The Reason You’re Not Reusing More Carriers? You’re Not Tracking the Right Signals

Carrier reuse is one of the most valuable things a brokerage can invest in. It lowers your coverage time, improves margins, and reduces fraud risk. And unlike pricing tools or sourcing platforms, it doesn’t require you to chase more freight or bring on more reps. It’s about using what you already have—smarter.

But most brokerages still struggle to turn reuse into a real strategy. It’s not because they don’t believe in it. It’s because they aren’t set up to recognize the signs of engagement when they happen.

Reuse isn’t a reporting metric. It’s a workflow

Brokerages often say they want to increase reuse, but then treat it like a stat instead of a system. They might look at historical booked load data and sort by carrier, but that only tells you what’s already happened. It doesn’t help your team understand what’s happening right now.

Most of the signals that lead to better reuse aren’t in your booked loads. They’re in the unbooked quotes. The emails that didn’t get a reply. The calls that came in from a dispatcher you’ve worked with three times before. The trucklist that matched a lane you’ve been trying to build up for weeks.

These signals get lost every day. Not because no one cares, but because the system isn’t built to track them. And so reps keep re-sourcing freight they could have covered faster with a carrier that already knows the drill.

If your reps are starting from scratch every time, your system is broken

Strong reuse doesn’t happen because your reps have good memories. It happens because your system shows them what’s already working.

When a load gets posted, your team should see who quoted that lane last week. They should be able to spot repeat offers from the same carrier. They should know which dispatchers are sending multiple quotes in a short window. That kind of visibility makes it easy to go back to the right carrier first—and save time and money while doing it.

But if the only record of engagement lives in scattered inboxes or siloed rep workflows, that carrier might as well be new.

Start tracking the signals that actually matter

You can’t improve reuse without tracking what leads to it. That means getting clear about the behaviors that signal a carrier is interested, available, and worth working with again.

Some of the most important signals to track:

• How often a carrier quotes you, even if they don’t win the load

• Whether they’ve quoted across multiple modes or lanes

• If they’ve called in multiple times in the same week

• If their trucklists align with recurring freight in your network

You don’t need a spreadsheet for this. You need a system that pulls in this activity automatically and makes it visible to the people quoting freight. That’s how you build a repeatable process—not just a lucky break when someone remembers a name from last Tuesday.

Reuse doesn’t happen by accident. It happens by design.

If your team is struggling to build carrier relationships that stick, the issue probably isn’t a people problem. It’s a visibility problem.

When your system captures and connects carrier engagement in real time, reuse becomes the default. Your reps stop guessing. Your coverage improves. Your risk goes down. And your team stops spinning their wheels re-sourcing freight they should already know how to cover.