Every carrier that grows past a handful of trucks eventually reaches the same conclusion. Broker freight pays the bills, and direct shipper freight pays better. The route from one to the other runs through a lot of phone calls to people who did not ask to be called.
Most of those calls are wasted. Not because outbound does not work in freight, but because the calls are made in a way that guarantees failure, and because a lot of carriers do not know which rules apply to them.
Who you are actually trying to reach
The person who decides which carrier moves a load is rarely the person who answers the main line, and rarely the person whose title contains the word logistics on a professional network.
In a mid-sized manufacturer it is usually a traffic coordinator, a shipping supervisor or a plant scheduler. This person is measured on whether the trucks show up and the product leaves. They are not measured on cost savings, which is the thing most carriers open with.
In a larger company, freight is bought centrally, often through a bid event, and a cold call will not change that. Knowing which of the two you are calling before you dial is most of the work, and it is research rather than calling.
What the opening line should contain
The calls that fail sound like this: we are a trucking company, we have capacity, we would like to quote on your freight.
Every carrier says this. It gives the person nothing to react to and no reason to continue.
The calls that work are specific about a lane. You run outbound to Calgary three times a week. We run that lane loaded westbound and we are empty coming back on Thursdays. That is a different conversation, because it is about their problem rather than your truck.
Getting to that specificity means knowing something before the call. What they make, where it goes, what equipment it needs, and ideally the lane where their current carrier is weakest. Some of this is public. Some of it comes from the brokers you already haul for, whose customers are shippers you could serve directly, which is a relationship question you should think about carefully before acting on.
What a traffic coordinator actually wants
Consistency, not price. A shipper who has to explain to a plant manager why a truck did not show up does not care that the truck would have been fifty dollars cheaper.
In practice, the things that get a small carrier onto a shipper's list are a specific recurring lane, equipment that matches what they ship, proof of insurance at the level their contract requires, a safety rating that survives a look, and a named human who answers the phone when a load is running late.
That last one is where small carriers genuinely beat large ones, and it is the thing most of them fail to lead with.
The follow-up is the programme
Almost nothing closes on the first call. The realistic outcome of a good first call is that you learn who buys the freight, when the current contract is reviewed, and whether there is a lane they are unhappy with.
That information is worth more than a quote request, and it only produces revenue if it is recorded and worked. A carrier making calls with no record of who was called, what was said and when to call back is running an activity rather than a pipeline.
Freight buying also has long cycles. The call that produces nothing in March is the call that gets returned in September when the incumbent carrier fails. That only happens if you are still in their notes, which means a follow-up cadence rather than a single attempt.
The rules that apply to the calling
This part gets skipped and should not be. Business-to-business calling is regulated in both countries, and the rules changed recently in the United States.
In Canada, calls to business numbers are exempt from the National Do Not Call List. They remain subject to the CRTC's Unsolicited Telecommunications Rules. In practice that means maintaining your own internal do-not-call list, honouring a request to be added to it within fourteen days, displaying a telephone number on caller identification, and observing the permitted calling hours.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission amended the Telemarketing Sales Rule in March 2024 and removed the broad exemption that had covered most business-to-business calls. The rule's prohibitions on misrepresentation now reach business calls generally, and the amendment introduced recordkeeping obligations requiring telemarketers to retain detailed call records for five years, including numbers called, dates, times and duration, scripts used, caller identification transmitted, and call dispositions.
For a carrier making a handful of calls a week this is not onerous, but it is not optional either, and it is worth setting up the record keeping at the start rather than reconstructing it later. None of this is legal advice and a short conversation with counsel is sensible before running a sustained outbound programme.
Why most carriers stop
The honest reason outbound fails at small carriers is not technique. It is that the person doing the calling is also dispatching, also invoicing and also driving occasionally. Calling is the task with no deadline attached, so it is the task that gets dropped in any week where something goes wrong.
Something goes wrong most weeks.
Outbound only produces results when it happens on a schedule that does not depend on a good week, which in practice means somebody whose only job is making the calls and keeping the records. Whether that person sits in your office or at a desk somewhere else matters less than whether the calls happen on the days they are supposed to happen.
That is the service we run for carriers and brokerages who have decided they want direct freight and have worked out that the calling will never happen otherwise. If you want to talk through what a calling programme looks like for your lanes, get in touch.