Building Relationship With Carriers

Umm don't suck? Be somewhat personable? Have decent freight? If your freight is meh you're going to really struggle to find regulars. People are taking that freight to accomplish something specific, and that something specific doesn't come up much. Nobody plans on taking a ####ty rate in advance. Sometimes an above average rate with a lousy shipper/commodity is actually a disguised ####ty rate.

People do repeat business because you have something to offer them basically. If you don't... Yeah they forget you were ever alive pretty quickly.

 

Give me a steady good rate and pay me in a timely manner and I will be calling you when I am looking for the next (repeat) load. Get a bunch of good carriers for your lanes so you rarely need to find new ones because I do this with a lot of customers and I can't keep them all happy all the time but not just one of them has the loads when I am in their area all the time either.

If you low ball me or otherwise I know every time I hear your voice the offer is not going to be something I will likely be interested in it won't take long before I just tell you all my capacity is booked and won't even hear your offer.... I don't want to hear "it's light weight" or "super easy 1 pick 1 drop" or whatever other nonsense and then for some reason I should accept a low rate to haul it. There is no shortage of that. When that happens I wonder did you underbid the contract or are you taking a huge cut? Not that it's any of my business really, but when I am consistently low balled and never work with you, when the tables turn I will in turn tell you a ridiculous rate. At which point I am usually berated for asking for too much... at this point I don't care if we ever work together or not. It's a what goes around comes around kind of thing.

 

I should add to that

Yes some markets go up and down. I'd rather the steady good stuff rather than screw around on the up and down wave. As long as you remember it when it turns in your favor we can work for the same rate every day of the year. I find the saying of the devil you know is better than the one you don't holds true here.

 

Treat your carriers well. You've got to remember that this is a "team sport". You can have all the freight in the world, but if you have a reputation for ####ting on your drivers, they're not going to want to move it for you. @boredsocial has been doing this longer than I have, and he seems to have a pretty good sense of how things go.

Sometimes you need to remind your customers of that, as well. You should have a good idea of what's reasonable, and what's not, as far as timelines for pick-up and delivery. Just little things to remember...

 

Just like we don't want someone who constantly low balls us you shouldn't want shippers that are only looking for best price.

You can sell best price but you won't get best service. It gets even worse when you promise a good rate then it falls apart and you go in the carriers bad books. Doesn't sound like a shipper you really want or need.

 

If you don't post to load boards then how are you supposed to start new relationships? There are fantastic carriers on load boards as well as crap. Every relationship is new until it's not.

Make sure and have your customer notify you if the load is covered. Ideally you want to be their only resource for moving their loads, but that takes a lot of time to build the trust and loyalty.

You'll figure it out. Like the other guys said, pay good and have good freight. If the shipper pays bad or has bad freight then fire them. Less headache for everyone.