Freight 360

Freight 360 Live: Maximizing DAT Tools for Brokers | Episode 286

• Freight 360

Share episode

Get 10% off a Year of DAT: Click Here

🔹 DAT Features – Explore qualification settings, company profiles, and market insights.
📊 Leveraging Data Analytics – Use tools like Benchmark & LaneMakers to optimize operations.
📈 Navigating Market Shifts – Learn how seasonal changes impact capacity and pricing.
💰 Boosting Profitability – Improve decision-making with real-time carrier performance tracking.

🎧 Tune in now to stay ahead in the freight game!

Support Our Sponsors:
QuikSkope - Get a Free Trial: Click Here
Levity: Click Here
Bluebook Services: Click Here
DAT Freight & Analytics - Get 10% off your first year!
DAT Power - Brokers & Carriers: Click Here
DAT Express - Brokers: Click Here
Truckers Edge - Carriers: Click Here

Recommended Products: Click Here
Freight Broker Basics Course: Click Here
Join Our Facebook Group: Click Here
Check out all of our content online: Click Here

Speaker 1:

Welcome back for a first ever live episode and webinar webinar here for Freight 360. We're going to have a special guest in a special episode today. Please, if you are on Stephen did say he's in the chat and he said I heard that, but this is our first time ever doing this thing live. So please, if you guys are on YouTube or LinkedIn, use the chat feature, ask us questions. Stephen Rui, our intern, can try to moderate that and we'll keep an eye on it and answer questions as they come through. But we're joined with Mike Abdel from DAT, Freight and Analytics, today.

Speaker 1:

We've done a lot of work with DAT over the years and, Mike, we'll give you a chance in a moment here to introduce yourself and kind of talk about your role within DAT, because there's really no better person to help us highlight the best ways to utilize a lot of the products that you guys have than the guy that trains people on it. So I guess we'll hop right into that, Mike, if you don't mind. Just, uh, for those out there who don't know you, which most probably don't I mean, I haven't, I don't know how much you're out there on on podcasts or whatnot but uh, give them a rundown on who you are and all that good stuff.

Speaker 3:

Thank you. Yeah, my name is Mike Abdel. I've been with DAT for close to 30 years now, so I've got to see the evolution of our products over the last three decades. So, yeah, I do the training here at DAT for all of our new hires, so I train them on how to train our employees or how to train our customers, and I also do you might recognize the voice, I guess, because I do a lot of the videos, the how-to videos that you guys might be watching when you access DAT One or other products. So I'm doing a lot of the videos, the how-to videos that you guys might be watching when you access DAT1 or other products. So I'm doing a lot of those videos for folks and just giving them some tips and tricks on how to use the different features that we offer. So that's my background, my history with DAT. It's pretty extensive, awesome.

Speaker 1:

And I'll kick this off, too, by saying that if you guys don't already have any of the DAT products, there is a link down in your description box. Whether it's YouTube or LinkedIn, it's it's always. We always have it shared on our podcast, too. You get 10 percent off your your first year, so that's definitely an opportunity to save some money. So make sure to check that out. Make sure to check that out. Really, the reason that Ben and I have been really excited to do this episode today and this webinar live is that for so many years, we've worked with folks and dealt with people either within the companies that we work for or who we've consulted with independently, and they think of DAT and they're like, yeah, that's just how I post my loads and find trucks, and the reality is there's so much more and especially with the release of the newest product line I think it was last year, the DAT1 sweep Mike, or maybe two years ago at this point, yeah, about two years ago we started releasing it, but we finally cut everybody over to it in 2024.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and what I noticed like so the brokerage that I work at for my normal day-to-day job a lot of the people internally were confused, like you know, what is this thing, what does this color mean? And we ended up doing a company-wide training inside of our company just to make sure, like, hey, here's what the new stuff is, here's how you can maximize its use, et cetera. And Ben and I have seen that with folks across the industry for a while now. They'll call us and ask questions or email us and ask for help, and we're like this is like a great opportunity to have someone from DAT really talk through the latest and greatest and what you can do as a broker to help maximize your ability to have a conversation with your customer intelligently, as well as how to reach the, the best carrier network and just have the insights and all the analytics there to to get you you know the most out of your products. Ben, you got anything else that kind of like the origin story behind this.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, not really more than the origin. One of the things we just or I've noticed a lot too is there's just so much more in that that can help people either find more loads, find things more effectively, more efficiently, like there's just I guess it's a lot deeper and there's just a lot more tools. And I think most people realize one of the things we talk about a lot is I mean, we've been working with them for years. But when we work with clients individually and I'll jump into it and I'm like, oh hey, are you guys looking at this? And they're like what do you mean? And I'm like, oh, and then, like three minutes later, I realized like most people just get so used to posting their loads, searching for trucks If you're a carrier, they're looking for loads, right, or they're posting their trucks and just really aren't utilizing a lot of the resources that are in there that help you price things more effectively, get a better idea what's in the market, and also right like there's all this contention around broker transparency and even like this week I saw all these posts of like why don't carriers have these tools?

Speaker 2:

Why can't we see these things? I'm like you literally have the exact same tool that we use, have the same information. We're all working out of the same product, and it's just whether or not you're utilizing this tool and all the ways to help your business, you know, run more efficiently, more profitably, find the right loads, line things up, whether you're a carrier or a broker trying to be able to work in the industry. So this should be a really good session. I'm anxious to dig in.

Speaker 1:

Yep. So, michael, I know we've got we got a kind of a rough set of bullet points here for anyone watching or listening right now. You guys know that Ben and I just kind of keep everything conversational, so we'll try and make this as fun and engaging as possible. But the first thing on our list here that we've got is the company profile with qualification settings. So this is something that perfect. We're going to share our screen here and you guys get a full, deep dive in. So take us through. You know, have at it. Ben and I will ask some questions and, you know, clarify and we'll field any questions that come from the audience. But let's dig right into this and if you're listening to this as a recording, I'll do my best to explain what you're not able to see right now.

Speaker 3:

But YouTube is your best option, yeah, so what we're doing right now on the broker side of DAT1 is we're introducing a new feature called qualification settings, and it's really all about you guys trying to make it easier for brokers to identify the right carrier for the job. You know, and that can be difficult. You know, when you're seeing, when you're viewing a ton of loads in here, you get, you know, a bunch of batches. It might be difficult to like weed out ones that you wouldn't do business with and focus on the ones that you would you're interested in. So that's when we brought in this qualification feature and you can see it in the upper right-hand corner. I'm pointing to it right now and it's in a beta phase right now as we're still tweaking it a little bit based on user feedback right now.

Speaker 3:

So how it works, it all starts with the broker is going to do a search for a truck that they're interested in. So I'll go ahead and fill out some details here. Like, maybe I'm looking for a load out of Dallas and I need that guy to go to Chicago, so let's put in maybe a flatbed for that one. Whoops a flatbed, and we'll do. Maybe it needs to be 25 feet and 25,000 pounds at least, and so I'm going to run that search, you guys, and it's going to give me some results here.

Speaker 1:

I've got about eight exact matches, 99 similar, similar. But which ones do I want to focus on? You know, like really quick too. This is your standard truck searching tool in dat right. So this is just like if any. You know, anytime I'm trying to cover a freight right I'm in that search trucks section here that is correct, and it's.

Speaker 3:

This is available in any package that we have as well. So, whether you're using the lowest price package that we have as a broker or the highest price package, you all have the ability to see these qualification settings.

Speaker 2:

I wanted to clarify something too, michael, and we've gotten questions about this too. So that field that says length, right, is that asking for the length of your load? Is that asking for the length of the truck? Will that give you everything smaller or everything larger than that in your search?

Speaker 3:

I've had that question too. That's a good one. Yeah, that's the length of the load. So basically what? By putting that in there, what we're going to find is trucks that are at least that long or longer, so they can fit that load in their truck.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and what I want to point out is I know I've seen lots of users put 53 in there, right, because they're like, oh, I want to just see what 53s are in there, but like, and then you ask, like I can't find any trucks and I'll be searching with them. Like, well, I, 48 foot flatbed. It's going to go bigger than that, right, and again, it's for the length of the load. So if you can and you're looking for and you can load anything, right, a 48 foot or a 53 footer. You want to put the smaller number in there, not the larger, because you're going to get more results, more options to be able to work through.

Speaker 3:

Exactly right, yes, perfect, yeah, so.

Speaker 3:

So, looking at these results now, maybe I have, maybe I only want to work with with carriers that have a satisfactory safety rating.

Speaker 3:

You know, maybe that's where I want to start, at least, and so that's one of the things that I can do with qualification settings right now is I have the ability to go in there and and exclude unsatisfactory ratings or exclude conditional ratings, so I want to get rid of the ones that might not be favorable for me as a broker.

Speaker 3:

So if I click on those and hit done, you'll notice that we now have this column here that has a bunch of either green check marks or they'll have an X, and the green check marks are all indicative of what we selected in here. So this means that these people do not have an unsatisfactory rating and they do not have a conditional safety rating. So they're either not rated or they're satisfactory. So you've just weeded a bunch of people out that you may not have wanted to do business with in the first place. We also have that same option for authority. So if I get rid of those for the time being and I pop in here and I'm like, okay, well, I want to work with people that have had their authority for at least a year.

Speaker 1:

This is big, because a lot of people that use DAT might work for a brokerage that has internal rules, right, and it might be like, hey, we want folks that have at least six months authority. So now when you're searching, you don't have to like sift through and be like how long have they been in business. You can literally just only see the ones that fit your criteria, which I think is great.

Speaker 2:

Right and also for like brokers out there. It saves you the time of calling a carrier and maybe even negotiating into a scenario and then, after going to look in your system and then finding out and it's just that a lot of that wasted time to be able to be more efficient and now you're only being able to reach out and look at the carriers that meet your brokerages qualifications to be able to work for it, rather than doing it backwards.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I remember like the manual days of like you know you've got your carrier qualifications and you're for your company, right, and you're trying to like go to FMCSA's website to check their authority date. You're trying to manually pull insurance. Your inspection history and violations is in a separate area and you're like what's going on here? So I think it's great that you guys are pulling a lot of that, that data, into this one singular tool here.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, that's right. We basically we're pulling in a ton of information from the FMCSA now, more information than we've ever been able to pull in. So you're actually we're able to use that information from that are using this and trying to figure out what would you be interested in seeing as a qualification setting? Right now we have, obviously, safety rating and authority but, like, here's an idea you know, like Landstar, for instance, landstar, one of their qualifications is you have to be an AM best, b plus or better carrier in order to qualify to haul loads for them. Well, that could be a qualification setting in here, because we do pull that information now and so maybe AM best, you know, and you can select ABC, whatever you want, and then we apply that as a qualification setting. So this is a baby, you guys, it's in its infancy and we're looking right now for feedback on how to make this even better than it is right now.

Speaker 2:

You know what I would love to see in there. I would love to just be able to see, when you click into a carrier, any FMCSA information changes Basically, where it shows when and how long ago was changed phone number and email, and then always being able to see the old one and the new one that way, because that's one of the big fraud warnings that are, you know, in lots of different places, and one of the things we mainly do is anytime that was changed anywhere recently is always go back to the oldest info and see if you're speaking to the same company you think you are, because that is one of the big vulnerabilities in the FMCSA database.

Speaker 3:

Well, let's go off script for a moment here, because we actually have something that we're getting there. So we're not quite there yet, but we're getting there. I think you can see right now. I just clicked on a company name and it lets me. At this point you get to see some company insights like that. There's a little. Get that back. If there's any authority issues, for instance, or any like they. They don't have insurance on file, any of issues like that we're going to pop out right here and kind of give you a you know a warning of sorts of that.

Speaker 3:

You might want to look a little closer into this one and if you do look a little closer into it by clicking view all details, you'll notice that it takes you to this company profile. Yeah, this is great. Yeah, for folks that use the DAT directory or the classic version of the DAT directory you've had a couple of different versions of it over the years. This is a beefed up version of the directory. I would call a directory on steroids, because we're still linking with the FMCSA, but we're not just including our customers anymore. The DAT directory you could have called it at one time the DAT customer directory, because whether you're a broker, shipper, carrier. You're in there and we were displaying information about you.

Speaker 3:

The company profile right now only has carriers in it We'll be adding brokers at a later stage but only has carriers in it right now. And it's not just DAT carriers anymore. These are all carriers with an active MC number are now in this system. So you'll now be able to come here instead of having to rely on going to the FMCSA for the information for carriers that weren't DAT customers. Now you should be able to see those carriers right from within DAT1 and see things from the FMCSA. Now, getting back to what you were talking about, ben, it would be nice to see if something's changed At the top of the screen. If any of this information changed a phone number, the email address or the company address we will show a flag, a little yellow triangle on that one, a warning basically saying this information has recently changed. That stays up there for 30 days. After 30 days, that warning message will go away.

Speaker 1:

So it's awesome Is that? Is that telling you go ahead? What I think is great about this is we think about oftentimes as a broker, like you're in a load board for one part of your job and then you're probably in some carrier vetting platform, whether it's proprietary or a third party, whatever. This is putting it all into one place so you're not having to like flip screens and all that stuff, so you can see, like inspection history, crash history, you know those changes like you just mentioned, literally in the same place where you're finding like this is a carrier that has a truck available right now.

Speaker 3:

So it's great, and where we've expanded upon it, where we always, in the directory which we would show you, a crash history, inspection history. Now we can take an even deeper dive into Safer's website so we're able to get the actual individual inspection reports and we're able to display them now Down in the vendor.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

So no violations reported, and you can see that about each one that you click on here. So that's again to your point. You don't have to go to the FMCSA, you don't have to go to Safer and click on their SMS to see the inspection details. It's all in here now, in one place in your workflow, without having to go elsewhere.

Speaker 1:

Yeah.

Speaker 3:

Good stuff.

Speaker 1:

Well, I know the next thing on our list here was market conditions, which I absolutely. I love that one and I love, like you know, showing people through how to use it. Ben, do you have anything you want to hit on in the company profile before we move on?

Speaker 2:

If you go back, though, to the one screen to just show everybody the, I think it'll be helpful for any new users out there to see, like what you can see on just the dropdowns as well, which is kind of like where you're still here and you click it, it like provides a little more information, and just for anyone out there like what this is telling them, because we get that question a lot right. All the way on the left you have age. What that actually means is how long has this truck been posted and been sitting there right? So oftentimes, brokers, a quick way to do this is you sort by age. That way you're not calling a truck that was posted three hours ago. That's been covered. Someone forgot to take down right.

Speaker 2:

The next common sorting function that at least I use right is sorting by deadhead. Which are the trucks that are closest to where my load's picking up? If I only have an hour or two, if you've got a truck that is 200 miles and your load's got to pick up in an hour, it doesn't really help you to try to talk to a carrier that is two states away, or what have you right? So those are really quick little tips that I think, help you just use this day to day as well as the top right, the rate data right, like there's a quick insight into what you're looking at and if you just want to let everybody know, mike, like, what that information is telling them where that comes from, and that they don't need to go to another place to see the rate view data on this lane when they're looking at it.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, this is to your point. This is rate view data, and so we're pulling this right from our rate view database. So if you're also you have DAT1 and you have rate view, you're going to see that same information in both places. So one thing I like to remind people of is how we get our rates, because I like to say that we have probably, I think, the most accurate rates out there, and it's because of where we're getting them from. We're actually getting them from the source, so from brokers out there that are paying carriers. We're getting those freight bills From carriers that are getting paid. We're getting those freight bills and we get to see those and we get to put them all in a database, and that's how we're getting our averages. So we're not guessing as what the rate is. We're not taking the offer rate out of DAT and saying that's the rate. We're actually taking the rate of the freight bill itself. So very accurate in that sense. And so what you're seeing here on this screen is we're going to give you the spot rate and the contract rate, both. So if you're a broker working with a carrier, we have the spot rate for you and we'll tell you things like there is fuel included?

Speaker 3:

This is a question I get all the time about rates. Does it include fuel? If you hover over the little information icon, it does tell you how much of this is fuel. So in this case it looks like 40 cents or 46 cents per mile is fuel. We're also giving you an average. In this case it's a three day average. Now I'm getting a three day average because I am also a rate view subscriber, so I'm getting what we call the best fit rate. You know, the very best rate we can give. But depending on what package you have, you might have a 15 day rate or a 30 day rate. If you want to get that three day rate, like you were seeing with me, then you're going to. You're going to want to subscribe to our rate view product as well to get it.

Speaker 2:

And I want to point out something too on this, because we've gotten this question a lot is people thought that, like when a broker posts a load and a rate, that that somehow affected this number. That is not true at all.

Speaker 1:

Right, like the example I always use and they're out there. They just think we're here manipulating the market.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, they're like all these loads are posted for rates and no one runs. Like that is not feeding into this information. This is what has happened, meaning like a load was booked, a truck ran that load and POD happened, it was invoiced. It has already occurred. It is an actual sale at that number, right. I always use like real estate as an analogy. Like your neighbor could list his house for $2 million and end up selling it for 500,000. You can list and ask whatever you want. That doesn't mean the value of that house is what that is. Same thing with a posted load Like that is basically what you're asking or maybe hoping to pay. That is not any of the information that feeds into this interface. And also, like all this contention back and forth with carriers versus brokers like everybody sees the same information, like if a carrier is looking at this versus a broker, we all have the same data and we are all looking at the same information through this interface same data and we are are all looking at the same information through this interface.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, if you guys are curious, more on the like under the hood of rate view, we did an episode with tamir dove from dat like the art, he's like the architect basically is the best way I describe it. He like, it's like if you're, if you're nerdy like me and ben get when it comes to like numbers. Um, you'll love that episode, so check it out. Let's move into market conditions all right.

Speaker 3:

So, uh, I can get there from uh, just by clicking on this button over here. We have a link to it. You can also get to market conditions from going into our tools menu. You can see that we have market conditions in here as well. And also, if you are a rate rate view subscriber, you have dat iq. You can get to market conditions in here as well. And also, if you are a RateView subscriber, you have DAT IQ. You can get to market conditions right from the menu in there as well.

Speaker 3:

So this is market conditions, you guys, and it is a really, really useful tool to gauge carrier capacity out there. And brokers care about this, right, you care about carrier capacity if they're. If the capacity is tight in an area, as a broker, you know you're going to struggle to find a, a load or, I'm sorry, you're going to struggle to find a carrier, and you might, if you do find a carrier, end up paying a rate higher than you wanted to pay, and that's those tight markets. And so this is actually a great way of looking at the United States and Canada in there and seeing where those tight markets are, where you might struggle. So what we do in here is.

Speaker 3:

We color code the United States red through blue and we give you a little legend in here that kind of tells you what this means. It's a heat map, you guys. It goes all the way up to plus 100, which is really super hot, and all the way down to minus 100, which is really cold market. So let's focus on one of these red markets right here and kind of see what information we have to view. And I am looking at outbound data and I'm looking at vans up here and I am looking at the prior business day. So me myself, I prefer either the market view or three-digit zip view. I'm going to show you both of them here. But let's start with the market and I'll click on one of these really red-hot markets. How about the Miami market?

Speaker 2:

here, it's very it's a very tight. I want to point out something as you're looking at that, mike, because this came up no-transcript, depending on what equipment and where, you are right. Produce is a great example. The day before the reefer market flips in Florida, for example, with produce like literally in the middle of the afternoon, capacity can shift drastically and rates will change right. You can see that a lot in California, obviously in Texas, where a lot of that produce moves. The other thing too I noticed was lots of folks weren't paying attention to. Are they looking at inbound versus outbound and do you just want to explain to everybody how that is very different, even though you're looking at the same state, what inbound versus outbound means? Just like from a basic 101 level.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, outbound, what we're looking at is loads and trucks that are leaving that state. You know that they're currently there, right now, and they're leaving. They're scheduled to go out when the inbound is. They're, you know they're going into that state. So we have loads that are posted, that are going to California, for instance, or we have trucks that are posted that have a destination of California, for instance. So that's the difference between inbound and outbound there.

Speaker 1:

I want to hop in here too. Whether if you're newer at brokerage or maybe you have a newer customer or maybe there's a new person working at your customer that is not super savvy or well-spoken or versed in freight markets, this is a great thing to be able to talk through with them. You could say, let's say they are in Fort Lauderdale. We were talking about the Miami market. Outbound is tight. You can explain to them well, what does tight mean? The Miami market. Outbound is tight, right, you can explain to them well what does tight mean. Well, what that means is there's way more demand to get dry vans moved out of this market right now than the amount of dry vans that we can see that are in this market. That's why supply and demand, mr or Mrs Customer, that's why we're gonna have to pay a premium if we wanna get our hands on some of this capacity versus those looser markets that are blue you can talk to your customers about.

Speaker 1:

Hey, if you have these plants out here in the West, it looks like Utah, idaho, et cetera are blue for outbound.

Speaker 1:

Loose meaning well, it's not going to be as competitive for us to secure capacity or to get a truck, so expect us to be able to if we have some time to try and really work that market and find you the best options available to lower your cost potentially.

Speaker 1:

So these are great, great resources to help have conversations with your customers and also your carriers too, a lot of your partner carriers. We're never going to succeed in this industry with just doing transactional get a load, find a truck and then the next time it's a different truck. You want to build relationships and rapport with these carriers, so if you can help educate them, if they don't maybe they don't have access to this data or they're driving if it's an owner operator, you can explain like hey, right now, if I send you to fill in the blank area, the outbound there is pretty loose, so it's it's going to be difficult for you to get a higher paying load versus hey. If I send you into this area and it has a tight outbound market, well, you could be expecting a bit more money on that lane versus the average.

Speaker 1:

So those are just a couple of things I wanted to point out and how we practically use this tool day to day.

Speaker 2:

And I wanted to add this too If you're a carrier, looking at this, like ideally, where you want to be sent, if you're in blue, you want to get to a red outbound market because it's more favorable for pay rates and capacity and negotiation as a driver, right, or a dispatcher, right. So, like ideally, if I'm a trucking company, I want to be moving from red to red to red to red as much as possible. Every time you enter a blue market you are going to look at depressed rates because there's more trucks than there is freight right, just simply speaking, right, and we can. Mike's going to show us the data to really get into this. But like again, when you just look at this map, when you hear somebody goes, oh I'm getting you know whatever per mile and somebody else getting twice what I'm getting, like if you look at this map, you can almost guarantee the person getting less is leaving a blue state or a blue region and the person getting paid more is leaving a red area of the country. And again, just because this happened two weeks ago or last month does not mean that's the case this month.

Speaker 2:

The way freight moves on our country like it changes drastically seasonally throughout the year. So to nate's point, if you're a broker talking to a customer or a carrier, right like that might have been a very loose lane. That was very easy for a shipper to get capacity on last month or last quarter that could change drastically to right now and they're going well. Hey, I don't understand why we're having service issues on the shipping lane now. Well, if you look here, you'll be able to see that market probably tightened up. There's less trucks than there are freight. It's harder to find a truck. You're going to have to pay more money to either get a truck to deadhead in there to that market to pick up your load or to incentivize a driver to take that load instead of someone else's load.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, your cheap customers that only care about rate and the truck falls off. That's I mean, exactly the point, right there.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and I know brokers will use these red markets to guide a carrier where they want them to go. Like, if they have a carrier like you know, they want to send them to Miami. And they're like the carrier's like oh I know, miami, miami sucks, there's no loads there, I can't get out of there. Well, data shows that Miami is really a hot market right now. If I send you there, the likelihood of you getting a really good rate coming out of Miami is pretty high, and so brokers can use that as one of their negotiation tactics to get the carriers to go and really good dispatchers too, mike, like if you're talking as a broker to a really good dispatcher, he's going to know this map.

Speaker 2:

Every morning they're looking at this and going, look, I am not going into Albuquerque today, I don't want that load, I want something. What do you got going into Memphis? What do you got going into Dallas? Just looking at this map like this is where that information is coming from. When you find out, oh, this truck was posted, but why don't they want to take my load going here? That's why they don't want your load going there, because they know they're going to get a lower rate, less favorable rate, when they had to load their next load out of wherever you're sending them.

Speaker 1:

We had a comment this is from Arthur talking about drive-in spot market in LA has gotten worse this year compared to last year. So I won't get too deep on a specific market, but a lot of things that impact a specific market. Their condition, whether it's tight or loose, is think about what's going to cause the demand to ship to go up or down in an area Like Florida. We're looking at the Miami market, like reefer in Florida, right is going to follow a cyclical seasonal change based on when the harvesting and shipping season is for a lot of produce, right, and then you know when you're not in that shipping season it is going to be the exact opposite We've seen with Southern California imports are one of the main driving factors for the market conditions for the outbound Southern California markets to hurricanes or other weather-related things like winter storms that can disrupt a market for a week at a time.

Speaker 1:

Think about those things. The more big picture thing to consider in a market, just generally speaking, is if you just look on a map where they're located and you think about how much do they make versus how much do they consume. If that's out of balance, that will impact the market. So, like Florida, I know it's like a great example for, like everything, geographically speaking, if you're in the Miami market you have like one direction to go and that's north. Right, if you think about a city like Boston, massachusetts, that metro area is a big consumer compared to the amount that it produces. So they typically will be bringing in more in than they're shipping outbound. And the same goes with any other location in the United States that they have an imbalance.

Speaker 1:

Think about it like a trade imbalance, right, the amount of importing versus exporting. But it's all domestic. So those things seasonality of produce and you know a lot of commodities have their peak seasons and their valleys and whatnot. And then you've got weather and you know things of that nature. So this market conditions map will give you a really good pulse read on, you know, current day, previous day, like you know, mike's got on the top of his screen. You can slide these over, you can go 30 days back, you can go, you know eight day forecast and you can zoom in and out of the actual area from the region, state, extended market all the way down to a three digit zip code. So really cool. I recommend you know if you guys aren't signed up again, use the link in the description box or show notes, you get 10% off. And if you do have it, play around with these tools, because a lot of you probably aren't utilizing what you already have.

Speaker 2:

And if you saw that when he just slid that to the prior eight days, the market changed. Look how much the market changed in a week, right, and everybody thinks like, oh, it takes so long to shift in different areas. Look right around the corner of Wyoming and South Dakota. Now go to current day, Mike. Watch that red dot right up by. It's blue. So there weren't trucks there, Right? Or there was a lot more freight than there are trucks and that shifted in the past eight days. And this is Relatively tight market. I mean it's really.

Speaker 1:

Look at the load to truck ratio over here we show a 7.4 load to every one truck ratio.

Speaker 2:

Right now postings we had 1,858 load postings and only 251 of postings right, so a trucking company likely posts a truck once whereas you might have three brokers posting the same load.

Speaker 1:

So you take that into consideration. Like you're typically not going to see a 1.0 load to truck ratio, but you will find in a tight area a much higher number than in a looser area. I just want to clarify that for anyone wondering what that number actually means.

Speaker 3:

And remember carriers when they're posting trucks, they have the ability to post to a specific area like Miami, florida, and those are the ones we're capturing. If they're posting like open, then we don't know where they're going.

Speaker 3:

You know they're going anywhere, they could end up anywhere, so we can't count those trucks. So there could be more trucks in that area than is reflective of this, because this is pulling trucks. Just you know data right from our database. Yesterday I was going to click on another market here because I noticed that San Antonio was very tight. When I go over there I can see, yeah, the number spiked, 11.5 is the load to truck ratio there. So in the volume of loads it's quite impressive too. So again, if you're a broker, you're going to probably have a more difficult time finding a carrier here, and if you do expect that, they'll probably want to make a little bit more money because they're in demand.

Speaker 1:

And yeah, again, not to drill too deep on a single market, that Laredo market is a huge import location in the States with a border crossing there. So think about things like tariffs leading up to tariff dates. Right, those are the types of things that will put a and seasonality too, for like produce coming up from Mexico, but those are the things that will impact a surge in demand compared to, like a flat market. So anything else. On market conditions, I know we want to hit on the benchmark analytics portion here too.

Speaker 3:

There was one more thing I wanted to show you, and it's just about the different, the different levels that we were talking about. So we do have three digits zip too, and so this takes a moment to. To render it's got a yeah, there you go. So it's breaking it down by code now. So, to render it's got a yeah, there you go. So it's breaking down my code now. So you're actually see individual cities. So, like I can, I can go in there and click on this one and I'm I'm literally looking at the uh, the 347 zip code there in florida and seeing how tight it is.

Speaker 3:

But what I really wanted to point out here, you guys, is is the more, the the bigger you go out, the less detail you're gonna to get. So, for instance, let me show you state. State here is usually a good one. When I click on state, look how red California looks. It makes it look like oh, that state is great. As a carrier, I want to get there. You know, as a broker, I'm going to struggle there. But are you really, as a broker, going to struggle there? Because California is a big state and if I go to market, you'll see that the markets actually, you know if I'm in the San Francisco market or Stockton market. It's actually loose capacity. So I tell people you know, the more you drill into it, the more specific you get, the better results you're going to get, the more of an idea You're going to have a better idea of that actual area if you drill in. So that's my suggestion.

Speaker 2:

It's a sharper tool, yeah, instead of using like a blunt object, right, like you're really pinpointing where is my driver going to be. If you're a dispatcher and trying to figure out what are my chances of getting a decent load out versus you know this very wide blunt tool to your point. Like California looks very red where in California it's a pretty big state, right?

Speaker 3:

Yep, that's the point. Yeah, and the other thing I wanted to point out is for those planners out there, the brokers that are planning trips, maybe you have a few days to secure capacity for a load. This is a great tool because you can see time of week that might be a better time for you to secure a truck. So, for instance, I'm going to go back to that Miami market. There you can see that today pretty tight. How's it looking tomorrow? Hey, look, it's less tight. I might be able to get a better deal on a carrier tomorrow than I would today. What about Monday?

Speaker 2:

Oh no, I don't want to wait till Monday.

Speaker 3:

Monday is going to get bad again, it's going to get really tight and I'm going to struggle again. So if I'm just looking at forecasting out, it looks like Friday might be my best opportunity to get the cheapest truck that I can get.

Speaker 2:

When did this come out? I haven't seen this yet. This is really cool.

Speaker 3:

Oh, eight day forecast.

Speaker 2:

No, I didn't see, like literally the day changes on that, like I haven't used that piece yet.

Speaker 2:

That's awesome Because, like what we saw for sure during the holidays, it was really prevalent around November and December of this year and still even in the spring, where, like we had loads for customers, right, like we were covering at what you would expect, right Right around the mean average around there, right, and then Tuesday, zero trucks and we're paying 25 to 30% more on a Tuesday, and then Wednesday seemed fine and like the weeks were getting really choppy in different markets and really digging in and figuring this out because, like to your point, if you could understand and see that there are different rates on the days of the week or service right, like whether your customer is rate sensitive or service sensitive.

Speaker 2:

Right, being able to your customer is rate sensitive or service sensitive. Right, being able to communicate with them ahead of time and going, listen, if you've got these loads coming up next week and you got four or five of them to move, you're going to want to try to plan for these to possibly go out, like you said, maybe Thursday, friday or Saturday, as opposed to Monday, tuesday, wednesday, and a lot of times a shipper will be more than happy to do that if they know ahead of time. What they don't want is a broker to guess and go yeah, send them over, and then find out at three in the afternoon they can't cover their load, there's no trucks there, or they can't get the rate that the shipper wanted to pay on it, right.

Speaker 1:

One last thing on here too. Mike, can you go back to the state level real quick Sure, I've got a dad joke. Level real quick Sure, I've got a dad joke. If you're watching or seeing this map, take a mental snapshot.

Speaker 3:

It's the only time you're going to see California be in a red state True, I digress.

Speaker 3:

All right, I think that will wrap it up with market conditions. I'd like to take a stab at Benchmark at this point. It is one of our newer tools and one that can really really help brokers out, I think, and really help brokers understand where they are doing good and where they might be able to do better and maybe save some money. So, first things first, when it comes to benchmark analytics for brokers, it does require our customers to be what we call contributors, so not only would you subscribe to our rate view, but you would also be a contributor to that, which means you're sending us your data. So benchmark is all about taking your data and stacking it up against the average broker everybody else's data so you get to see how you're doing compared to the average, or benchmark, of all other brokers out there. So this is a really cool tool to figure out am I doing good on these lanes or how am I doing for this customer of mine? Is this customer of mine worth it? Am I losing money on this customer where I'm making money on other customers? It's really giving you all that control to analyze your business in that way, and so you'll see that I'm on there right now and I'm looking at a 13-month history. So I'm going back a year right now and looking at the data on my account and we give them a nice little summary right here at the top. That kind of shows them what the year looks like, what the previous year looked like, and it looks like I spent $62,000. I moved 38,000 loads. Those 38,000 loads were represented of 5,700 different lanes and I used 35 different carriers last year to haul all these loads. So when we get all that data, the first thing we're able to tell you is okay, well, of all those loads, lanes and carriers, here's where you were doing really good. These are the green ones and here is where a green ones being hey, you were below the benchmark. You know where everybody else is paying this. You are paying this good job Now as we get into the pink and red.

Speaker 3:

That's when you started going above the benchmark. So here are some loads and it looks like it might be a little hard to see I do apologize, but it looks like this is representative of 8000 of these 38000 loads that I was 27.7 percent above the benchmark. So that's kind of way above the benchmark on these loads. Why was I so high on these loads, and so what you're allowed to do with this now is any one of these things are clickable and they'll apply a filter and so, for instance, if I click on this, I want to understand, you know, what loads these are and why they're costing me so much. So when I click on it, here's my summary of just those loads now, and I get to see geographically where all these loads are that are costing me so much money.

Speaker 3:

And the bigger the circle over here, the more loads that are being moved.

Speaker 3:

So this one is like 1500 loads that I'm above on, and this smaller red one is looks like it's only 154 loads.

Speaker 3:

So when you the size of the circle is based on the volume of loads you're moving in that area, as I scroll down, I'm going to be able to see I want to get down to the bottom here because it's going to be the load details, so, I'm sorry, the carrier details. These are the carriers that are hauling all those loads of mine that are above benchmark, and we do put the very, the the biggest offender, I should say at the top, where you're biggest over the benchmark price, and so in this case you can see that, like my Napoleon trans carrier here, the rate view by cost was oh, this is actually a good one, this is actually a good one, this is actually a good one. I just looked at, I just realized that the buy cost, the rate view cost, was oh yeah, there we go. Sorry, yeah, the rate view buy cost was $422,000. So that's how much, on average, brokers are paying carriers. You paid $5 hundred thirty nine thousand, so you were one hundred and seventeen thousand above on this particular carrier alone.

Speaker 1:

Mike, do you have data on, like the, the, the sample size here of how many contributors or load volume, just roughly that this is being compared against.

Speaker 3:

Roughly. Yeah, I know there are over 1,000 contributors at this point brokers, shippers and carriers alike. We have over 1,000 now. When we first started off RateView, we had, I think, 60-something, 65, maybe 66 brokers and carriers and we were only able to give you like a 15-day 30-day rate. Now we have over 1,000 contributors and we're able to get all the way down to a three day average rate, and our goal is to get it all the way down to a one day average.

Speaker 1:

That's what we did. We talked with Tamir. He was mentioned in like it was hundreds and hundreds of contributors, which is like way more than I know, like FreightWaves has in their tool. And then you have shippers directly too. That are some of the contributors in there. So I think it's really cool that you're getting, you know, not just a singular data source, but you're getting like a mix right. I think he was saying too, like some of them upload them, like they provide their data at different intervals too, like some might be every two days, some might be weekly or you know whatever. So you're getting a really good mix of different sources and frequencies. So it kind of like spreads out. That way. You're not, you know, over-biased in one area. I guess it's good.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, and our goal is with contributors we like it's preferable that they're set up with a TMS. A lot of TMSs have an integration tool with us that allows us to automatically transmit those freight bills to us at the end of the day, so it's hands-off in that sense. Yeah, it's a very automated process. But in this view, it looks like I've identified a carrier that's costing me a lot of money and if I clicked on that carrier, it's going to apply a filter to it. So now I'm looking at the carrier, the loads, the lanes that this carrier is hauling for me, so I can see, for instance, charlotte, north Carolina, to Houston. I'm paying about $6,000 more than I should be paying, based on the benchmark rates over here. This is a great.

Speaker 1:

I want to hop in here, ben. We talk about having an annual review of your customers, right? Think about the same thing with your partner carriers. If you can have a discussion about upcoming projects or bids that you're looking to work on with them, potentially you can have that honest, transparent conversation of like hey, we know that we paid you guys well above market rate last year. We value your service and we value all this, but it gives you that objective level of data to know that, like, am I willing to pay above market rate based on the service and the consistency that that carrier provides to me? And the answer might be yes, the service and the consistency that that carrier provides to me and the answer might be yes.

Speaker 1:

But if you're paying above market average rate for them and they're falling off on you, or that you've had communication issues, now you've got multiple data points to say, ok, something has to change here. And again, the same thing goes with the ones that are saving you on cost. It's great to save money, but are they always reliable, right? You know there's just different things to look at here. The more data you have, the better when it comes down to making decisions on you know, cost versus service and all that stuff. So I think this is a really great tool for that.

Speaker 2:

And I think that's really important to add context right. I think everyone really does focus in on that number right. But, as Nate pointed out, there are things that go into that number right Quality service, communication, reliability, right. It's very well or possible that, like the carrier you're paying more for in that scenario has newer equipment, is maintaining it more effectively, has drivers that are very experienced, that communicate very effectively, has drivers that are very experienced, that communicate very effectively, that has ELD communication on everything all of the time, and it's also very I mean, it could also be possible, right, that all of those things your customer doesn't have any issue and is willing to pay above market rate because they need all of those things. Where you might have another customer in your book of business that is shipping, and we always kind of use this as an example of like a commodity, like lumber or scrap metal. Those customers tend to be more weighted towards price than they are service, because it doesn't really matter as much if that load gets to the scrap yard a day later, if they can save a little bit of money. But if you're shipping raspberries or a perishable good, if it's two days late, like you could have lost a good portion of the shelf life of that product, if not all of it. Right? And again, you can go all the way through from examples from flatbed to reefers to where all of these things matter. Right, they are not apples to apples.

Speaker 2:

So when you hear carriers even argue with each other over what they made on what scenario, right, it's just very one piece of that information. It's not including all of the rest of the things that go into it. What is the claim percentage? What is the driver out of service percentage? What is the vehicle out of service percentage? What are the crashes? Right? What are all of the other things that go into picking up and delivering a load that cost more money to maintain, to communicate, having other people in the office, invoicing, being able to get those done accurately and on time, like, all of these things come at a cost to a business and can be reflected in this number, right? So, as Nate's saying, when you're reviewing any of these your customers as a broker or as a carrier, or vice versa a broker and a carrier, a broker and a shipper right, you need to be able to go through the other things that make up that number and what they're prioritizing, right?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I want to take a second here too. We're talking about, you know, pricing and whatnot. So I want to address one of the comments from the chat here. This is from Arthur again said have you seen rates on DAT lately? Spot rates for full truck load are $1.50 a mile. Who's running this freight? 99% of the loads are terrible, even for back haul. So here's the thing I want to point out and we've talked about this, ben, a lot of times when we break down what goes into a rate, dat is just reporting. Dat is not setting rates. Brokers do not set rates.

Speaker 1:

The way that this all happens is based on supply and demand. So if you go back to what we were talking about earlier, we looked at the market conditions map. That's going to show your supply demand balance right. Red being a tighter market means that there is more demand than the supply of trucks available, which means it is going to drive the price up, right. This is the same way that it goes with other markets in the united states. If we're in those bluer regions and the demand is lower than the supply, that's going to lead to the price going down, and that is just the reality of capitalism and free market and supply and demand in an economy. It has nothing to do with who's reporting the data or whatnot. But if you look at, covid is a great example of like.

Speaker 1:

A very exacerbated example of this is there was a huge demand to ship a lot of goods. After we were all cooped in our houses for a couple of months, right, everyone starts buying stuff and building up their houses and you name it, right, there's not enough trucks in the market to handle all that demand at all times. Which did what? Raise the rates drastically because everyone's saying, if I want to get a truck, I'm going to have to pay top dollar, and sometimes we were seeing two to three times the average rate per mile, you know just to secure a truck.

Speaker 1:

Now the opposite happens when we go into a freight recession, meaning we've got all these carriers and brokers too, that have entered the market because times were good, and now, all of a sudden, you turn the spigot off for the most part for all that freight that's moving, whether it's interest rates are up, so companies are producing less. People have less available extra money, so they're buying less things, right, whatever the case might be, there's less demand to ship, but still all these trucks out there, so the rates go down Right and then, until you get to an equilibrium, you're going to see that happen and it's not that anybody is taking advantage of everybody else. It's just that's how the market is when it's high and when it's low and as it shifts upward and downward, it's cyclical. We just happen to see like the biggest, like widest cycle I've ever seen in two decades of doing this, like widest cycle I've ever seen in two decades of doing this. It's like this one big up and this one big down over the course of like four to five years.

Speaker 2:

So I want to at least bring that out and explain that I wanted to do it. So Dean and I did an episode like two or three weeks ago on this topic and this is a really interesting tidbit as to what is happening now and why and he kind of broke this down is two carrier markets basically emerged from the pandemic One. A lot of the carriers that were in the market at the beginning of the pandemic when rates went up, they were able to buy trucks at a lower rate because trucks got more expensive during COVID too, right, so they had trucks at a cheaper price that they didn't have to pay such an inflated price later in the pandemic. They also saved a lot of money and paid those trucks off. So those carriers over the past two or three years have been able to be sustainable with lower rate per mile because they didn't have the truck payment right or they paid that off or they saved that cash. The carriers that entered the market at the end of COVID that paid two or three times the truck price of the carriers that did before the pandemic have bigger truck bills and they're financed and those are the ones that are able and need to be able to make more money per mile than the other ones because they paid higher equipment costs.

Speaker 2:

Right, but either way, that is the main reason to your question, michael. It's normally cyclical about every 12 to 18 months, like typically about 14 months. It's been three years where it hasn't cycled out and it's because, to Nate's point, there was such an influx during the pandemic to move all of this. It was the largest influx of carriers ever, and then a lot of them made enough money that they were able to stay in business longer than they normally would have with depressed rates. But depressed rates are just less freight to move.

Speaker 2:

Nobody's manipulating it. It's not anybody taking something or misleading anyone. At the end of the day, what a rate is is what a company is willing to pay and what another company is willing to perform that work for. At the end of the day, if no trucks, if every carrier in the country said I won't take a load for less than two bucks a mile tomorrow, you would see a floor at two bucks a mile because none of the freight would move until the next day and all the shippers would be like, ok, it is what it is, pay the higher rate. The only reason they ever come down is because another driver or carrier is willing to take a load for less money than another one. Otherwise they wouldn't go that low.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and the same thing goes too with like if a guy or a girl driving a truck wants to get to a certain location, like, let's say we use the example like they want to get home for their kid's birthday or their kid's sports game, right, and it's a bad call for them. That is why, on a micro level, you might get a lane, it might be cheaper to get a truck, and it's that one-off or those two one-off situations where you just happen to find the right carrier at the right time in the right place, versus on a macro level no-transcript I did.

Speaker 3:

First of all, I 100 percent seen that same cycle. You guys, I've seen it numerous times here at DAT over the years I've been here. This is by far the longest cycle I've ever seen. So totally agree with you guys, I've seen the same thing over here.

Speaker 3:

One more thing I wanted to add about our rates, though, because I've had this. You know, I've talked to carriers too. I've had that carrier call me up and say DAT, how can you set the rate this low? And say, dat, how can you set the rate this low? And I got to tell that person first of all hey, we're not setting the rate, believe it or not. You, the carrier, you're the one that's setting the rate when you guys agree to these lower rates, to what you were just saying.

Speaker 3:

So one thing I wanted to point out though, just so people understand a little bit more about our rate calculations. I told you already we're getting all these freight bills in right. Every single day. We're getting tons of freight bills in. What I didn't mention is the fact that we take the top 25% of those and the bottom 25% and we throw them away. Why? Those are your anomalies. They're like oh my God, somebody paid an exorbitant amount to get this load moved. We don't want that included in the average rate. So, top 25, lower 25, cut all the way out. What's left is what we take an average on, and so that, right, there being the fact that we're weeding out anomalies high and low, and we're basing it off the freight bill itself, you got yourself one accurate rate. So, when a when a dollar 50 is the rate out there. That's what carriers are taking, right?

Speaker 1:

now, and we always tell people too, like if you were. I know we're not looking at rate view in detail today and we've done it on, you know, other episodes of the show, um, but you'll see that median, that's your 50th percentile, and then you'll see your high and your low. That's your 75th and 25th percentile. Like you said, mike, half the data is not even included in there, right? So you have a pretty good bucket of data that's being displayed and synthesized for the customer, but what a carrier has to remember is like well, 25% of these rates actually aren't being reported. They're actually higher than what I see, and also 25% are lower and I can't see them here. And the same goes for brokers, right. So that's why, ben, we talk about it a lot.

Speaker 1:

The more time that you have as a broker to work on a load and find coverage for it, the better chances are that you can secure capacity. That is good for you and it's good for the truck who wants that backhaul to get back home. You might get below that low line and if you're a carrier, right, and you know like, hey, this is a hot load for this broker, for that broker's customer, I might be able to get paid higher than that amount because ultimately the customer is the one that has to decide is it worth me paying higher amount to get it moved? So you know again, this is data. It's not anyone's opinion. It is just the truth. This is just the actual facts here that are being displayed.

Speaker 3:

And this is one of the things that brokers do. This is one of the things that brokers will do when they do a truck search, for instance, Like I did a search from Dallas to Chicago. So I'm trying to get you know, I need a driver to go to Chicago. Well, I can come up here and choose this company filter and choose Illinois as a state, and what that's going to do is it's going to leave only carriers that are based in Illinois. On my list they're not. There might not be any right now, but if I hit that then yeah, there we go. There's three carriers that live in Illinois that I might just be able to drive the cost down a wee bit because they're trying to get home.

Speaker 1:

And here's what. Here's what we don't see. If you didn't do that, it's like their destination says anywhere. So they didn't blatantly say I want to go to Illinois, but we know you're domiciled in Illinois and that's home for you. So that's like kind of like the you know behind the scenes. You can kind of make an assumption at the. You know the intent behind them, you know what they're going to be preferring, so really good. The other thing too, go ahead.

Speaker 2:

I just wanted to add the example, right for anyone out there, like, of a situation where you end up paying way above it and it's excluded.

Speaker 2:

Everyone thinks of the ones below, right, like, but like when I worked at a large brokerage, like you call it, like fallout Friday because late in the afternoon, right, if you had any trucks to pick up, right that we're paying at median All of a sudden they're broke down and you can't, they don't answer the phone or they're cancer in the load, and then you go to recover that load to find another truck because your shippers got to pick up that load by call it five or six o'clock on a Friday.

Speaker 2:

It can't sit there over the weekend and you were paying $1,500 above what you expected to pay. Or had that other truck booked earlier in the morning, right, because, again, like, the shorter the time frame to Nate's point, the less carriers that are close enough that meet your requirements, they can pick it up. They know that they are going to ask for a premium and, as a broker or shipper, you're going to pay it right. So those are also examples of the other end where these are excluded because, like, what it's supposed to tell you, this is what you're most likely to pay on, like a standard shipment right. If it's oversized, if it's overweight, if it has very specific requirements, you're probably going to be over that number or on the other end, depending on how easy it is to move, how flexible those things are.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, that's huge. Well, awesome, Appreciate everyone that was interacting with us too. Yeah, Someone added in lane makers is great too. We didn't really head on to say really cool tool. I highly suggest you guys check out. You can actually see not just what you know trucks carriers posting but what lanes they're searching for freight in. So that's a really cool one that I really like, If you got it. I guess, if we got a couple of minutes here and you want to just highlight it really quick for anyone who hasn't seen it.

Speaker 2:

We can do that. I love it.

Speaker 1:

It weights the posted truck differently from the search, so you get like a really good analysis on what's important to that carrier. So talk us through while we're showing the screen here. What do, what do you? What are we typing in here?

Speaker 3:

So lane makers I mean what I, to sum up, lane makers I tell people it's a great way to find potential partners and lanes that you're not familiar with.

Speaker 3:

Like one of the things that you might find in benchmark analytics when you're looking at is is like this lane is killing me, the carrier that I'm using is is like way overcharging me, I can tell because it's way over the benchmark.

Speaker 3:

Well, you might want to replace that carrier, you know, you might just want to find a new carrier that can haul that lane.

Speaker 3:

So you, what you do is you come in here and you choose that carrier activity because you're looking for a truck and you, you put in that lane that you're looking at so Dallas to Chicago and your equipment type and when you hit search, what's going to happen here is we're going to find you carriers that we think are potential matches to you based on both their search history and their posting history. So, for instance, this Sonic Trans, in the last 30 days they have done 93 load searches for loads from Dallas to Chicago. Hey, that's the kind of load that I have right now that I'm looking to get moved. And, by the way, they've also posted their truck from Dallas to Chicago 33 times in the last you know, 30 days. So a truck that posts you know, that tells you right there, this is a serious player and this person right here might be able to replace the carrier that's overcharging you right now in that lane. So yeah, we'll give you up to 30. And here's the point.

Speaker 2:

Go up for a second. I want to show something else too for brokers out there. Like, just because a truck isn't posted doesn't mean there's not a truck there and doesn't mean there's not a carrier that wants that load. It is very common for carriers not to post their truck because they just don't want to field inbound phone calls and emails. They're just looking for the loads where they reach out and you can see that all the way. On the left they search for that load 93 times. They only posted their truck one third of the time. They had a truck there. Right, they searched that load a hundred times, posted their truck 24, right. So just those two carriers. Look at that one. They posted their truck zero times and they searched for that load 255. So just because you're saying I don't see any trucks posted, how am I going to cover this load? Right? This gives you insight into the likely carriers that might have a truck there but just didn't post their truck.

Speaker 1:

Yep, great stuff, cool. Well, hey, mike, awesome having you on here again. And for anyone listening, whether or watching if it's whether you're live or recorded you can get 10 percent off your first year of DAT. Use the link in the description box and you'll get that discount on your whole first year, which is, you know, a great saver. Used to just be a free month, now it ends up being even more in the first year here. So, mike, thanks for having you or thanks for joining us. It's great having you on here. Anything you have to wrap up with or any final thoughts.

Speaker 3:

Well, I just wanted to thank you guys for the opportunity. It was fun coming in here and getting a chance to go over some of our tools. Love to do it again sometime, you guys.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, Absolutely Ben. What do you got?

Speaker 2:

Whether you believe you can or believe you can't, you're right.

Speaker 1:

And until next time go Bills.

People on this episode

Head Shot

Benjamin Kowalski

Co-host
Head Shot

Nate Cross

Co-host