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What freight buyers actually check before they enquire

Procurement teams look you up long before they call. Four things they check, and what happens when they find nothing.

What freight buyers actually check before they enquire

By the time a shipper sends you an enquiry, they have usually already decided you are worth the email. That decision happened somewhere you cannot see.

A logistics manager with a problem does not start with a tender. They start with a search, a LinkedIn look, a chat with someone who did the same lane last year.

Four checks come up again and again. None of them are hard to pass. Most forwarders fail at least two.

One: can you actually do their freight

Not whether you offer air, sea and road. Whether you have moved their commodity, on their lane, at their volume.

A buyer importing pharmaceutical product from Mumbai is looking for the words temperature control, GDP compliance and Mumbai. If your site says global freight solutions across all modes, you have given them nothing to match against and they move on.

This is why lane pages and commodity pages earn their keep. They are boring to write and they are the pages that get read.

Specific beats impressive. A buyer wants recognition, not range.

Two: who are the people

Freight is bought from people. The buyer clicks through to LinkedIn to see who they would be dealing with, and they are looking for two things: that the people exist, and that they have done this a while.

A team page with real names, real roles and profiles that are actually filled in does more work than any amount of copy about your values. An empty profile with a grey silhouette raises a question you never get to answer.

It costs nothing to fix. It is still the most commonly skipped item on this list.

Three: is this business still going

This is the check nobody talks about. A cautious buyer is looking for signs of life, particularly if they are about to put freight worth more than your annual profit into your hands.

Things they notice:

  • Last LinkedIn post eighteen months ago.
  • Copyright 2019 in the website footer.
  • A news page whose newest item is a Christmas message from a previous decade.
  • Companies House filings that are late.

Any one of these on its own is survivable. Together they suggest a business that has stopped, and procurement is paid to avoid that risk.

Four: the paperwork

Accreditations and memberships are proxy trust and they are searched for by name. BIFA, AEO, IATA, FORS, ISO 9001, ISO 14001, GDP, TAPA. If you hold them, they should be findable in text on your website, not only as a row of logo images.

Insurance levels, standard trading conditions and a named compliance contact all reduce friction for the person who has to justify choosing you internally.

Make it easy to say yes to you in a meeting you are not in.

What to do about it this month

  1. Search your own company name and your top three lanes. Look at what a buyer sees, not what you know is behind it.
  2. Fill in every client-facing LinkedIn profile properly. Headline, photo, About, current role.
  3. Add or update the footer year, the newest news item and one recent post. Three signs of life.
  4. Write one lane page for the lane you most want more of.
  5. Put your credentials in words, in the page copy, where search engines and buyers can both read them.

None of that is a marketing campaign. It is removing the reasons a buyer quietly decides not to contact you.