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Courtesy Post Bid ShipMicky Thompson

In September, Micky Thompson, who started a shipping-related business last year, headed out from his headquarters in Tucson, Ariz., to make a pickup in San Francisco. It wasn’t a shipment he was handling, though. Rather, he was traveling to a software conference to track down a product that might improve his marketing.

Mr. Thompson is a serial entrepreneur, and his company, Post Bid Ship, aims to solve a problem that bedevils the trucking and shipping industries: empty trucks. The average truck travels with less than a third of a load, and trucks often have to return to base from long treks completely empty. That shortfall lowers profits and raises shipping costs, and it hits smaller trucking companies — the average company operates 12 trucks — especially hard.

Mr. Thompson’s nine-employee company offers a solution: It matches trucking companies that have empty space with shippers who have loads heading in the same direction. Truckers can then bid to haul the loads, much the way Priceline enables travelers to bid on unsold hotel rooms and airline seats. But as with any new type of business-to-business service from a start-up company, getting other companies to understand and trust the service can be tricky, and Mr. Thompson found he needed a way to market and sell more effectively. “Thirty percent of the shipping managers we talk to are ready to buy that day, but the other two-thirds need to be nurtured by hearing from us over and over again,” he said. “It’s drip marketing.”

Thus the trek to the San Francisco software conference, which wasn’t in vain. He connected with a company called Marketo that offers a Web-based sales-and-marketing service. Marketo tracks all interactions with potential customers, whether the customers come to your Web site, send you an e-mail, check out your webinar or show up at your promotional event. Even better, while Marketo normally goes after big companies that are willing to pay $3,000 a month or more, it recently brought out a less-expensive, easier-to-set-up, slightly stripped-down version called “Spark” that is for smaller companies. Mr. Thompson, who pays $800 for the service, had it up and running in about two weeks. “Some products take nine months to integrate into a company,” he said. “I wanted results right away.”

He said he seemed to be getting those results, in part because Spark has a couple of interesting features. One is that it automatically analyzes all of those customer interactions to find the prospects it deems most likely to buy. For example, a prospect who visits a Web site several times in a day may be more likely to pull the trigger than one who stops by once a week. And when several people from the same company are checking out your Web site, it may mean you have a big potential customer that’s worth expending extra effort to land.

The ability to focus on those sorts of prospects, said Phil Fernandez, chief executive of Marketo, can do more for the bottom line than handing out promotional discounts through Groupon, for example, because customers brought in by discounts may not have much interest in paying real prices. “What you really want to know is who is likely to be a good customer,” he said.

Another interesting aspect of the service is that it comes with two hours a month of consultation with a flesh-and-blood marketing expert. That was part of the reason Mr. Thompson was able to get up and running quickly and profitably. “The Marketo consultant helped us design our campaign,” he said. “Now our sales reps are finding they can skip the parts of the pitch that prospects are getting online, and go straight to the decision-making process.”

Mr. Thompson, who carefully tracks whom his sales reps talk to, said he was already seeing a payoff in deals closed, including a contract with one of the largest shippers in the country. “And we’ve got new marketing campaigns scheduled,” he added.

If his service catches on and trucks start filling that empty space, maybe shipping costs will go down and some of the savings will get passed on to the rest of us.

You can follow David H. Freedman on Twitter and on Facebook.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=6a250c095c9f12a8365de650a9be07e7