The most expensive thing a small carrier spends is not diesel, and it is not tires. It is the two or three hours a week the owner can actually give to selling. Research compiled by Vainu from Sales Insights Lab found that 50% of initial sales prospects turn out not to be a good fit for what the seller offers — half the names on the average prospecting list were never going to buy, no matter how good the pitch was. Salesforce’s State of Sales research, summarized by Landbase, says even full-time salespeople spend less than 30% of their week actually selling. You are not a full-time salesperson. You run trucks.
That math should change how you prospect. If you have built a list the way we taught in How to Build a Shipper Prospect List, you are staring at 40 or 50 company names. You cannot run a nine-touch pursuit on fifty shippers. Nobody can. The carriers who win direct freight are not the ones who chase everything — they are the ones who figure out, in minutes instead of months, which ten names deserve the chase.
This lesson gives you the Chase Score: five checks you can run on any prospect in about two minutes each, a ten-point scale that sorts your list into chase, drip, and park, and the word-for-word qualifying call that gets you the answers without burning the relationship. By Friday you will know exactly where your next ninety days of selling time goes.
Why Chasing Everyone Loses to Chasing Right
A study released by Conversica found sales and marketing executives agreeing that at least 50% of sales effort goes to leads that never get properly worked — too hard to reach, or not worth reaching in the first place. For a big company that is an efficiency problem. For a one-truck or five-truck carrier it is fatal, because the pursuit itself is expensive. Winning a direct shipper takes a researched first call, a packet, a follow-up cadence that runs eight or nine touches over ninety days. Spend that on a shipper who ships flatbed freight when you run dry vans, or who is locked into a dedicated fleet, or who pays in 75 days, and you did everything right and still earned nothing.
Qualifying is not the same as the account-fit decision we covered in How to Pick Shippers That Fit Your Trucks. The Fit Filter is what you run when an opportunity is on the table and you are deciding whether to take the account. The Chase Score runs much earlier — before you have invested a single touch — and answers a different question: is this name worth my selling time at all? One protects your trucks from bad freight. The other protects your calendar from bad pursuits.
The Chase Score: Five Checks, Ten Points
Each check scores 0, 1, or 2. A 2 means the check clearly passes, a 1 means you cannot tell yet, a 0 means it clearly fails. Add them up and every prospect lands between 0 and 10. The five checks: the freight check, the rhythm check, the incumbent read, the pay check, and the door check. Most of the evidence is already sitting in plain sight — the company’s website, its job postings, its dock as you drive past, and one short phone call. Two minutes a check is the standard. You are not writing a research report; you are deciding whether a name earns ninety days of your attention.
Checks One and Two: The Freight and the Rhythm
The freight check asks whether what leaves their dock matches what your trucks haul. Product type tells you most of it: packaged consumer goods and palletized materials mean dry van, building products and machinery lean flatbed, food means reefer and often food-grade requirements you may not carry. Weight matters as much as trailer type — a company shipping dense product may max out at 26 pallets you cannot legally scale. Score 2 if their freight is plainly your trailer, your weights, your lanes. Score 0 if it plainly is not, and park the name no matter how big the facility looks. Half your list will die right here, and that is the point.
The rhythm check asks when they ship. A shipper who loads trucks fifty weeks a year can anchor your calendar; a shipper who ships hard for eight weeks and goes quiet can still be good freight, but it cannot be your anchor account, and it should not get an anchor account’s pursuit. Look for the tells: seasonal product lines, harvest or construction cycles, a parking lot that is full in October and empty in February. Score 2 for year-round weekly freight, 1 for steady-but-unknown, 0 for a pure seasonal spike — unless you are deliberately filling a seasonal hole in your own year.
Check Three: The Incumbent Read
Every shipper worth having already has somebody hauling its freight. The question is whether that somebody is beatable, and the dock will tell you before anyone inside the building does. Drive past at shipping time twice in one week and read the trailers. A different carrier name at the dock every time you look means the freight is being bought load by load through brokers — churn, which is your opening, because a shipper buying from strangers will talk to a carrier who shows up with a face and a yard twenty minutes away. One company’s trailers every time, especially a painted private fleet or a dedicated big-carrier operation, means the freight is locked and your pursuit will spend a year prying at a sealed door. Score 2 for visible churn, 1 for a mix you cannot read, 0 for a locked dedicated operation. This is the check carriers skip most, and it is the one that saves the most wasted quarters.
Checks Four and Five: The Pay Check and the Door Check
The pay check asks whether this company can and will pay a carrier on time. You will run a full credit check before you ever haul — that is a different lesson — but at the qualifying stage you are looking for the loud warnings: supplier complaints you can find in two minutes of searching, liens, a string of one-star reviews from vendors, layoff news, or a building that looks like deferred maintenance from the road. Score 2 for an obviously healthy operation, 1 for quiet, 0 for visible distress. A shipper who cannot pay is not a prospect; it is a loss you have not booked yet.
The door check asks whether you can actually reach the person who decides. A local plant where the shipping manager’s name shows up on LinkedIn, in job postings, or from one call to the front desk scores 2. A regional operation where freight is bought at a headquarters two states away scores 1 — winnable, but slower. A national account where carrier selection runs through an annual corporate bid scores 0 for a small carrier prospecting from the outside. You are not judging the freight here; you are judging whether a five-truck carrier can get a decision-maker on the phone this quarter.
The Two-Minute Qualifying Call
Two or three of the five checks will usually resolve from the truck seat and the desk. The rest resolve with one honest phone call to the shipping office — not a sales call, and you say so up front, which is exactly why it works. Receptionists and shipping clerks answer factual questions all day; they stonewall pitches. Here is the script:
Ninety seconds, and you just scored the freight check, the rhythm check, and the door check from the one person in the building with no reason to posture. If the answers are good, you also walked away with the decision-maker’s name — which means your first real touch, when it comes, is already warm.
Chase, Drip, or Park
Now sort. Eight to ten points: chase — these five or six names get the full pursuit, the packet, and the nine-touch cadence from How to Follow Up With a Shipper, starting this week. Five to seven points: drip — they stay on the list and get a light quarterly touch, a truck-list email or a holiday call, until something changes their score. Zero to four points: park — write one line in your notes saying why, so future-you does not re-research a dead name, and set a date if the reason is temporary. Parking is not quitting. A shipper parked for a locked dedicated fleet becomes a chase the week that contract blows up — and because you parked it with a note instead of forgetting it, you will be the first carrier in the door.
This Week’s Assignment
Take the top twenty names on your prospect list — build the list first if you have not — and score all twenty against the five checks before next Friday. That is roughly three hours of desk work, windshield time you were already driving, and a handful of two-minute calls. Then book your next ninety days of selling time against only the names that scored eight or better, and write a park note for everything under five. Twenty scored names, five real pursuits, zero wasted quarters.
Bottom Line
Half the names on your prospect list were never going to be your customer, and every hour you spend finding that out the slow way comes out of the two or three hours a week you actually have to sell. The Chase Score finds it out the fast way: five checks, two minutes each, ten points, and a list sorted into chase, drip, and park before the week is out. Your trucks only make money hauling the right freight. Your selling time only makes money chasing the right shippers.
Innovative Logistics Group
