Freight forwarders do not have a shortage of people with sales experience. They have a shortage of leaders who can carry a complex commercial mandate. The distinction is material. A strong individual seller can protect a book of business; a commercial leader must create a repeatable system for winning, pricing, retaining, and developing business while keeping operations capable of delivering the promise.
That combination is difficult to hire because forwarding sits at the intersection of relationships, technical judgment, working capital, and execution. The best candidate has to understand the customer, the lane, the product, and the economics — and then make those ideas usable by a team. A job description that simply asks for a network and a growth mindset hides the real work.
Four reasons the search breaks down
- The role is underspecified. Owners may ask for a chief commercial officer while still retaining every pricing, customer, and hiring decision. Candidates hear a leadership title but discover an individual-contributor job with limited authority.
- Revenue is mistaken for leadership. A large personal book can be evidence of commercial skill, but it does not prove coaching ability, forecasting discipline, cross-functional influence, or the capacity to build a pipeline that survives a departure.
- The economics are unclear. Forwarding leaders are asked to grow, improve yield, and protect service simultaneously. If the company cannot explain how those outcomes will be measured, candidates reasonably question whether the mandate is achievable.
- The process is too narrow. Searching only within the same title and the same local competitor set creates a small pool and reproduces the same operating assumptions. Adjacent backgrounds can be valuable when the transferable capabilities are defined first.
What the credible candidate can do
A board or owner should assess evidence rather than charisma. The commercial leader should be able to explain how a target market was selected, how account quality was evaluated, how pricing discipline was introduced, and what happened when an important customer or salesperson was lost. The details matter because they reveal whether the candidate built a system or benefited from one that was already working.
- Translate strategy into coverage. Turn a broad growth ambition into segments, named accounts, territories, roles, and a cadence for reviewing opportunity quality.
- Sell the whole proposition. Connect forwarding expertise, visibility, reliability, customs knowledge, and problem-solving to a customer's risk — rather than leading with a rate that any competitor can copy.
- Partner with operations. Make promises that the network can keep, surface trade-offs early, and treat service failures as information for improving the commercial model.
- Coach for repeatability. Set expectations for discovery, qualification, proposals, handoffs, and account planning so performance is not dependent on one heroic seller.
A better hiring brief
Before opening a search, the hiring group should write a one-page mandate. It should specify the market to be developed, the decisions the leader can make, the resources available, the relationship between new business and existing accounts, and the operating constraints that cannot be ignored. It should also identify the starting condition: is this a turnaround, a scale-up, a succession, or an integration?
Interview questions should then test the mandate. Ask the candidate to describe a forecast they changed, a margin trade-off they made, a seller they developed, and a customer they chose not to pursue. Ask what they would inspect in the first 30 days and which indicators they would not trust without operational context. These questions expose judgment better than a list of logos or a discussion of personality.
The retention test starts before the offer
Many commercial searches fail after the candidate accepts because the company has not resolved the conditions that made the role attractive. A leader needs access to data, a clear relationship with operations, a realistic hiring plan, and a sponsor who will hold the organization to the new operating model. Compensation matters, but so does the credibility of the mandate. The strongest candidate will notice when those pieces are absent.
The answer is not to lower the standard or to keep searching indefinitely. It is to define commercial leadership as a business-building capability, broaden the market thoughtfully, and make the operating contract explicit. When a forwarder needs that combination, a specialist search for freight-forwarding commercial leaders is more useful than another generic sales requisition.
Sources and further reading
Written by
John Delgado III
Founder & Managing Partner, SearchPath Executive Search
Founder of SearchPath Executive Search with more than 27 years recruiting leadership across global logistics and supply chain, with executive searches completed on five continents.
More about JohnContinue reading
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