Freight & Analytics

Finding Shippers 101

A guide to
getting your
brokerage
off the ground

Your first steps as a broker

Shippers and brokers have a symbiotic relationship. One has goods to be moved, the other has the means to move it.

Freight brokers are the middleman
between a shipper and their customers, ensuring that the shipper’s
products arrive at the right place,
at the right time, with as few hiccups
as possible.

What may seem simple is quite
complex. And it’s even more complex
when you’re just getting your feet
wet. Navigating those first steps as
your brokerage gets off the ground
is no small task.

You may be starting from scratch, just
a big vision and some determination.
Others may start brokerages after
leaving larger brokerages, bringing
with them a book of business. Some
start brokerages knowing exactly
which carriers they’ll connect with but
lack shippers to service.

Everybody starts their broker journey
from different places. Still, the first
step for most is the same: You’ve got
to find shippers.

We’ll break down how the top
brokerages find these shippers, but
we won’t leave you high and dry there.
After we outline how it’s done, we’ll
show you a few practical next steps
like growing and vetting your carrier
network, setting up best practices for
sustainable growth, and how to use
data and analytics to supercharge
your operation.

Finding Shippers 101 is a quick
distillation of a broker’s first steps,
aimed at helping you chart your own
path forward.

Table of Contents

4 Finding shippers
5 Before the call
6 During the call
7 Building a network
9 Sustainable growth
11 Understanding the market
13 Looking ahead

Finding shippers

It’s prudent to say this at the outset:
You’re going to do some cold calling.
The tried and true method of connecting
with potential customers hasn’t gone out
of style, but you can’t go into it without
the proper prep work. Let’s talk about
what all needs to happen before you hop
on the phone.

Prospecting is a critical skill
for any sales professional,
and as a freight broker, you’re
now a sales professional.
Congratulations.

Before you begin cold calling, sit down
and identify where in the market you
want to begin your business. Don’t just
call anyone anywhere, pick either a
region of the country, a specific market,
or a particular industry to focus your
prospecting. This makes things simpler,
whereas casting a wide net may leave
you a bit disoriented or spread thin. Aim
small, miss small.

With your business targets set, spend
time crafting an image for your company.
The strength of your brand will pay
dividends as you grow, as your level of
service will directly affect your brand's
reputation. Take time now to make sure
you have a website, company name, a
professional email address, and optionally,
a presence on LinkedIn. Get yourself a bank
account and an LLC set up if you choose.

Before the call

Once you’ve identified where you’re going
to prospect and who you’re going to call,
you’re going to need a load board. We’re
partial to our own DAT One, the industry
standard load board. There, you’ll need to
do some research, because you can’t hop
on a call with a shipper empty-handed.

If you can’t talk specifics
about rates or current
capacity conditions, you
won’t be able to have a
meaningful conversation.

So, for your potential customer, use tools
within DAT One to see what it will cost you
to get a truck. Then take a peek at market
conditions to understand any region’s
state of supply and demand (how many
loads are available vs trucks available).

Once you’ve done the preliminary market
research, don’t call without having a value
proposition. As a new broker beginning
their book of business, a common
strategy is offering a more affordable rate
than the market. Assuming you have few
or no customers at this point, you are
also a solo operation. Don’t view that as a
negative. Flip the script and remind your
potential customers they will only have
one point of contact if you secure the sale.
As an extension of that, you’ll be able to
provide them with white-glove service.

Being a new broker doesn’t necessarily
stack the odds against you. You’re more
flexible, agile, and open to custom service
options. Use that to your advantage to
create a unique value proposition to give
your prospects.

During the call

Every company is different. For you, this means
avoiding some of the freight broker cold-calling
scripts you find online. They can’t possibly suit
every shipper customer you call. We prefer to
share general guidelines for your call that can be
adapted for your prospect and allow breathing
room for your personality to shine.

Nail your energy and enthusiasm

Whether we want to admit it or not, being
likable sells. Do your best to make sure
you’re approachable, actively listening, and
enthusiastic about helping your customers.
It helps to stand up on the call and smile as
you speak. Don’t be afraid to walk as you talk,
either. It helps keep your energy up. Some
sales pros suggest putting a mirror close by
so you can always remember to smile while
you’re chatting.

Close with confidence

If the conversation has gone well and you feel
like you got a good rapport with the customer,
ask them for business. A simple “Do you
have truckloads I can handle for you?” is all it
takes. Customers that ask this straightforward
question fare much better than those waiting
for an offer to cover loads. Don’t beat around
the bush – go for it and secure the sale.

HERE'S A PRO TIP FROM OUR
FRIENDS AT FREIGHT 360:

Have prepared questions

Can you share a bit
about how your shipping
is organized?
How many full loads
do you ship a week?
Do you have your
own trucks?
When is your busy season?
Do you use outside
carriers? What do you like
or dislike about them?

Building a network

Of course, the other side of the coin is
finding carriers. If you’ve found your
shippers, great. Now you’ve got to move
their goods. To do that, you need carriers.

Strong carrier networks are the bread and butter of any freight brokerage.

Without them, you’ve got nothing. No way
to move goods, no way to make money.

For brand new brokers, part of the
challenge of building a network in the
beginning will be because it typically takes
90 days to establish a line of credit, which
makes it more difficult for shippers and
carriers to vet you as a prospective partner.

You’ll have plenty of work to do in those
first 90 days, but writing and soliciting
company reviews can help you start
building your reputation and growing
your network.

The trouble is, you’ve got to build a network
of carriers that you trust.

You’ll have to do a bit more vetting and
background work before you onboard new
carriers, and tools like DAT’s load board
come in handy here. You can post loads
there and find trucks quickly. It’ll save you a
headache or two, trust us. Plus, DAT’s load
board comes with the DAT Directory, which
makes finding trusted carriers a cinch.

How can you find trusted carriers?

Vetting carriers is difficult and daunting.
Tools like CarrierWatch allow you to
verify that a carrier is legitimate and vet
their credentials – it makes the whole
process easy and fast. Both you and your
customers will know shipments are in
good hands. With CarrierWatch, you can
validate the carrier’s cargo insurance
and safety ratings, so you’re not caught
off guard by carriers with less-than-ideal
operating standards. You can even
bring on carriers fast with other tools
like OnBoard, making network-building

even faster. We offer Private Networks
on DAT so that brokers can develop more
exclusive relationships with the carriers.
You can verify what other brokers have to
say about that particular carrier by visiting
our DAT Directory page.

Optimize your profile on DAT by including
as much as possible, such as contact
information, how you post your loads, and
credit scores. Source company reviews
and ensure you use a domained email
address (yourname@yourcompany.com
instead of yourcompany@gmail.com)
consistently to help generate trust among
the carriers that you work with.

Sustainable growth

The logistics industry values old-fashioned
customer service, and once you’ve got
some shippers and carriers in your corner,
it’s a good time to hang tight and focus on
servicing them. Instead of simply adding
more and more and more customers, grow
to a manageable size, then double down on
customer service.

Spending time developing a relationship
of reliability and trust is how you’ll get to
the next phase of growth, so don’t skimp
on it here. Do everything you can to make
your customers happy, go above and
beyond, and instead of only growing a
business, grow a reputation. Because a
good reputation can be flipped into future
business. If your service is exemplary, word
will get around.

It may be slower growth than you like,
but this is an important part of your journey.

Think about it: If your customers like and trust
you, they’ll pay for that instead of searching
for cheaper, untested alternatives. Your trust,
reliability, and thoughtfulness toward your
customers can separate you from the pack.
Don’t overlook it.

Don’t be afraid to take a loss, either.
Sometimes preserving relationships while
you lose money creates long-term financial
rewards because of trust and the history
of the relationship. You’ve got the agility
and flexibility that big brokerages can only
dream of. While starting a business is nerve-wracking, calculated risk could launch you
into bigger profits down the road.

Taking care of customers builds long-term
relationships, and long-term relationships
build a stable business. That’s our goal.

Consider a TMS

At this point, your business may be running
off spreadsheets to manage invoices, billing
and payments, or customer prospecting.
And that may be fine up until this point,
but you’re about one typo away from that
spreadsheet crashing. That’s no way to run
a business.

Here, we believe in the power of DAT Broker
TMS. It’s a TMS (transportation management system) purpose-built for brokers, not
a shipper solution that got a facelift. It may
be helpful to think of this as a brokerage-in-a-box – a one-stop shop for running a
business with everything you need in one
place. We intentionally built it to streamline
your business, so you’ll end up growing
your business instead of your back office
staff or another collection of filing cabinets
against a wall.

While we’re talking about scaling and
growing, DAT Broker TMS will grow with
you. Instead of offering modules, integrations, and
customizations in groups, we let
you add on individual modules only as you
need them – you won’t pay for features
you don’t need.

All of your accounting, documentation, and
tracking, along with the entire freight cycle
starting from finding trucks to getting paid,
lives inside the DAT Broker TMS. Once
you’re streamlined and efficient, growing to
that next level is far easier.

If you’re not quite ready to spring for a
hole new TMS, that’s okay. We’ve got a
host of tools to help you streamline your
operations. No matter where you are in your
journey, we have solutions to help.

RateView

Insights
on informed pricing

LEARN MORE

OnBoard

Vet and bring on
new carriers fast

LEARN MORE

CarrierWatch

Assess
safety scores

LEARN MORE

Understanding the market

Now that you’re operating on solid
ground, built on long-term partnerships
and organizational efficiency, this is a
good time to step out and tackle new
areas of business.

The stability you worked
so hard to create fuels
your expansion now.

Expansion can come in the form of new
industries to service, new geographic
areas, or new types of freight entirely.
Tools like DAT iQ shine here – we take
over $150B in annualized invoices and
turn that into actionable market data.

You’ll see the most profitable lanes, hot
or cool markets, and insight into historical, current, and forecasted rates. It’s
a 360-degree view of the market that
makes sure that your business’ expansion
and diversification are informed and built
on sound rationale.

Plus, we make it easy to understand
the industry. As you’re growing, your
understanding of logistics’ complexity
will grow, too. As your operation and
understanding grow, the right tools will
help. Here are a couple of our favorites.

Market Conditions

Index (MCI)

MCI is a simple, definitive metric for
truckload supply and demand, showing
you how many trucks are in a market in
comparison to available loads. With that
information, you’ll identify seasonality
shifts, and geographically normalized
search and post behavior. Plus, it accounts
for inbound and outbound volume.

We see early-stage brokers quoting prices
to shippers without knowing the balance
of supply and demand. Brokers with MCI
in their toolboxes know how much it costs
to find trucks for shippers. They see
where trucks are hard to find, and price
accordingly. This helps brokers negotiate
with solid footing. It’ll be easy to find
where you have breathing room for lower
rates and where you can anticipate paying
a premium.

MCI also has a forecasting element that
lets you look ahead at load-to-truck ratios
for the upcoming 8 days. With that, you
can schedule shipments for days when
the capacity conditions are working in
your favor.

RateView

RateView makes pricing easy. With it,
brokers can look at historical and forecasted
rates for any lane or market. It’s a
safeguard against misinformed quotes that leave you
without a profit margin.

RateView is a synthesis of over $150B
in freight transactions from over 68,000
shipping lanes. Once that data is sorted and
categorized, brokers have a transparent
view of how the market handles rates on
any given lane. That information powers
confident negotiating and gives you the
upper hand.

Looking ahead

It’s not easy getting a brokerage off the ground, but
you’ve done the hardest part – starting. As you do the
leg work of finding shippers and growing your network,
remember Rome wasn’t built in a day.

As always, DAT is ready to help. We’ve helped thousands
of brokers, from the top brokerages in the country,
to start-ups like yours. Our products and resources
are built to fit your growth journey. For more of those
resources head to dat.com/getstarted

About DAT Freight & Analytics

DAT Freight & Analytics operates the largest
truckload freight marketplace in North
America. Transportation brokers, carriers,
shippers, news organizations and industry
analysts rely on DAT for market trends and
data insights based on 400 million freight
matches and a database of $150 billion in
annual market transactions.

Founded in 1978, DAT Solutions LLC is
a wholly owned subsidiary of Roper
Technologies (NYSE:ROP), a diversified
technology company and constituent of the
S&P 500 and Fortune 500 indices.