Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / Kill Tedious Work: Streamlining Logistics Tasks with Maria Cardenas Ramos

Transcript

Kill Tedious Work: Streamlining Logistics Tasks with Maria Cardenas Ramos · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  Foreign.
• 0:06
  Here live at Manifest and I bumped into my old friend Maya Cardenas.
• 0:13
  How are you?
• 0:14
  I'm fantastic.
• 0:15
  How are you?
• 0:16
  Good.
• 0:16
  Enjoying the conference so far?
• 0:19
  Yes, yes.
• 0:20
  I mean and I don't know about you, but the energy here this year has just been off the charts.
• 0:25
  It's been off the chart.
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  And also there is so many people that it's kind of like overwhelming sometimes, but it's amazing.
• 0:32
  I've met so many people and reach out to also new friends.
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  So now I feel amazing.
• 0:38
  It's great.
• 0:39
  Yeah.
• 0:39
  And I mean I'd love to hear perspective on this because one thing I love about the logistics industry is it's so collaborative.
• 0:45
  Everyone is so willing to work together and I've bumped into so many old friends and then made new connections too and talk and everyone seems to be so focused on solving the ever long list of problems that come
• 1:00
  as logistics evolves.
• 1:02
  How would you say?
• 1:04
  Same.
• 1:05
  I totally agree.
• 1:06
  So we're not necessarily looking for clients, we're looking for partners, people that want to identify pain points directly and tie that to roi.
• 1:15
  So that's kind of like our approach.
• 1:16
  And we've been just having great conversations with brokers, terriers, they've been doing a lot of like data entry manual work or invoicing processing that takes like too much of their time.
• 1:27
  And we act like a partner, you know, like how much time or money can you save if we do like an automation or anything and if it makes sense to them in terms of money, we kind of like
• 1:37
  present that option to them.
• 1:38
  But if it's expensive or it doesn't make sense for them in numbers wise, we just don't even try to pitch it.
• 1:43
  Also we've had partnerships, like new partnerships with other AI products that are already out there.
• 1:49
  You know, they already built something great.
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  So why don't we just stick it together and we build something like even greater in terms of like workflows.
• 1:57
  So new partners are coming too.
• 1:59
  So it's been amazing.
• 2:00
  And you just literally said exactly what I wanted to say.
• 2:03
  It's about partnerships.
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  And I love that perspective too because as I'm on the floor, right, I bumped into some people and I talk a lot about this on LinkedIn in terms of sales and sales malpractice and the right way to do
• 2:14
  sales.
• 2:14
  And so many people I see do the like what you do if it's not a fit.
• 2:17
  Cool.
• 2:18
  No, no reason to pitch.
• 2:20
  Some people still insist on just trying to sell you something that's not a fit.
• 2:23
  But, but for the most part People have been very cool about, hey, if it doesn't work, no problem, and, or they'll point you in the right direction.
• 2:30
  So I've had that also with other people.
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  Like, we're having a conversation, you know, how we can automate certain parts of the back office operation and they're like, you know what, I'm on the operational piece, like on the logistics side of it.
• 2:41
  But you should talk to marketing because it's a great use case and interaction to the right person.
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  Or they politely say, we're not there yet.
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  We have too much for your plate right now.
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  But it's great what you're doing.
• 2:50
  And that's very like, I respect that and I like that from this industry.
• 2:54
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 2:55
  All right, so now when you're talking about the workflow automation, that's the work you would do with Celeric Labs, correct?
• 3:00
  Yes, that's right.
• 3:02
  So we do workflow automation for like basically any type of company that they want to, you know, I don't know if you feel the same way, but sometimes we do the same work over and over again.
• 3:12
  And it's a very sensitive work in terms like we get typos or we get mistakes and you feel like sometimes you could be doing something more valuable.
• 3:21
  So we analyze case by case and we do some like a first layer of consultancy which sit down with different teams and explore like, hey, what's keeping you up night?
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  You know, like, what's taking too much of your time?
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  We analyze if it's automated and if it could be automated in two weeks or less.
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  If it's automated and the roi, it's high.
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  The client is just like, you know what, I'll pay you for this, you know, and just like an example of it, we had a client that was paying like 3.5 for a PR agency to like scrap all the
• 3:51
  data from the Internet and get, and get information.
• 3:54
  If there's someone talking good or bad about their brand because they were in the stock market, we automated that.
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  And now when it took them like two weeks to get like news of someone, now it's immediate, like they get it in seconds in their email.
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  And AI classifies the sentiment even of the news, if it's neutral, positive or negative.
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  That way the impact in the stock market is not even like, we cannot even calculate the impact of it.
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  But I can tell you they don't pay anymore.
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  3.5 K.
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  So we saved them 35 grand per year for life.
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  And the automation, 20 K.
• 4:28
  So when you start putting things in perspective and you Focus on what's most important is the roi.
• 4:33
  It's like an easy sell.
• 4:35
  Yeah.
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  If it's a fit.
• 4:36
  Right.
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  It just makes sense.
• 4:37
  And I love how you're talking about giving up that tedious stuff that some sometimes entrepreneurs have so much trouble just letting go of what the work they shouldn't be doing and fantastic that you've got a solution for that.
• 4:50
  Yeah.
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  And also you've got another company and it's called the StoryGen.
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  The StoryGen.
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  And you're a marketing savant, you're killing it on LinkedIn and that's what you help other people with.
• 5:02
  So tell us about that company.
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  So it's a creative agency.
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  We started like a year, two years ago, I don't know already but we have like five active customers on a retainer plus the projects that we get of website ux, ui.
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  Advertising is like a one time thing or even branding but we do content marketing in general like kind of like completing the full funnel and we help customers acquire new leads, get the right messaging out and you know,
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  kill it digitally wise because that's where most people or most of your contacts get and yeah, that's what we're doing.
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  We're more than 10 people already so I'm kind of like super happy about it, about all the growth that we're having right now and well, if you're a broker, a startup within logistics and you're looking for a marketing
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  partner, just DM me on LinkedIn.
• 5:48
  I'll.
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  I'm all ears.
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  And one more question too because we were just talking about this with AI search and everything.
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  So one thing I've noticed too is sometimes people have like kind of fear of putting themselves out there and doing content marketing and what are people going to think?
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  But talk about the value that you see from your perspective doing, doing content marketing.
• 6:08
  Well, people really want to know you and they want to understand like how are you fixing their lives or kind of like solving a real problem.
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  So when it comes down to marketing sometimes, and I've talked to this with founders all the time or people like that are within like the company and operations, they have a great product, they have a great service, they
• 6:24
  have a value prop like really clear in their head but when it comes out it's not very clear for the other one listening.
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  So kind of like the marketing layer adds to, to exploring and maybe expanding a little bit more like what are you truly solving and how you're different and making it so easy for people to understand and skip it
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  fast and say like hey I want to work with this person because they talk my language, they understand what it's my struggle.
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  And you just take it from there.
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  Like, we're not here to do sales.
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  That's for your sales people or that have like thousands.
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  Not thousands, but a lot of years of experience in the industry on marketing makes sure that the message is massive and understandable, skippable, easy to digest.
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  So you're marketing your sales team.
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  Just do the closest.
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  Love it.
• 7:09
  Okay.
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  And Maria, if people want to find you on LinkedIn or your website, what's the best way people can reach out?
• 7:15
  So for the tech piece, a workflow automation, please go to C-E-L-E-R-I k.com that's celerig.com for the marketing, it's the storagen.com like story generators.
• 7:27
  Thisorigen.com that's our website.
• 7:30
  You can drop form there or you can find me on LinkedIn as Maria Cardenas.
• 7:34
  All right, so good seeing you again.
• 7:37
  You too.