Improve your forwarder business through partnerships

It’s common among freight forwarders to think that the only way to expand and improve their business is by looking for new forwarder partnerships. However, there are other ways in which you can improve your forwarder business through partnerships…

Building a relationship with your freight partner takes a lot of effort, but it’s also essential to the growth of your freight forwarding company. Many benefits can come from a good partnership, such as:

• Increase business exchange;
• Better support in critical situations;
• A deeper understanding of the requirements;
• Less price variation.

3 simple steps to improve your business through your freight partnerships

In your freight forwarding business, you need to be mindful of not only how you manage your clients, but also how you deal with the partnerships you need to make to deliver your shipments. This can be an important way to improve your business!

Here are 3 steps to improve your forwarder business through partnerships and not leave money on the table:

1. Choose your new partners carefully

If you are a forwarder, you know how difficult it is to find freight forwarders to work among the thousands of freight forwarding companies on the market. In fact, one of the most difficult parts of the forwarder’s job is finding qualified freight forwarders to work with.

For this reason, the choice of a potential freight partner should be based on your company’s analysis of the partner you intend to do business with. 

Analyzing potential partners is an important step to ensure that you are choosing a partner that has the expertise you are looking for. 

You can start your analysis by going to the forwarder’s website and checking everything on it, reading about their company, the services they offer, which previous partners they have worked with, their certifications, their contact number, etc.

In the busy routine of a freight forwarder, the analysis process of potential partners can be very time-consuming. However, it is indispensable to make sure that you are choosing qualified forwarders that align with your company’s needs to work with. 

That’s why Parnity has made it easy for you! Search for freight partners on Parnity in a matter of minutes – look for freight forwarders in your target location and use the search filters to refine the results by type of service or logistics certifications, for example.

By accessing that potential freight partner’s profile, you can view key information about the company, the forwarder’s validation documents, and many other crucial details for your analysis. 

Click here to learn more about how to find qualified freight partners with Parnity’s help.

2. Organize your current partners through a system

Having the information about your partners consolidated in one place can streamline your team’s work, leading to improved business and faster decision-making. If you want to improve your forwarder through partnerships, having your partner’s information gathered in a bunch of spreadsheets and emails should no longer be an option for you.

It’s time to start thinking about using a forwarder management system.

With the help of freight management software, your company can centralize, optimize, and streamline communication within the company, along with quoting processes.

Certainly, one of the most challenging things within a forwarding company is keeping track of all the freight partnerships. However, by using a freight partnership management system, forwarders can not only keep track of all current and potential partners but also know which partners to consider for a service and save time when looking for freight forwarders to quote.

If you don’t have a freight partnership management system in mind yet, but understand the importance of one, a great option is Parnity’s management system.

Parnity’s add-on feature for forwarder management – called MyPartners – is a solution for forwarders to stop using spreadsheets and start improving the management of their partnerships. It’s a new solution in the logistics market for you to manage your forwarder partners in the most intuitive and enjoyable way.

Check out everything you can do using Parnity’s tool in the video below:

3. Analyze the quality of your forwarder partnerships

Having all aspects of your forwarding company’s processes controllable through an analytics system provides not only the ability to streamline and optimize work processes but also the potential for better strategies.

Analyzing your current partnerships is also a way to start improving your forwarder business through partnerships.

Learning how to analyze forwarder partnerships is not an easy task. Start by gathering information about each of your partners (it’s very important to gather as much information as possible about each forwarder partner you do business with).

Once you have mapped out your forwarder partnership data, compare partners offering the same services in the same country or city. This is how you know if you are making win-win partnerships. 

However, when you don’t have the data collected in a visual way, this analysis can get even more complex. Therefore, use an analytics tool for freight forwarders to help you with this – once you have better visibility into your partnership data, you can make improvements more quickly.

Parnity’s analytics tool can easily help you with this, Partnership Analytics is a Business Intelligence tool developed by Parnity to help you, freight forwarder, visualize all business data regarding your forwarding partners.

Partnership Analytics provides the analytical depth you need to improve your partnerships and allows you to easily and intuitively view a variety of information. Click here to learn more.

PRO TIP: don’t forget to pay attention to the relationship you are building with your partners!

Thinking about the kind of relationship you are having with your current partners is very important for you to know if there is anything you can do to improve your forwarding business.

The best way to do this is to turn your forwarding company to be customer-centric, meaning that all of your actions will be done thinking of the best interest of your forwarder customers.

For example, make sure that you and your freight partner are always on the same page about the business you will be exchanging, and clarify all necessary documentation/regulations. You can also establish an official channel for exchanging information to avoid misunderstandings.

Probably one of the most important points for improving your forwarder business through partnerships is to keep a constant follow-up with your freight partners. Make sure you always keep in touch with them, ensure that the cargo got there well, and don’t forget to give and ask for feedback.

Let’s get to work

As you can see there are many ways to improve your forwarder business through partnerships.

Now it’s time to put everything you’ve learned into practice! Remember that Parnity has many tools that can help you in this process and if feel the need you can always come back to this article whenever you need some guidance.