You Don’t Have a Carrier Sourcing Problem. You Have a Follow-Up Problem.

Most brokerages think they have a carrier problem. Coverage drops, conversion slows, and the first reaction is usually, “We need more capacity.” Teams start posting more, calling more, onboarding more.

But when you take a closer look at the day-to-day inside most brokerages, the issue usually isn’t a lack of inbound activity. It’s a breakdown in follow-up. Carriers are reaching out. Offers are coming in. But there’s no structured process to track, act on, or reuse those conversations.

And that’s what’s actually costing you coverage.

The offers are already there

Every brokerage gets flooded with inbound carrier engagement. Reps field phone calls, check emails, sort through trucklists, and respond to load board replies all day. These are real quotes. Real trucks. Real opportunities to cover freight faster.

The problem is that these signals are coming in through a dozen different channels with no central place to track them. One dispatcher might quote via email. Another calls in with availability. A third sends a trucklist. Unless a rep is actively working that load at that exact moment, those signals are easy to miss.

This happens constantly. An offer gets buried in an inbox. A voicemail never gets returned. A trucklist gets saved to a folder no one checks again. That carrier doesn’t follow up. And the next time you post that same load, someone else covers it. It looks like a sourcing problem. It’s not. You already had the truck—you just didn’t have a system to act on it.

Reps are overloaded, not underperforming

Most reps are managing a high volume of loads with a mix of manual workflows, siloed inboxes, and their own memory. They’re not failing to follow up because they don’t want to. They’re just too buried to chase every thread.

There’s no visibility into which carriers engaged yesterday. No prompt to follow up with someone who quoted two loads last week. No simple way to escalate a voicemail that mentions truck availability in a hot lane. Without structure, even strong reps default to reactive workflows. They post, they wait, they chase. Repeat.

And that’s when “we need more carriers” starts to sound like a solution. But adding more carriers to a broken system doesn’t fix anything. It just gives your team more inbound noise they don’t have time to follow up on.

Better follow-up starts with better structure

Fixing this doesn’t mean hiring more people. It means creating a system that helps your team act on what’s already coming in. That starts with visibility.

You should be able to answer questions like:

• Who offered capacity on this lane in the past three days?

• Which carriers are quoting us repeatedly, even if they didn’t get the load?

• Are we logging trucklists and voicemail offers in a way that surfaces them later?

• Can we route repeat engagement to the right rep automatically?

When your team has this level of structure, follow-up stops being a scramble. It becomes a repeatable, proactive workflow. And you stop wasting time sourcing capacity you already had access to.

The next step isn’t more carriers. It’s better systems

If your brokerage is stuck chasing new carriers every time a load gets posted, it’s worth asking whether you’re losing freight because of what you don’t see, not what you don’t have.

Most coverage gaps aren’t caused by a lack of options. They’re caused by missed signals and dropped conversations. The offers are there. The trucks are there. They just need a system that helps your team follow through.