Truck Parking Club hits major milestone with 1,000 property locations across 46 states, providing 24,000 parking spaces for truckers nationwide. CEO Evan Shelley shares the company's journey and ambitious plans for expansion.
Here are 10 freight broker sales tips from some of the top minds in our industry.
P.S. If you're enjoying this newsletter, don't miss The FreightCaviar Podcast. Every Monday at 5 AM CT, we release a new episode featuring interviews with founders, executives, and industry leaders.
Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of interviewing some of the top leaders in our industry—founders who have built highly successful brokerages and key decision-makers at shippers.
Here are some of the best tips I’ve learned from them:
Focus on Sales Training
Marco Vargas-Avila, Sr. Domestic Transportation Manager at Dole, on the importance of thorough sales training:
“There are some brokerages that train their salespeople really well, and that comes across. You're a bit more polished. You come across as a bit more professional. But if you're just calling and you can tell that you're just trying to get lucky, hoping that you can give them some freight, it sets you apart, and not in a positive way.
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #141: How to Land Shippers.
Make the Calls (Smile & Dial)
Mikhail Rasner, CEO & President at MiRUnited, on the importance of consistent outreach:
“First thing you absolutely have to do is—you gotta pick up the phone, you have to start making the phone calls… There’s a lot of ways to structure your sales style, mine tends to be activity-based. I am the person that tends to be hammering the phone. That doesn’t mean that I’ll be pestering a shipper. It doesn’t mean you have to call the person ten times. It means you have to have a large enough capacity of names in order to be successful.”
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #114: Mikhail Rasner: CEO & President at MiRUnited.
Take on Tough Freight
Matt O'Mara, Founder and Owner of Whimsy Intermodal, on the importance of tackling difficult freight:
"We tell our customers, give us your most difficult freight, the things that nobody wants to deal with. Those are the lemons that we turn into lemonade, and that's how we've grown."
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #79: Whimsy Intermodal: Trucking Since 1996.
Kenny Lund, Executive Vice President at Allen Lund Company, on the value of handling difficult freight:
“Dad always taught us, ‘Hey, ask shippers for the most difficult lane. Don’t ask them about easy lanes. If you get their most difficult lanes to handle and you do a good job, then you’ll get the other stuff, the easy stuff.’”
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #108: Kenneth Lund: The Allen Lund Story Part 1.
Work Hard & Serve Well
Andrew Silver, Co-Founder of MoLo Solutions, on the importance of hard work and customer service:
"Anyone can do it and anyone can be successful if they do it the right way. You got to be really willing to work really, really hard. I mean, like really hard, at least the first couple of years we were working 15, 16, 17-hour days just grinding to get the freight moved and get the customers. You just got to find a way to get in with some customers and service them really well."
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #58: Andrew Silver: The CEO of MoLo Solutions.
Embrace Competition
Steve Cox, President of Steam Logistics, on the drive to compete and grow:
"I love competing. Some company is getting a little bigger than we are? I don’t like it, I go, 'Why aren’t we growing this fast?' I love competition; the industry is so big—if you’re worried about competition in this industry, you might as well not be in it."
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #97: Growing a Freight Brokerage to $765 Million in Revenue.
Winning a new customer is just part of the process…retaining them is even harder! Even the best salesperson or the most service minded person can still lose a customer. It could be another broker outbidding their rates, or it could be something outside of the Freight Agent’s control, like poor billing practices.
Maintaining excellent customer support from your entire company can be the key to sustaining great relationships with your customers. If you want to learn how Trinity Logistics supports the customers and relationships for our Freight Agents, click here.
Find and Nurture Quality Leads
Nate Cross, Co-Host of Freight 360 Podcast, on the importance of proactive lead generation:
“People are either doing it wrong or they're not doing it enough, if at all, and they think that there's just this load board full of shippers that need loads moved, but that’s not the reality. You've got to go out there and find an effective way to generate good leads and then prospect them for the long term until you can convert those folks to customers.”
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #125: The Story Behind Freight 360 with Nate Cross & Benjamin Kowalski.
Build Relationships with People You Like
Matt Walsh, the number 1 agent at Echo Global Logistics, on the importance of likability in sales:
"There's the normal Sales 101 stuff that applies to any industry, and that's, you know, people want to work with people they like."
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #26: The #1 Sales Agent at Echo Global to Being on Shark Tank.
Focus on Your Core Strengths
Will Jenkins, CEO/Founder of Journey & Former Co-Founder of MoLo Solutions, on the value of specializing:
"Many companies fail because they attempt to excel at too many things. In a meeting, I can confidently tell you what we're best at. If you ask about something else, I'll be upfront about it not being our current strength, though that doesn’t mean we won’t consider it in the future."
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #133: The Will Jenkins Story: From Selling Cutco Knives to Co-Founding MoLo Solutions.
Tim Higham, CEO of AscendTMS, on the importance of focus:
“I’m a big believer in not chasing too many shiny things. I see it all the time, especially in small companies, where they try to chase every penny of revenue they can. I’m a big believer in: work on your core product, polish it, love it, sing to it, and if it works, fantastic. But if it doesn’t work, quickly toss it aside or start something else. Don’t chase five things at once hoping that you can master all five.”
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #99: Tim Higham: The CEO & Founder of AscendTMS.
Know Your Numbers
Kevin Nolan, Founder of Nolan Transportation Group, on the importance of tracking performance:
"Know your stats... like back in the day I used to carry around baseball cards because the internet didn't exist, but if I went to go watch the Braves I wanted to know what Dale Murphy's batting average was last year... there's no hiding in any of my businesses. You have to come in and produce, so every day our numbers are posted."
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #160: Kevin Nolan, Founder & Former CEO, Nolan Transportation Group (NTG).
Leverage Technology
Mark Riskowitz, a California-based shipper, on the value of tech-savvy partnerships:
"I'm always a fan of partners that leverage technology to make ours and their life easier. So I think first and foremost, the goal is to steer away from the more traditional purely email-based partners that obviously still flood the market today."
Click here to listen to our entire interview: #139: Interviewing a Shipper.
Bonus: Shippers vs. Brokers: Key Differences
Eric Williams, Logistics, Domestic First Mile at Target, posted on LinkedIn about the key differences between the shipper and broker spaces. He highlights distinctions in areas like relationship-building, network optimization, cost vs. capacity balancing, planning, and market intelligence.
Check out Eric's insights on the key differences between how shippers and brokers operate, by clicking here.
During a TIA-hosted media call, new TIA President and CEO Chris Burroughs unpacked what these changes could mean for brokers, carriers, and the broader supply chain.
Keep up with the freight broker world in 5 minutes.
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