

Managing directors need precise insight into how things are developing and, ideally, proactive alerts when revenue is slipping.

Losing customers hurts particularly in times like these and must be avoided.

Winning new customers is especially hard, and new “playbooks” have to be developed.

The two CRM strategies, “hunting” and “farming”, also depend on the economic climate. This is reflected in an interesting study I want to report on here.

There are CRMs designed primarily to find many leads, book many meetings and win new customers on a regular basis. These are known as “hunter” CRMs, because they “hunt” for new customers.

On the other side are CRM tools that, on top of all the target-customer functions, bring a great deal of analysis capability for existing-customer business. This requires deep integration into the IT landscape, so that revenue data, shipment data, complaints and credit information are all available in one place.

Once this foundation is in place, the strategies proposed below can be put into practice quickly.

What a 2025 McKinsey study recommends

An article by McKinsey summarises the levers that can secure and even grow revenue in uncertain times.

To execute these strategies, management needs excellent tools and a good “data lake” in which all information comes together and can be analysed.

In many companies, the CRM is that data lake. It collects information on existing and target customers, potentials for both groups are stored in a structured way, and interfaces feed in financial data, open items, credit limits and payment terms. Shipment data, structured by lane, product and division, can be queried and analysed per customer.

The recommendations:

• Prevent customer churn
• Grow revenue with existing customers through cross- and upselling
• Use AI to find suitable leads
• Put plenty of people on promising deals
• Find outliers in existing-customer pricing and work towards standard prices

Read the McKinsey article

Prevent customer churn

The first and most important point concerns customer loss. The study shows strikingly how worthwhile all customer-retention activity is, compared with the effort a company needs to generate the same revenue with a new customer.

These figures surprise every time, and in a downturn they are even more striking than in boom times, because the companies you want to win as new customers are unsettled too and have to cut costs everywhere.

It used to be said that winning a new customer costs three times as much as keeping an existing one.

A few years ago, analyses even showed ten times the effort for new-customer acquisition, because the constant availability of information and prices has profoundly changed the role of sales people.

Winning a new customer today takes a great deal of expertise and insight into the prospect’s processes and pricing. Keyword “consultative selling”: a salesperson with that much expertise simply costs more than someone running through a cold-calling script.

Grow revenue with existing customers through cross- and upselling

McKinsey’s recommendation is to analyse, within existing customer relationships, whether the customer already has the optimal product, the optimal level of support and an appropriate price. All three factors are often levers for growing revenue.

In long-standing customer relationships, it is often simply not known which services the logistics provider actually has in its portfolio.

A good sales scenario, then, is to use best-practice examples to show how other customers benefit from the right mix of services and products.

In a modern CRM, AI agents analyse the customer’s current setup and suggest further products, price adjustments or upselling. A comparison with similarly operating customers can help here.

The prerequisite, of course, is that services and revenue development per product are transparently available in the CRM from the ERP.

Use AI to find suitable leads

In the past, a large part of sales work was research: analysing suitable leads and finding the right contact person.

Today, AI does this work astonishingly well and makes good suggestions.

Ideally, an AI agent is built into the CRM. It might propose a pitch, already tailored to the customer profile. Or it takes over the research on contacts and suggests whom the salesperson should approach on which topic.

Put plenty of people on promising deals

This scenario is particularly interesting: once the analysis has identified the most rewarding customers, and a risk analysis has shown where customer satisfaction could suffer badly, staff should be deployed precisely there.

In contract logistics, for example, that means a special focus on data quality and fulfilment rates, with qualified staff in control. Or tasking the account manager with watching all complaints and fluctuations in orders and getting in touch quickly when something goes wrong.

For this, it is essential that all data, including customer complaints, claims, damages and service calls, is transparent to the account manager, and that there are proactive alerts for shipment fluctuations, exceeded credit limits, missing payments and so on. A well-integrated CRM holds all this data and can trigger alerts proactively through monitoring processes.

Find outliers in existing-customer pricing

This item in the list of revenue levers may seem surprising at first. But in logistics in particular, prices consist of many components, and it is often possible to raise the contribution margin considerably with specific components.

Another scenario is long-standing customers with special agreements, where nobody noticed for years that their price structures were outdated. That is less rare than you would think, and it does not necessarily jump out at you.

When transport prices, conditions and surcharges are stored per customer in the CRM in a structured way, the analysis becomes far easier.

Equip sales teams with the right CRM tool

The recommendations for growing revenue even in harder times all rest on good tools and a good data basis.

In my consulting practice, I have talked again and again to users who accepted the strategic value of their CRM tool but found the software’s usability, interface and workflows extremely confusing.

That is one of the decisive points when configuring a CRM tool that is meant to succeed:

• It must be extremely easy for individual sales people to record the relevant information, even without typing, simply by speaking.
• It must look simple and be intuitive to use on a phone or tablet.
• Searching for data must be easy and, with AI support, possible in plain sentences.
• It must give good recommendations for action, suggesting to each account manager, based on the data, what to do each day to reach the defined goals.
• It must present the key company KPIs with trends, plus the current status of personal goal achievement, in a clear and striking way, also on mobile, when a salesperson opens the CRM on their phone over the first coffee of the morning.
• It must offer data structures tailored to the service portfolio, so that existing business and pipeline can be segmented, presented and analysed well.
• It must provide the right interface for every level: simple and reduced for operational staff, mobile for field sales, with dashboards for branch managers, sales management and executives.

For CRM to work: adoption through ease of use

Strategy and data are of little use if the tool is not used day to day. Successful CRM configuration therefore means: easy data capture (ideally by voice too), intuitive mobile use, AI-supported search in natural language, concrete recommendations for the day’s focus, and clear KPI dashboards for staff, sales management and executives.

Conclusion

In the current climate, sales is not a “nice-to-have” but a steering instrument. Whoever understands CRM as a data and decision platform, creates alerts and transparency and cooperates across departments, reduces risk, stabilises existing revenue and can even unlock growth potential.

In the BVL blog post of 22 January 2026, LOGO board member Dorothee Gabor explains the relevance of sales in the current economic climate.