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How to win airfreight customers in Melbourne

A working playbook for a freight forwarding BDM: which sectors actually fly, which companies to call, where to find them, what to say, and what to do in your first 90 days.

Read this bit first

Melbourne is the best airfreight territory in Australia, and it is also a zero-growth market right now. National volumes have drifted back near early-2021 levels. That means there is no rising tide — every kilo you win in the next twelve months comes off a competitor's account. This playbook is built for taking share, not catching growth.

01 The market you're selling into

30%+of Australia's international air freight moves through Melbourne Airport — the nation's biggest air freight hub

60%of Australia's pharmaceutical exports come out of Victoria

15,649 tof fresh meat exported through MEL — the #1 export by volume

$258 mof locally made pharmaceutical product exported through MEL — the #1 export by value

Two numbers there matter more than the rest. By value, MEL's top three exports are medical products, meat and seafood. By volume, they're meat, seafood, and fruit and nuts. Those two lists barely overlap with what most forwarding BDMs spend their week chasing, which is generic import consol out of Asia — the single most contested, lowest-margin freight in the country.

The strategic read: chase the export side and the temperature-controlled side. That's where Melbourne is structurally strong, where the freight is high-yield, where relationships are stickier, and where fewer competitors have real capability. Import consol from Shanghai is a rate war. Chilled lamb to Dubai is a capability sale.

Who's flying it

Dedicated freighter operators into Melbourne include Polar Air, Cathay Pacific, Singapore Airlines, Qatar Airways and Tasman Cargo, on top of substantial bellyhold capacity across the passenger network. Saudia Cargo launched a scheduled Riyadh–Melbourne 747-400F service on 25 July 2026 — 110+ tonnes, nose-loading, explicitly targeting perishables, pharma, industrial equipment and e-commerce.

Use this

A brand-new freighter route is a reason to call. Every Victorian exporter shipping to the Gulf, the Levant, North Africa or onward into Europe now has a new option they probably haven't priced. "There's new nose-loading freighter capacity out of Melbourne to Riyadh as of late July — has anyone walked you through what that does to your Middle East transit and rates?" That's a conversation, not a cold call.

02 Your unfair advantage — use it hard

In May 2026 Mainfreight opened a new Air & Perishables facility at Melbourne Airport, off Airport Drive inside the precinct, close to the airline terminals. The specs matter, because they're your entire differentiation story:

What the site has

11,500 m² of warehouse and office, running 24/7
Space for refrigerated containers — real cold chain, not a chiller room
Road train access and sunken docks
Electric roller systems for airline ULDs
Handles dangerous goods and temperature-controlled cargo
High-security fencing, monitored access, AI-enabled CCTV
Throughput of 25 million kg a year

What that lets you say

To a meat or seafood exporter: your product does not sit on a hot apron. Reefer space, on-airport, 24 hours.
To a pharma shipper: temperature-controlled handling inside the precinct, with monitored security and CCTV chain-of-custody.
To a chemicals or cosmetics importer: we handle DG in-house. Most forwarders quietly subcontract it.
To a regional exporter: road train access means your Warrnambool or Shepparton linehaul comes straight in.
To anyone: come and look at it. A site visit closes freight that a rate sheet never will.

The single best action in this playbook

Run facility tours. Book a standing Thursday morning slot. Invite three prospects at a time — non-competing, same sector. Coffee, hi-vis, forty-five minutes, then lunch. A brand-new 24/7 on-airport cold-chain facility is the most persuasive sales asset you will ever have, and it expires as a novelty within about twelve months. Nothing you say on the phone beats a logistics manager standing in front of a reefer bay.

03 Who you're actually competing with

"DHL" is three different companies, and confusing them will cost you deals.

Competitor	What they are	How you beat them
DHL Express	Integrator. Own aircraft, own network, door-to-door parcels and documents. Brilliant under ~30 kg.	Don't fight below 30 kg — you'll lose and look silly. Above ~70 kg the economics break down badly. Find shippers who are sending 100–500 kg consignments on an express account out of habit. Show them the same-week consol rate. This is the easiest money in the market.
DHL Global Forwarding	The real head-to-head. Consol airfreight, customs, project cargo.	Local decision-making versus offshored customer service. Their biggest churn driver is customers who can't get a human who knows their account. Sell the named Melbourne coordinator.
DSV	Absorbed Panalpina, Agility and DB Schenker. Enormous and still integrating.	Priority target pool. Integration years produce service failures, system migrations and account manager churn. Any Melbourne shipper on legacy Schenker or Agility paper is worth a call this quarter.
Kuehne+Nagel, Expeditors, Geodis, Hellmann	Strong global forwarders, disciplined, well run.	Hard to displace on capability. Win on the domestic leg — none of them own Australian linehaul and warehousing the way Mainfreight does.
Local Melbourne forwarders & customs brokers	Dozens of them. Nimble, cheap, relationship-heavy.	Beat them on network, on IT visibility, and on what happens when something goes wrong at 2am in Frankfurt. Also: many are partners, not rivals — brokers without their own air product will feed you.

The one differentiator that's actually structural

Every forwarder claims global network, technology and service. Only some of them own the truck that turns up at the customer's dock. Mainfreight runs its own domestic transport and warehousing across Australia and New Zealand alongside air and ocean. That means one company, one system, one invoice, from an offshore supplier to a pallet on the floor in Dandenong South — with no handover to a subcontractor on the last and most visible leg.

That's your line. Not "we're global." Everyone's global. "Your freight never leaves our system, and the bloke who delivers it wears our shirt."

04 Why airfreight accounts actually change hands

This is the most important page in the playbook. Freight forwarding has low switching cost but enormous switching inertia. Nobody wakes up wanting a new forwarder. Being cheaper is almost never enough — a 5% saving isn't worth the risk and admin of a change, and the incumbent will just match you anyway.

Accounts move for four reasons, and essentially only four:

1. A service failure

A shipment missed a flight, a reefer broke temperature, a customs entry was wrong, a quote was honoured badly. Anger has a half-life of about three weeks.

Your job: be the name they already have when it happens. This is why you touch a list quarterly forever rather than calling twenty new companies a week and never ringing back.

2. A personnel change

A new supply chain or logistics manager arrives with a mandate to review, no loyalty to the incumbent, and something to prove in their first 90 days.

Your job: watch LinkedIn job changes across your target list weekly. Congratulate, then ask for fifteen minutes in their first month. This is the highest-conversion trigger there is.

3. A new lane or new product

They've won a distributor in Korea, opened a US warehouse, started importing from Vietnam instead of China. The incumbent is weak there or hasn't been asked.

Your job: track customer announcements, capital raises, new market launches. A new lane has no incumbent.

4. A capacity crunch

Peak season, a blanked flight, a rate spike, a perishables glut. Suddenly the incumbent can't get space and the shipper is ringing anyone with allocation.

Your job: know your allocation cold and call your list before peak, not during. "Cherry season is six weeks out and space to Asia will tighten — do you want me to hold you some?"

What this means for your week

You cannot create these triggers. You can only be positioned when they fire. So the job is not persuasion — it's coverage and timing. Build a list of 200 named accounts, get on the radar of every one of them, and touch them on a schedule until something breaks. Most BDMs abandon an account after three calls. The ones who make real money are on year two of the same list.

05 Six rules that decide whether you make budget

Lead with a lane, not a company overview

Nobody wants your capability deck. "Three consols a week to LAX, Tuesday cut-off, cleared Thursday, and we deliver it on our own trucks" is a specific, checkable, useful sentence. Pick the three lanes you're genuinely strongest on and open with those every single time.

Ask for the second-supplier slot, not the business

"Fire DHL" is a huge ask. "Be your backup" is almost free. Nearly every shipper with real volume wants a second forwarder for capacity, benchmarking and disaster cover — and their procurement people often already have a mandate for one. Get the account opened, get one shipment, then be excellent. Backups become primaries the first time the primary stumbles, and you'll be the only alternative with a live account number.

Take the ugly freight first

The DG consignment nobody will touch. The AOG part at 4pm on a Friday. The oversize crate. The one lane the incumbent is genuinely bad at. This freight is a nuisance and it is your way in, because it's the freight the incumbent is least willing to fight for and the customer is most grateful about. Solve one horrible problem and you'll get asked about the easy freight unprompted.

Sell the domestic leg

When you're up against K+N, Expeditors or DHL GF, don't argue about airline relationships — you'll draw at best. Move the conversation to what happens after the freight clears. Own linehaul, own warehouse, own delivery, one system, one invoice, one phone number. That's a fight the global forwarders cannot win in Australia.

Never lead on price, and never win on price alone

Freight bought on price leaves on price, usually within a year, and usually after costing you margin and service recovery. If the only reason they moved is a number, the next BDM through the door has the same weapon. Win on capability, transit, visibility and the person answering the phone — then be competitive, not cheapest.

Your CRM is the job

200 named accounts, every one with a next action and a date, touched on a cadence, forever. A BDM without a disciplined list is just someone having nice conversations. The wins in this industry land in months 6 to 18 — if you can't remember who you spoke to in March, you will never collect them.

06 The activity maths

Set expectations honestly with yourself and with your branch manager. Forwarding sales has a long, lumpy cycle. Here's a realistic weekly engine for a Melbourne air BDM:

Activity	Weekly target	Notes
Outbound dials	40–50	Two focused blocks, not spread through the day. Tues–Thurs, 8:30–10:00am is when logistics people are at their desks.
Real conversations	15–20	Actual decision-influencer conversations, not gatekeepers.
Face-to-face meetings	5	Cluster them geographically. One precinct per day — see the drive-day routes.
Facility tours booked	1–2	Your highest-conversion activity by a distance.
New accounts opened	1–2	Includes tiny ones. An account number is a beachhead.
Quotes / rate requests out	8–12	Track your hit rate. Below 15% means you're quoting the wrong freight.
List touches (existing pipeline)	25	The unglamorous one that actually pays. Quarterly cadence across 200 accounts ≈ 15–20 a week minimum.

Expect: first meaningful win around month 3. A real book by month 12. A good book by month 24. Anyone who tells you it's faster is selling something.

07 How to use the rest of this

Sectors — the ten Melbourne industries worth your time, ranked, with the specific lanes they fly and the trigger to open with.
Target list — 70+ named Victorian companies organised by precinct, with why they fly and what to lead with. Start here if you want to make calls this afternoon.
Finding leads — the data sources, public lists, trade shows and referral partners that actually generate freight in Australia. Includes drive-day routes and a warning about what not to waste money on.
Scripts — cold call, voicemail, email, LinkedIn, discovery questions, and answers to the seven objections you'll hear every week.
90-day plan — week by week, what to do first.

Sources for the market data on this page: Melbourne Airport freight · Melbourne Airport, biggest air freight hub · Mainfreight, new Melbourne Airport facility · Saudia Cargo Riyadh–Melbourne freighter · Invest Victoria, pharmaceutical sector · Air Cargo Week, market conditions