Like most guru’s say in any realm in business, 90% of your success comes from your mindset and your execution of the basics. The remaining 10% is your actual skills and ability to deliver what you promised to your clients. Your success as a freight broker is no different, however with all of the misinformation out there about the reality of freight broker sales, there are a lot of freight broker’s going about their sales with the completely wrong strategy. Especially at the beginning.
In this video/article we’re going to cover one of the most detrimental sales mistakes that I see in new brokers and new agents trying to get ahead in the industry. This mistake has nothing to do with your ability to sell and everything to do with WHO you are trying to sell to.
What is the biggest sale’s mistake freight broker’s make?
The best way to illustrate this mistake, rather than just tell you is to tell you a story about the beginning days of my own brokerage. Now this was run by my parent’s at the time as I had just been born, back in 1992, you can imagine there was no guidebook or resources about freight brokering like you are reading on this page.
Anyway, with a small background in freight our brokerage was able to secure a rather large customer. With only two people running and managing the operations, this customer started to take up a majority of the resources. With 10-15 loads per week, on paper, the brokerage was rather prosperous. Profits were high, carriers were happy, and the brokerage experienced its first taste of momentum.
It’s something I hope you all get to experience, when you can go to work, do what you love and really tell yourself “I can do this”.
After a few weeks of servicing this large account, my parent’s who were running the show started receiving slower requests from the client until one day out of nowhere they didn’t receive any communication at all. They shook this off not thinking anything of it, until the same thing happened for the next 5 days…then 14 days…then 1 month.
After so long, we called the client on their cell phone only to find out that the customer, our largest (and only) client, was bought out suddenly by an industry titan and immediately shut down. This put this prosperous cash flowing account to a screeching halt and with that, the stresses of starting from scratch took over.
It was a horrifying experience, so I’ve been told…I was only 1 year old at the time.
From this experience came one of the most important lessons that I was taught very early on and I continue to pass on to every broker, mentor, agent etc. that crosses my path with questions about sales.
What is the most important Freight Broker Sales Lesson?
The most important lesson a freight broker or agent can learn is that you should always have multiple small to medium size shippers as a foundation of sales, before pursuing larger enterprise level accounts.
To this day in our own brokerage, our rule is that 1 account can never account for more than 15 % of our total sales. If they do, then we are either not growing fast enough, or our sales people are not soliciting enough new accounts, no matter how you look at it, it’s a problem.
A problem that we work to fix immediately.
One of the most important lessons I drive home to all of my students is that you should not even entertain a large shipping account until you have at least 3-5 smaller accounts that can give you a consistent source of profit.
This creates a cushion or “insurance policy” in case your larger accounts ever disappear which happens more often than you think.
Do this, and I can guarantee that not only will your success rate be higher on your sales calls, but you will feel safer, you will develop your skills faster and you will have a more successful freight brokerage.
Do not waste your time, energy and resources going after the same accounts that every other freight broker and agent is looking to break into. Avoid the competition and pursue the profitable work that the other’s ignore.
I show everyone exactly how to do this and more in my Freightskills Academy which is currently accepting new students who want to work closer with me to grow their freight brokerage or agency.
P.S. Whenever you’re ready… here are 3 ways I can help you grow your Freight Brokerage:
1. Join our Freight Broker Accelerator and get RISK FREE training If you’d like to work with me directly on your brokerage growth plan Check out the Freight Broker Accelerator the number 1 brokerage training program on the internet. Join the Freight Skills Academy Risk Free for 30 Days
2. Watch my free Webinar It’s the roadmap to growing your freight brokerage past 6-figures: Watch our FREE Webinar
3. Join the Freight Broker Network and connect with Brokers who are scaling too. It’s our new Facebook community where smart broker’s learn to get more income, impact, and independence.: Join Our Free Group
