How to analyze freight forwarder partnerships

Not knowing how to analyze freight forwarder partnerships is a challenge that almost 100% of forwarding companies face at some point. And that is an essential matter to go through, after all, you need to know if you are making profitable forwarding partnerships.

If you are looking to improve your forwarder business, analyzing your current partnerships is the best way to start. This is how you will find out if you are making win-win forwarding partnerships. 

Steps to analyze your forwarder partnerships

Learning how to analyze freight forwarder partnerships is not an easy task, but following a few steps helps:

1. Gather information about each of your forwarder partners

To start it’s really important that you collect as much information as possible about each forwarder partner you make business with individually, for example: 

• The cargo expertise of your forwarder partner;
• The countries and cities that your partner works with;
• The type of services he offers;
• The year you became partners;
• The amount of business you’ve exchanged;
• The volume of business you are receiving from your partner, and the volume you are giving to your forwarder partner;
• What kind of services you have been exchanging with your partner;
• The profit you are making;
• How much business you have been exchanging per month. 

You can gather all this information in a spreadsheet, or you can make your life even easier by using an analysis tool for freight forwarders to help you with the data. Parnity has an amazing business intelligence tool for freight forwarders to analyze their partnerships, click here to know more about it.

2. Analyze your forwarder partnerships

After mapping your forwarder partnership’s data it’s time to start your freight forwarder analysis – compare the partners that offer you the same services in the same country or city. This is how you will know if you are indeed making win-win partnerships. 

For example, let’s say that you have two freight forwarder partners in Mexico, from forwarder A you are receiving no business, but you are giving them around 18 cargos per month. From forwarder B you are receiving around 16 cargos a month, but you are not giving them anything. 

So the smarter improvement would be to give the forwarder B the business you usually give to forwarder A, this way you would be making a win-win partnership with the forwarder B, which leads to more business generation.

This is not an easy analysis to make, especially when you don’t have your data gathered in a visual way. That is when an analysis tool for freight forwarders helps to escalate your business – once you have better visibility of your partnership’s data you can make faster improvements. 

Parnity’s analysis tool can easily help you with that, check out a snippet of our webinar Data-Driven Decisions in Your Forwarder that shows the same example presented above in a visual and faster way using Parnity’s analytics tool.

To learn more about how to make data-informed decisions inside your freight forwarding company read our blog with some insights, click here to read it.

3. Improve your forwarder business through partnerships 

It’s time to make decisions to improve your freight forwarding company, after you have analyzed your current partnerships it’s time to get down to business. 

Get in touch with your current forwarder partners and propose the improvements, if it’s the case for you to give your partner more business ask him if that is ok, or if it’s the other way around, show him how much you are sending to his forwarder, and how poor you receive from his company.

Besides that, you can always look for new opportunities in a new city or country, for example, if you understand that you are sending many ceramic commodities to Iran you can get in touch with freight forwarders in Iran and show them how great you are at dealing with this kind of commodity. 

Watch a brief example of how you can get to this conclusion. 

So, if you are still wondering how to know if your forwarder partner is profitable the answer is simple: by analyzing your partnerships. 

All thought, the process of analyzing your current partners is not that simple, but that is why using an analysis tool helps.

Tool to analyze your forwarder partnerships

Business data analysis can help forwarders to make strategic decisions, achieve goals and solve problems. That is why having a data analytics tool in your freight forwarding company will help you to improve your partnerships. 

A great tool for you to analyze your current forwarder partners is Parnity’s Partnership Analytics – a Business Intelligence tool created to help freight forwarders to visualize all the business data between their forwarder partners. This feature allows forwarders to understand if they are making win-win partnerships.

With Partnership Analytics you are able to view:

• The volume of cargo sent to your partner and the volume received
• The profit generated with that partner
• The amount of business you have exchanged by month
• Which are the criteria (modal/city/expertise) that you have more business exchanged

Benefits of using Parnity’s analysis tool: 

• Knowing what agents gives you more business so you can keep having a good relationship with them;

• Knowing which agents have been giving you routing orders, and you haven’t been sending them any, but to another one instead;

• Knowing if those agents you’ve been sending cargo are also giving you in return or not;

• Knowing which countries have you been moving more cargo and which ones you should improve;

• Paying more attention to small businesses that can be maintained, some can even grow bigger;

• Making the right decisions based on your own experience;

• Being prepared for meetings and conferences knowing everything about each partnership specifically so you know which agents you should ask for more businesses;

• Keeping your Business Development organized. What you see better, you see faster, and act even faster;

• Understanding what can be better regarding your partnerships in order to be more profitable.

To see how Parnity’s Partnership Analytics works watch the video below

After all, analyzing forwarder partnerships is beneficial?

Yes, yes, and yes! Learning how to analyze freight forwarder partnerships is the main way to start improving your forwarder business. Many forwarders think that to increase their business they need new forwarder partners and that is not true at all.

To start increasing your forwarder business generation start with your current partners, analyze them and then start the improvements. After you cover the partner’s ground you can start looking for new partners.