{{first_name | default: "Hey"}} —
I was in Playa del Carmen earlier this month for TWIG Talk.
If you've never been to a freight forwarder network event, here's the format: 350 owners and BD folks from around the world, in a hotel, doing back-to-back 20-minute meetings for three days. Then a few keynotes. Then drinks.
I gave one of the keynotes — "From Referrals to Revenue." It went well. People came up after.
But the moment that mattered wasn't on stage.
It was a hallway conversation with a forwarder who told me, basically: "I know I should be doing outbound. I've tried three times. It never works. I think it just doesn't work for our business."
That conversation has happened to me, in slightly different forms, probably 50 times in the last year.
Outbound works for freight forwarders. I have proof, my clients have proof. But almost everyone trying it on their own is doing 3–4 specific things wrong that guarantee it won't work — and they conclude the channel is broken instead of the execution.
I'm going to spend a lot of issues unpacking exactly what those things are.
The first issue drops in the next few days. It's about the gap between what gets celebrated at events like TWIG and what actually fills a pipeline.
Talk soon.
— Jose