Prospecting for new business is a key part of a freight brokerage business. There are numerous ways for a freight broker to prospect. While there will always be a debate on which is the most effective, the top freight brokers use multiple prospecting methods to land new customers and increase their gross margins by mastering their freight broker sales pitch.
For most freight brokers, sending cold emails is in their mix of prospecting methods. It’s not an easy task to master though. Building curiosity, while keeping your message short and compelling, is much harder than it looks.
The good news, though, is that by following these five tips to fine-tune your freight broker sales pitch, it becomes much easier. Plus, it only takes a few tweaks to start seeing better conversion results for your cold email campaigns.
What to Consider When Refining Your Sales Pitch
The subject line
If your email isn’t opened, then the rest of the cold email tips below won’t matter at all in getting your freight broker sales pitch seen. Your subject line is your headline. It is the best sentence of your email. What does this mean? This sentence (or part of a sentence) has to build enough curiosity for your prospect to open your email to learn more about your idea.
Two easy tips for getting better results immediately is to start your headline with why or how and include a number. Why and how drives curiosity and a firm number for return on investment, savings or service level is a concrete detail. An example would be, “How changing pickup dates can save you 22% on your shipments.” It’s not a fantastic headline, but it’s a start to getting the recipient to open the email and read your freight broker sales pitch.
Keep it short
Why have radio and television ads always been 30 seconds in length? It’s because 30 seconds is the average length of our attention spans. If you aren’t building interest in 30 seconds with your freight broker sales pitch, then it’s not the amount of content, it’s the quality of content. For emails, a good rule of thumb is 120 to 140 words in length. Anything over 140 words and you start to lose the reader with a wall of words.
Remember, cold emails are about selling the next step in the process. It’s not about compressing the next five steps in the sales process into a simple yes or no.
It’s not about you
Your cold emails in your freight broker sales pitch should never be about your company, or its products and services. Your prospects don’t really care how long your company has been around, or how many carriers are in your network, or how you claim to be able to cover any and all loads.
Like all of us, prospects care about their own problems. The more immediate the problem, the more they care about it. This problem could be trucking capacity, rates or service levels to name just a few. You might not know the exact issue, especially if you are building a format for a mass email, but you must write about a common problem in as much detail as possible to drive value for your eventual solution.
One call to action
While your email is about your prospect’s problem, the last sentence or two has to focus on your solution and a call to action in your freight broker sales pitch. Just like any other close during a sale, you have to ask to move forward to the next step. It’s easy to include multiple calls to action. It happens when we pack in too much information in an email. Multiple calls to action create confusion and uncertainty, which is a freight broker sales pitch deal-killer. It’s much easier to delete your email than it is to take the time to decipher how to learn more about your solution. The only thing worse than having multiple calls to action is to not have one at all. How does your prospect move forward without a sense of urgency to contact you?
A good P.S. is powerful
Hardly anyone will read your freight broker sales pitch email word for word. Prospects do not have the time or interest to read a stranger’s email. One way to beat this is with a fantastic P.S. at the end of your email. It’s estimated that 90% of prospects will read your P.S. before reading the first word of your email. You should use a P.S. as your second subject line. The original subject line will get your email opened and the P.S. will give you the best shot at getting your email read. So, what makes a good P.S.? It should be a short two sentences. The first is a summary of your prospect’s problem. The second should build urgency for your solution. It’s difficult to master, but once you start using a P.S., you will immediately start seeing better conversion results.
How SONAR Aids Freight Brokers in Their Sales Pitches
FreightWaves SONAR provides the fastest freight market data in the world, across all major modes of traffic. The SONAR platform is the only freight forecasting and freight analytics platform that offers real-time freight market intelligence-driven off actual freight contract tenders. SONAR has proprietary data that comes from actual load tenders, electronic logging devices and transportation management systems, along with dozens of third-party global freight and logistics-related index providers like TCA Benchmarking, Freightos, ACT, Drewry and DTN. Whether you’re working from the office or from home, SONAR can provide you the data and intelligence you need to stay ahead of your competitors. Find out more about FreightWaves SONAR for brokers.
