Why Drivers Are a Hidden Growth Engine in the Information-Management Industry
A few years ago, I lost a long-standing customer in a regulated industry. There was no warning from the sales team. No flag from customer service. No complaint, no escalation, nothing in the CRM. The account simply gave notice and was gone. What stung the most came a week later, when one of our drivers told me he had seen a competitor's truck at that location for the past two months and figured we already knew. We didn't. We had a person inside that account every two weeks, and the intelligence we needed to save the business was sitting in a pair of work boots the whole time.
That moment changed how I think about our industry. In secure information management, whether shredding, records storage, ITAD, or media destruction, we tend to focus on the salesperson and pay less attention to the person who actually lives with our customers. Salespeople visit accounts. Drivers live there. For a lot of operators, the gap between those two facts is worth real money.
Start with a simple comparison. A typical outside sales rep in our industry touches ten to fifteen accounts a week. A route driver makes roughly one hundred stops a week. Across a year, even accounting for vacation, holidays, and route variability, that's somewhere north of 5,000 individual customer interactions per driver. A team of eight drivers will produce more than 40,000 customer touchpoints in a year. No sales team, no matter how aggressive, can match that footprint.
Now layer in what they actually see on those visits. Drivers walk past competitor trucks in the parking lot. They notice overflowing bins, cardboard piling up next to shred consoles, new construction, fresh signage, departments being moved, and unfamiliar faces. They overhear the receptionist complaint about the service schedule. They watch the customer's headcount grow or shrink in real time. Very little of this shows up in a quarterly business review. Most of it shows up on a route sheet, if anyone is asking.
The financial implications are not abstract. Decades of customer-economics research from Frederick Reichheld and Bain & Company have shown that even a five percent improvement in customer retention can drive meaningful profit gains in a typical service business. The original 1990 work by Reichheld and W. Earl Sasser ("Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services," Harvard Business Review, September–October 1990) documented that a five percent reduction in defections generated 85 percent more profit in one bank's branch system. Subsequent research has consistently found that acquiring a new customer is generally more expensive than retaining an existing one. In a route-based business, the person best positioned to flag a defection before it happens is the person at the back of the truck.
There is parallel evidence on the upside on driving growth rather than just protecting it. A study published in the Journal of Marketing by researchers at Wharton and Goethe University Frankfurt (Schmitt, Skiera & Van den Bulte, 2011) found that referred customers had a customer lifetime value approximately 16 percent higher than comparable non-referred customers, with retention rates roughly 18 percent higher over a multi-year horizon. Those are the kinds of customers your drivers are well positioned to bring in: friends-of-the-customer, neighbors in the office park, the tenant down the hall who just signed a lease. Referred customers tend to be higher-margin, stickier, and more cost-effective to acquire than customers obtained through traditional outbound channels.
Salespeople visit accounts. Drivers live there.
If the opportunity is so clear, why is it underdeveloped at many companies in our industry? Some operators have already built strong driver-engagement programs and will recognize a lot of what follows. For those who haven't, my experience is that this is rarely a motivation problem. It's more often a leadership-design problem. We can accidentally engineer drivers to be passive.
Look at how the role is sometimes defined. The job description says: drive the truck safely, make all the stops, stay on schedule, avoid problems. Performance reviews focus on on-time performance, route completion, vehicle inspection reports, and complaints. None of that necessarily rewards observation, awareness, or initiative. Drivers can end up trained to execute rather than to notice. If there's no explicit expectation that they grow accounts, no system to capture what they see, and no feedback loop that tells them their input matters, then it shouldn't be a surprise when those things don't happen.
This is not unique to our industry. Gallup's workplace research consistently identifies frontline-heavy industries (manufacturing, construction, healthcare, route-based service) as having among the lowest engagement rates of any sector, in large part because most companies' communication, recognition, and feedback infrastructure was built for desk workers. Gallup's meta-analyses also find that roughly 70 percent of the variance in team engagement is explained by the manager and the immediate work design, rather than by HR programs or compensation in isolation. The implication is straightforward: if drivers in a particular operation are disengaged, the lever is generally not a pizza party. The lever is how the role is designed and led.
That body of research connects to something foundational. The Service-Profit Chain, first articulated by Heskett, Sasser, Schlesinger and colleagues in the Harvard Business Review in 1994 and refined ever since, established that profit and growth in a service business are driven by customer loyalty; loyalty is driven by satisfaction; satisfaction is driven by the value of the service delivered; and value is created by satisfied, productive frontline employees who feel ownership of the customer relationship. In a shredding or records-management company, that frontline is, in large part, your driver.
In the companies I've worked with, drivers tend to fall along a spectrum. At one end is the Bin Picker: completes the route, minimal interaction, transactional mindset. In the middle is the Professional Operator: friendly, takes pride in the work, delivers consistent service. At the other end is what I call the Route Consultant: knows the accounts on their route, protects relationships, spots opportunities, and treats the route as a personal business.
Many companies have one or two Consultants who go there on their own. The strategic question is whether you can move drivers along that spectrum on purpose. I think the answer is yes, but it takes deliberate design across five components: clear expectations, simple conversation prompts, meaningful incentives, tracking and accountability, and recognition that builds identity.
If it isn't written down, it's harder to make it stick. Adding customer awareness and opportunity identification to your driver job description, your onboarding materials, and your performance review template gives the role the clarity it needs. Some operators are surprised when they audit their current driver job description and find it has not been meaningfully updated in years and contains little language about customers, growth, or observation.
One useful frame is to organize the role around four pillars: safety, service quality, customer awareness, and identifying opportunities. The fourth pillar is the one that's often underdeveloped. Telling a driver during onboarding that part of their job is to notice things and report them, and meaning it, gives them permission to engage in a way they may not have had before.
Drivers don't need to sell. They just need to ask. One of the bigger mistakes operators can make when rolling out a driver-engagement program is trying to turn drivers into salespeople. Most drivers don't want that role, and most customers don't want it either. What tends to work is teaching drivers four or five natural, low-pressure questions they can ask in the normal course of a service visit.
In the field, that might sound like:
• "Are you still happy with your service schedule?"
• "I noticed extra boxes by the bin. Are you doing a clean out?"
• "Is there anything else we can help with? I can have someone from our office reach out."
• "Do you know anyone else in the building who might benefit from our services?"
One important guardrail. The goal of these questions is to surface a lead, not to scope or close work in the field. Drivers should hand any expansion-of-service inquiry back to your sales or customer service team for proper intake and follow-up. The driver opens the door. The office walks the customer through it. That keeps things clean for the customer, the driver, and the operator.
Friendly. Natural. Helpful. Not salesy. The questions can go on a laminated card and get role-played in the morning huddle. The bar is not eloquence. It's consistency. A driver who asks one of these questions on every fifth stop will, by sheer volume, surface more opportunities in a month than the sales team is likely to find in a quarter.
Pizza parties don't change behavior in a sustained way. Neither do small spiffs and one-time bonuses. The behavioral economics here are well established and practical experience in our industry tends to confirm it: incentives that are too small, too occasional, or too disconnected from the action they're meant to reward usually get filed under "nice gesture" and forgotten.
What tends to work is a referral bonus large enough to matter. Many operators in our industry land in the $250 to $500 range per closed account in shredding and records management, paid quickly, paid publicly, and tied to a clear, simple rule. Some operators add a revenue-participation component for ongoing accounts. Whatever structure you choose, a useful test is this: would a driver tell their spouse about it? If the answer is no, the incentive may not be big enough.
It can help to pair the referral bonus with a broader driver scorecard that captures the full picture of the role: safety (vehicle inspection reports, violations), service (on-time stops, accuracy), professionalism (uniform, training), customer experience (feedback), and reliability (attendance). Tier the bonus, for example: top tier for scores of 90 to 100, strong bonus for 75 to 89, moderate for 50 to 74, and none below 50. Drivers earn bonuses based on observed behavior rather than guesswork, and the structure tells them clearly what "winning" looks like.
What gets measured tends to get repeated. Many CRMs in our industry are built primarily for outbound sales activity rather than inbound driver intelligence. A simple fix is to add a single category, such as "Driver Referral," and track three things per driver: leads generated, accounts closed, and revenue created. A monthly leaderboard in the dispatch office and recognition at the morning huddle go a long way.
Visibility is half the battle. The other half is closure. Few things kill a driver-engagement program faster than a driver flagging an opportunity that disappears into a black hole. Build a clear hand-off process between drivers and the sales team, ideally a same-day acknowledgment and a 48-hour first-contact commitment. When drivers see their leads turning into closed deals (and bonus checks), the behavior compounds.
Drivers want what most employees want: respect, ownership, and visibility. One of the more underrated levers in any driver program is public recognition for the right behaviors. Celebrate the new account a driver brought in. Celebrate the at-risk customer they saved. Celebrate the renovation they spotted that turned into an expansion contract. Read the stories aloud. Put the names on the wall.
This matters because of how identity drives behavior. There's a meaningful difference between someone who says "I'm just a driver" and someone who says "I manage this route." The second statement reflects ownership, accountability, and pride. It also reflects how that person is likely to behave on stop number 67 of the day, when they're tired, behind schedule, and they notice that the customer's lobby looks different than it did last month. The first person keeps driving. The second person asks a question.
People don't rise to incentives. They rise to expectations.
Designing the system is the easier part. Implementing it without it dying on the vine is harder. Five steps tend to make the difference.
First, explain the why. People generally don't buy into what they don't understand. Tell drivers, explicitly, why this matters to the company, why it matters to them personally, and how it connects to the growth and stability of their job. Frame it as professional development, not sales pressure.
Second, show what it looks like. Don't just tell them. Demonstrate the conversations. Role-play the questions. Have a senior driver or operations manager model the behavior on a ride-along. Many drivers haven't seen this done well; they need a picture.
Third, make it safe to try. The fear of "messing it up" is what keeps many drivers silent. Make it explicit that you don't expect perfection. You expect attempts. The driver who tries an awkward question and comes back with a referral has done the right thing, even if the delivery was clumsy. Confidence drives behavior.
Fourth, reinforce weekly. What gets repeated tends to become a habit. Build the conversation into your weekly driver meeting. Spend ten minutes every week reviewing what people heard, saw, and asked. Coach in small doses and do it consistently rather than only at quarterly or annual reviews.
Fifth, celebrate behavior, not just results. Behavior precedes results. Recognize the attempt before you can recognize the outcome. A driver who asked five questions this week and got zero referrals deserves the same coaching attention as the driver who happened to land a big purge job. Behavior is the leading indicator. Reward what you want more of.
Run the math for your own business. Take a modest illustrative example: ten drivers, each surfacing one closed referral per month, average new account value of $150 per month in recurring revenue. That's 120 new accounts per year, generating $216,000 in new annual recurring revenue from the same trucks, the same drivers, and the same routes. EBITDA multiples in our sub-sector vary widely by sub-vertical (records storage typically commands higher multiples than mobile shredding), revenue quality, customer concentration, geography, and broader market conditions. Even at a conservative multiple, recurring revenue of this kind can produce meaningful incremental enterprise value over time, without adding a truck, a route, or a salesperson.
Even at half that pace (one referral per driver every two months), the underlying ARR contribution remains material. The leverage is significant because customer interactions are already happening. You're paying for them anyway. The question is whether you're extracting any commercial intelligence from them.
A few traps to sidestep. Trying to turn drivers into aggressive salespeople tends to backfire with drivers and customers alike. Underinvesting in the sales-team handoff is demoralizing for drivers; nothing kills momentum faster than a lead that goes nowhere. Paying incentives without recognition leaves a lot of value on the table, since the public acknowledgment is often what changes behavior, more so than the bonus itself. And launching this as a one-time campaign and then abandoning it is a common failure mode. The companies that get sustained results are the ones that make this part of their operating rhythm: every week, every quarter, every year.
A few months after I started building this kind of program at our company, one of our drivers (I'll call him Mike) came back from a route and mentioned, almost in passing, that one of his customers had been stacking boxes next to the shred bin for two weeks. He said it looked like they were cleaning out a storage room. We followed through our normal sales process. It turned into one of the largest purge projects we did that year.
When I thanked Mike, his answer was the thing that has stuck with me: "I figured it was my job to look out for the account."
That, to me, is the difference. Not training. Not technology. Not compensation, on its own. Identity. Mike believed it was his job to look out for the account because we had, finally, designed his role and led him in a way that made that belief reasonable. The opportunity in your business probably isn't whether your drivers can do this. They can. The opportunity is whether you've built the system that lets them.
Drivers can be a cost center or a growth engine. The difference often isn't who you hired. It's how you lead them.
Jeff Green is Vice President, Business Development at Annex, a marketplace where businesses can shop and book secure document storage and destruction services online. He is a long-time operator in the secure information-management industry and a regular speaker at the i-SIGMA Conference, working with shredding, records-management, and ITAD businesses on operational design, sales-and-service alignment, and frontline leadership.
Reichheld, F. F., & Sasser, W. E. (1990). "Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services." Harvard Business Review, September–October 1990.
Reichheld, F. F. (2001). Loyalty Rules! How Today's Leaders Build Lasting Relationships. Harvard Business School Press. See also Bain & Company, "Prescription for Cutting Costs: Loyal Relationships."
Heskett, J. L., Jones, T. O., Loveman, G. W., Sasser, W. E., & Schlesinger, L. A. (1994). "Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work." Harvard Business Review (reissued 2008).
Heskett, J. L., Sasser, W. E., & Schlesinger, L. A. (1997). The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value. The Free Press.
Schmitt, P., Skiera, B., & Van den Bulte, C. (2011). "Referral Programs and Customer Value." Journal of Marketing, 75(1), 46–59.
Gallup. State of the Global Workplace Report. Gallup, Inc. (most recent edition).
Gallup. Q12 Meta-Analysis: The Relationship Between Engagement at Work and Organizational Outcomes. Gallup, Inc.
Harvard Business Review (2014). "The Value of Keeping the Right Customers." Amy Gallo.
American Trucking Associations. Driver turnover and retention industry data.
i-SIGMA. NAID AAA Certification standards and CSDS curriculum materials, available at isigmaonline.org.
Post Summary
Route drivers are often the most overlooked source of customer insight and growth in secure information management. With frequent, firsthand access to customer locations, drivers can spot retention risks, identify referral opportunities, and uncover expansion needs long before they appear in a CRM. When companies give drivers clear expectations, simple prompts, meaningful incentives, and recognition, they can turn everyday route activity into a powerful engine for revenue growth.