Shippers are facing a dramatically different freight market, one many are ill-equipped to handle. With new staff lacking experience in tight capacity environments and a prolonged supply-side driven market, traditional &#x27;post-and-pray&#x27; strategies no longer work. Learn why securing favorable rates now, evaluating routing guides, and strengthening carrier partnerships are crucial for survival. ⁠Follow the FreightWaves Today Podcast⁠ ⁠Other FreightWaves Shows⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rates Rising, Capacity Tight: Is Your Shipping Team Ready for This Market?

FreightCasts

# Full Transcript

**Podcast:** FreightCasts

## Transcript

Welcome back to Freightways. Today, we're not going to have a show tomorrow, so I'm going to make sure that we talk about the things that are important. Julie, before we go, there's been a big conversation internally. You yesterday had the opportunity to visit with a couple dozen of our major clients. One of the things that you brought up earlier internal was the fact that shippers are underprepared for this market. Many of the shipper audiences have not seen a cycle where carriers have the advantage. They've not seen – we have the

the combination of fuel prices going absolutely hyperbolic and contract and spot. What is your general sense of that? And international disruptions, and they're trying to deal with all of those at the same time. And Zach and I have actually talked about it in the past, even before I had this meeting yesterday, and how we can better serve our clients is that many of them have – maybe their executives have been through a cycle like this before, but they don't have a very tenured staff. So their staff maybe has never been in a market where it was actually very hard to procure trucks.

So they're really having to retrain them on that, right? They've only worked in the last three years in this down market, or they came from procurement with no transportation experience, and they're really having to get a very quick education on what's happening in the market and why and how to deal with that. And then I think some of the shippers who I spoke with took it even further yesterday saying that not only am I training my staff because I've been through this, but they may not have.

I feel like our brokers can and need to do the same thing because carrier reps are usually not lifers, right? They do that job for a few years, and many of them have only been covering freight in an environment where it was hard to get freight, but it wasn't hard to cover it. And now you can't post and pray. You have to really build those relationships and make outbound phone calls, even setting the regulation aside that also doesn't allow you to post and pray, but the market as well.

So they were saying they were feeling that from their brokers, and they were feeling that from their own staff. So hopefully Sonar Data can help in the context we do prepare them with some education for that crew. But yeah, they're up against an uphill battle for sure. It's a very different market, Zach. Like just the changes and the complexities of the market. You know, we are hearing that our channel checks say that are telling us that there's less freight being posted openly in open marketplaces and the load boards. A lot of that was sort of security driven. Now it's compliance driven.

That's the highest risk carrier, the one you don't know that you haven't worked with. How are you helping? What are you telling shippers that they should be thinking about and preparing for? Yeah, I think, I mean, everything ...

Rates Rising, Capacity Tight: Is Your Shipping Team Ready for This Market?

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.

Rates Rising, Capacity Tight: Is Your Shipping Team Ready for This Market?

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.