Red, It's not as easy as you may think. Let's just take NDA and Saver, what zip codes can service Saver?, What zip codes are in a one day ground transit from customer. If in one day transit, how can UPS assist in getting my Worldship so it will not let me ship (or at least prompt me) to not ship air in a one day territory. Also, the AE's had to deal with the after effects of the 97 work stoppage, then another contract proposal most customers thought was all set for 2008 way before the deadline. Then comes the posturing of another work stoppage in Chicago. Don't think for a minute that FDX didn't use that against us. Also, Let me ask you something, if you owned a company that depends heavily on you being able to ship out and you already got burned in Aug of 97. Would you ship all (or even most) of your shipments with a carrier that has a union work force that either goes on strike, or threatens to go on strike?
The LTL world has many other competitors out there, these customers get 70 even 80 % of the Czar rates, but the fuel surcharge is way higher in LTL then in small pkg. (But you still have to know what each is).
Then there's information to give customer to keep the Finance, procurement, etc departments happy.
It's not an easy job they have, (Heck, no one at UPS has an easy job).
Here's another one to think about. You work your butt off, finally getting your foot in the door and getting them to try UPS, you put pricing together, work with customer on all their issues, and then also work on their pickup times etc with center team. They test us out for a small percentage of their work, and tell us on Friday AM, that they are switching 100% to UPS next week. You just made over a 1 million/yr sale, and will earn yourself a good commision on this. Then the driver who's been on route for the week, that was trained for pickup time etc, decides to make the pickup earlier then scheduled. (Ltr box - scans show we were too early). Customer ships out after driver came hundreds of ltrs. All now late. Customer backs off, and keeps all work with FDX. At worst driver got a warning ltr. You however lost thousands in your bonus. How would that make you feel? Months of work, down the drain by one mistake. Definitely would have been different story if we had been in place for months, but we were still on a testing time line.
Are there bad AE's out there, sure. But you can say that about pretty much every position we have, (drivers, Preloaders, on roads, ctr mgrs, finance, AE's, IE etc) Mostly good, hard working folks, but there's some bad apples out there.
Just trying to let you know, there's two sides to each story. Want to make sure you guys heard a bit of the other side.
(PS, No, it wasn't me that lost the sale on this)