Where to Find Shippers for Your Freight Broker Business?

 

If you are a broker, time should be your money. When navigating the driver's surfaces, avoiding bad actors and doing a lot of manual work, you need to cover a lot of costs in less time. This means less time looking for new clients that match your parameters.

You are completely aware from the competition in the business but there are few of the simple ways to beat the competition and thus improve your end result. If you are ready to be creative and put a little work ahead, it can pay off in the long run.

Let’s highlight a few major ways to search for the right shoppers in your freight broker business:

1.      Uncover different shipping locations for your current clients

You have your regular customers whom you can trust to deliver quality cargo. Have you ever wondered if they have subsidiaries or other departments of these companies that need to move cargo?

It's easy to get connect online, simply find their rest of the locations, and see if they suitably match the channels you work in or even where you have relationships with rest of the operators. Talk to your contact person to see if there are other needs in their company.

Depending on the basis of the relationship, you can get some of the recommendations or at least some performances from the best person through the shipper’s directory.

2. Make some friendly calls

Making friendly warm calls might not be a fun for some people, because you never know if the other side of person is interested to listen to you or not. But give it a try and go for it!

3. Request references

Recommendations from shipper’s directory list are good tools and often go unnoticed. As the industry grows, it may also be a small circle of people who decide which freight to use.

A recommendation from one satisfied customer to another potential customer provides confirmation and turns your cold call into a hot call.

4. Find similar competitive companies

This can be a lot effective in case you have been running through a certain cargo which you are about to transport. Google can be your good friend in this journey. You can straight away search online by the freight type or the industry with which you can develop a strong potential of clients to reach out with.

5. Contact the customers of your customers

How do freight brokers find shippers from shipper contact list? You can also get in touch with the customer of your old customers. If you are shipping the raw materials from one specific company to another one, you can choose to produce the raw materials as the parts and simply send them elsewhere.

This can be an opportunity to locate cargo in areas where you have already established shipping routes and transport connections.

6. Sending direct mail

You can also use direct mail to reach carriers looking for a cargo seller. You can buy mailing lists from senders and filter the list by the ones you want to redirect. Be sure to send several offers or letters each month to keep your message current, followed by phone calls.