For brokers, winning bids without a household name can prove difficult. This is especially true for growing brokers that are still working to scale their businesses in today’s challenging freight market. A powerful combination of persistence and partnerships can help.
In order to win bids, a broker must first capture a shipper’s attention. Specialization is one of the most effective ways brokers can do just that. Denim Head of Product Sean Smith has found that the most successful brokers that partner with the factoring company often set themselves apart through a combination of location, commodities and special abilities.
By focusing on a niche market, brokers instantly become bigger fish in smaller ponds. This also gives growing brokers the opportunity to perfect a more specialized set of skills without taking their attention away from other demands.
While it can be easy to become disheartened when trying to scale a brokerage in a volatile market, this type of persistence and specialization really do pay off. The trick is making every relationship with shippers count and staying optimistic about the future.
“If you get an opportunity, hold it close and provide the best customer service as possible. There’s always potential to win more business from a single shipper or leverage their testimonial to win more business,” Smith said.
Once a broker wins a bid, it is crucial to provide a top-notch experience for the shipper. Partnering with a trusted factoring company like Denim is one of the simplest ways to boost customer satisfaction quickly.
When brokers partner with Denim, they are able to offer a higher level of support and flexibility to shippers, including high-value perks like back-office support. In fact, by leveraging the tools available to them through their partnership with Denim, brokers can utilize their back office as a lever to win business instead of treating it as an afterthought.
Partnering with Denim gives brokers a competitive edge due, in large part, to the company’s technology-forward approach to reimagining factoring and payments.
“We are a tech company first, and we use that to power the factoring business,” Smith said.
This tech-first approach allows brokers to utilize a whole suite of solutions that would be difficult to access on their own — including reporting, visibility and automation tools. These solutions help brokers run a healthier business by creating greater transparency and reducing the number of fires they have to put out on a day-to-day basis.
The level of support that growing brokers can access through Denim makes it easier to win business against larger, more established brokers without jeopardizing the things that make smaller brokers so great in the first place — particularly flexibility.
“With much larger companies, there is more push and pull,” Smith said. “Smaller companies are more nimble and able to meet the shipper where they are.”
To succeed in today’s market, brokers must leverage the benefits inherent to their operations while also embracing partnerships that allow them to offer additional value and better service to customers.
With persistence, this strategy will pay off.