3 tips to improve your forwarder business

Growing a business is the goal of every forwarder company, however, making improvements inside a freight forwarder business is never easy. Sometimes you can be blindsided by how you are used to operating, leaving you stuck in the same place. Thinking of that, here are 3 tips to improve your forwarder business. 

1. Marketing actions – take it to the next level

Your freight marketing strategies can’t be the ones left out of your business workflow. Many forwarders don’t take marketing seriously, but that is how you are going to take your freight forwarding business to the next level. After all, who is not seen is not remembered.

The first marketing action you need to take inside your forwarding company is with your current partners. Stop for a moment, and make the following questions to yourself: 

• How are you managing your relationship with them? 
• Are you getting any feedback, good or bad? 
• Are you letting them know that they are your priority?

If your answers were no, then let me walk you through some tips on how you should improve your marketing strategies.

• Maintain relationship with your partners:

To maintain a relationship with your active forwarder partners it is important that you keep in touch with them at least once every two weeks. For example, you can send an email to them saying how successful your work week was and how they were part of it. Show them the numbers of cargos you delivered, to how many cities or countries, and by the end leave a note – that was only possible because we have you as a partner. Let them know how your business is going and how they are a part of its success, let them feel included and seen for their hard work. 

• Ask for feedback:

Another super important freight marketing action is to ask for feedback, after each service you deliver send an email or a WhatsApp to your forwarder partner asking him how he felt about your work, and if there is anything you can do better next time.

• Partnership reactivation:

Thinking of your inactive forwarder partners, the ones that you haven’t been doing business with in a while, but you would like to, you can send an email or a WhatsApp message saying that you miss doing business with them and if there is anything you can help them with. 

It’s important to understand why you haven’t been exchanging business with those partners, so ask them if something happened, if by any chance they were unsatisfied with your services and how could you assist them in the best way possible.

To know more about how you can increase your forwarder partners retention check out this blog post.

Now that you have taken care of the marketing strategy for your current forwarder partners is time to think about your potential forwarder partners. And that means – social media strategy for your freight forwarding company.

• Social media strategy:

Having social media accounts for your freight business is important so you can be seen by forwarders around the world that might be looking for new forwarder partners. In 2020, there were 3.6 billion people using social media, according to Statista, so I guess you can see the importance, right?

You can start the social media strategy inside your forwarding business by gathering some ideas of what you would like to talk about, after you’ve mapped that it’s time to think about which social media you would like to be part of. After you’ve done that it’s time to plan and execute.

Learn how to start your forwarder’s social media strategy and all the tips to do it on our blog social media strategy for freight forwarders, click here to read.

2. Build a solid relationship with your current forwarder partners

It’s common to think that getting new forwarder partners is the way to improve and grow a freight business. However, improving your current freight forwarding partnerships is actually key to growing your forwarder company. 

Building a relationship with your freight forwarder partner requires a lot of effort and it should start from day 1 when you make the first contact. Bear in mind that a forwarder company with a customer-centric approach will guarantee the partner’s success. After all, the happier your forwarder partners are with your services the better are the chances of them doing business with you again and recommending you to other freight forwarders. 

To learn more about customer-centric strategies for forwarder business read our blog.

Here are a few tips for you to ensure a good forwarder business partnership

• Agree on expectations – make sure you and your forwarder partner are on the same page about the services you will be exchanging. Make sure to clarify all the documentation needed and regulations.

• Establish an official channel of communication – it’s common to exchange emails, messages, phone calls, and much more in a business. But to avoid misunderstandings it’s important that you establish an official channel to exchange information.

• Get to know each other – relationships work best when we know who you are working with, so let your partners know your staff, and get to know theirs.

• Make sure to follow up – be sure to get feedback from your forwarder partners, and let them know yours. 

3. Forwarder partners management

Last but not least, our last tip to improve your forwarder business is partnership management. You might think it doesn’t help, however, consolidating the information about your partners in a single place can optimize your team’s work, leading to an improved business and faster decision making. 

Having your partner’s information gathered in a bunch of spreadsheets and emails should not be an option for you anymore, if you truly want to improve your forwarder business you need to start thinking about using a freight forwarder management system.

With help from freight management software, your forwarder company can centralize, optimize and streamline communication inside the business, along with the quotation processes, and the decision making. The more consolidated the information of your partners is, the faster your team can work on it, leading to faster decision making and more business. 

A great option for a freight management system is Parnity – its CRM for forwarder partners – called MyPartners – is a solution for freight forwarders to stop using spreadsheets and start improving their management. It is a new solution in the logistics market for you to be able to manage your forwarder partners in the most intuitive and enjoyable way.

Parnity’s management partnering system can be used for free, to know more about how it can help you click here. 

To sum up

Remember establishing improvements inside your forwarder company is not an easy and fast process, so start from the beginning. Organize your marketing strategies while you work on your partnerships relationship, and then you think about a management solution for your freight company. 

No need to rush, it’s better to get things done properly than to make a bunch of changes not well executed, this way you’ll probably not have any results.