With greater ambitions come greater challenges. Learn how Xeneta deals with them

When a new venture shakes up the way an entire global market does business, the question arises: They have proven that things can be done differently so what are they going to do about it?

The Norwegian startup Xeneta has a vision for the future of the global freight trade market, and there are a few challenges they need to deal with in order to get there.

“We believe the way they do business now is old fashioned and outdated and the way they will do business in five years will be the Xeneta way.” shares the CCO, Lars Johan Bjørkevoll

A while ago we told you the story of Xeneta, a company that brought high tech approach and transparency to the sea freight trade negotiations. They provide buyers of freight services with relevant data on market prices and give them more power to negotiate in addition to better understanding of both their business and the market.

The initial challenges for them were to develop the technology and to gather the data they need to execute the analysis of the market for their clients. They had to show their relevance in the market and prove that their product works and brings added value.

“The first years were very focused on getting companies to provide data into our data pool. So we have given away our market insight tool for free and in exchange companies have provided us with updated price data on a regular basis.” Lars Johan Bjørkevoll says.

This approach worked very well for different industries because they quickly learned that they can save significant amounts of money with the tool. The companies wanted to get aboard early in order to be able to benefit from it sooner and even large, Fortune 500, corporations jumped in quite easily. For these initial stages of development Xeneta had what they needed – the good sales people and the right engineers to develop the technology.

What are the new challenges?

Once the business started to grow, the needs changed and since none of the founders had experience with building and scaling a business, Lars had to join in and bring in his knowledge from successfully scaling other ventures in Norway. He shares that the growth of the business demands building a generic business model, and insuring appropriate systems for sales and marketing that will cater for the growing number of customers.

With building a longer term vision for the company, the board needed to bring in also the right kind of staff so they could project in the future. They needed people who are prepared for the changing nature of the work and the possible growth beyond the borders of Norway.

“Are you going to move abroad? Where those people are going to be? You have to think about that now because you need to nurture someone and give them the experience and knowledge they need in order to move abroad in maybe one year.” he adds.

This hints to the plans of Xeneta to establish an office in the US. Even though the corporations they serve are already global, most of them have headquarters in Europe. However, many of them are located in Asia and the US, and this is one of the main challenges the company is now facing. The time difference makes it hard to communicate with companies outside Europe because that would create the need to be active 24/7, and this is exhausting.

According to Lars, there are over 50 000 leads waiting for Xeneta to approach them in the US, and they need to get there to do that. In addition, the way things work in freight business is very traditional – communication happens through networking, industry events, fine dining with clients, and lots of public relations, all of which demands people to be present where the clients are.

“It works, we find new clients every day, we check them into our sales machine, we get them nurtured, we show them the product, we close some deals but now we need more people with the right kind of experience to help us get that sales machine going.” he explains.

What’s in the future?

“Huge potential, people want it, they love it! They have been using Excel so far so for them having such visual tool is groundbreaking!” he cannot hide his excitement.

Bringing tech in the traditional freight business in not the endgame of Xeneta, they have vision for the future and their current products are only the tools to get there. The purpose now is to educate the users in a new way of thinking, because they are not used to using technology in their business.

The first step is to get the software integrated into their business processes and then get the sellers side also to join on the platform. The future will be that buyers and sellers can meet there and interact with each-other through the platform.

“A very crucial step in our endgame is to get them to meet because then magic can happen if we facilitate for it in the correct way” he shares, and envisions that “5 years from now we would like to be a strong contributor in the industry and change the way they do business.”