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Episode 57: Jordan Reber, Building Relationships

Released on
June 5, 2025
Key Takeaways
  • Genuine relationship-building is different from relationship-maintaining. Most freight reps do the latter. The former requires investing in people before they are clients or before you need anything from them.
  • Follow contacts' career moves and reach out when relevant events happen in their professional lives. This signals genuine interest rather than transactional contact when you need something.
  • The freight professionals who have strong networks when they need them invested consistently before the need arose. The difference between cold calling and calling for introductions is almost always explained by prior relationship investment.
  • Relationships started when you have a load to cover or when a contact becomes a decision-maker have the sequence reversed. The relationship needs to precede the business opportunity.
  • Contacts consistently distinguish between genuine relationship investment and performative check-ins, generic comments, and coffee meetings that are actually sales pitches.

Thirty-plus years in freight sales teaches you things that can't be shortcut. Jordan Reber has built a career on relationships — the kind that outlast market cycles, company changes, and industry consolidation. In this episode of The Journey Podcast, Will Jenkins sits down with Jordan — Executive Vice President at ARL Network — to talk about what long-term success in freight sales actually requires from the people who achieve it.

Jordan's starting point is curiosity: the genuine interest in the person across the table — or across the phone — that separates reps who build real relationships from those who execute a relationship-building playbook. He shares what it means to show up to a freight sales conversation actually wanting to understand someone's business, not just their freight volume, and how that difference registers with buyers even when it's never explicitly acknowledged.

The conversation covers patience as a practical freight sales skill — not passivity, but the willingness to invest in relationships before you need them and trust that the compound returns are real even when they're not immediately visible. Jordan talks about his approach to networking in freight: how he thinks about building a network versus working a room, what genuine relationship maintenance looks like over years, and how that investment has opened doors that no cold call or LinkedIn message could have reached.

He also shares industry expertise as a differentiator: how deep knowledge of freight — the markets, the carriers, the operational realities — changes every conversation you have and creates credibility that generic salespeople can't replicate.

Build freight industry knowledge through The Freight Academy or explore Journey's freight consulting services.

Episode FAQs
How do you build real relationships in freight sales that actually lead to business down the road?
How do freight brokers stay top of mind with a shipper who is not ready to move freight yet?
Why do freight brokers who try to build relationships often end up with nothing to show for it?
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