Inbound Organization

Chapter 10Cerasis—Culture Creating a Movement around a Mission

Cerasis is a third-party logistics company providing a web-based logistics management system and integrated transportation services program. They provide tools matching a company looking to ship a package with a freight carrier. Their tools provide customers with the lowest shipping cost in the most efficient way. They give away the transportation management system software, and Cerasis makes their money on the margin of the value-added services they provide—like a stockbroker who provides a free stock-trading application but assesses a charge per trade. Cerasis is a service and software company brokering a transaction between a customer and a provider. They compete with multibillion-dollar multinational corporations like UPS and FedEx. How do they stand out and flourish when they have far fewer resources and are competing against publicly traded behemoths?

They became an inbound organization.

Six years ago, Adam Robinson arrived as director of marketing and immediately saw that the company had a problem: Cerasis worked in reactive mode. They would wait until a customer had a freight claim for damage or loss and then go about trying to mitigate that claim, reducing the cost to the shipper and carrier. He also observed that Cerasis was playing in a market dominated by large, multinational companies, a situation where focusing only on a reactive response put the company at a competitive disadvantage.

Adam started an ...