--- title: "How we booked $5,573,986 of freight capacity for a brokerage in seven months. | Stone Haven Capital Group" description: "31 shipper accounts signed at an average of $179,806 in annual gross margin, won off the incumbent broker rather than off an empty desk." canonical: "https://stonehaven.capital/showcase/freight-brokerage-3pl" last-updated: "2026-08-22" --- > 31 shipper accounts signed at an average of $179,806 in annual gross margin, won off the incumbent broker rather than off an empty desk. Stone Haven Capital Group Schedule a Call Case study · Freight Brokerage & 3PL # How we booked $5,573,986 of freight capacity for a brokerage in seven months. 31 shipper accounts signed at an average of $179,806 in annual gross margin, won off the incumbent broker rather than off an empty desk. Seven months. A freight brokerage selling contract and spot capacity with a dedicated account team. No new branch, no carrier acquisition, no rate war. Every account on this list already had a broker, which is the whole reason the programme had to be built the way it was. - $5,573,986 generated in 7 months, from 31 shipper accounts at an average of $179,806. - 1,507,656 emails to 376,914 companies, producing 2,261 replies at 0.6%. - 430 interested conversations became 129 held meetings and 31 signed accounts. - What did most of the work: we kept the brokerage's operating domain out of the programme entirely. - What went wrong: we ramped sending too fast and lost a domain cohort in week three. 01 ## Did they get a good result? The figures are printed as the systems recorded them. In the seven months before we started, new account revenue came to $1,990,709 and arrived through the sales team's own relationships and the occasional inbound RFP. Seven months later the brokerage had closed 31 shipper accounts worth $5,573,986 in annual gross margin, 2.8x the baseline, with 129 qualified accounts worth $17,802,000 still working behind them. What happenedThe number Shipper accounts closed31 Annual gross margin signed$5,573,986 Average annual gross margin per account$179,806 Qualified accounts still open129, worth $17,802,000 Interested conversations430, worth $39,560,000 Emails sent across seven months1,507,656 Shipper contacts approached376,914 Replies received2,261, a 0.6% reply rate Positive replies430, 19.0% of all replies Bounce rate across the estate2.9%, 43,722 in total Seven months of freight sending, exactly as the platform logged it. 02 ## Did you get them in front of the right people? 1,507,656 emails is a number a wide list and a large estate will produce on their own. It says nothing about whether a single logistics manager with loads to move ever read one. 31 shipper accounts signed, carrying $5,573,986 in annual gross margin at an average of $179,806 each. Behind them sit 129 qualified accounts worth $17,802,000, and 430 interested conversations worth $39,560,000. The conversion is where the targeting shows itself. 2,261 replies produced 430 positive ones, 129 of those cleared qualification and 31 signed. 30.0% of every positive reply became a qualified account and 24.0% of those closed, which is the shape you get when the list is holding people whose contract is genuinely up. A month of booked capacity calls, created against held. 03 ## What worked, and why ### We kept the brokerage's operating domain out of the programme entirely. Load confirmations, rate agreements and tender acceptances all leave the same domain, and a broker whose confirmations start landing in spam has an operational problem before it has a marketing one. None of the cold volume touched it. We stood up 327 dedicated sending domains carrying 980 mailboxes, every one authenticated on SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX before it sent anything, with warmup running on all 980 for the length of the engagement. Each mailbox was capped at 20 sends a day, which is what makes 1,507,656 sends across seven months possible without a single mailbox behaving out of character. The estate finished at a 2.9% bounce rate, 43,722 bounces in total, with inbox placement holding at 91.0%. Monitoring logged 0 account errors and 18 alerts across the whole run. 327 domains and 980 mailboxes, none of them carrying a load confirmation. That separation is what protects the business underneath. The domain that customers rely on to confirm freight stayed clean, and every deliverability risk sat on infrastructure built to be replaced. We built the list around shippers with a contract coming up and excluded the ones with nothing to move. The people who change broker are logistics managers, transportation directors and VPs of supply chain at companies moving between 40 and 600 loads a month. Below that band there is no volume to argue over. Above it, freight is bought through a procurement process that a cold email does not enter. The band decided the list before anything else did. The exclusions carried as much weight as the roles did. Asset-based carriers came out, because they are competitors rather than customers. So did companies running a private fleet with no purchased capacity, and anyone whose freight profile said the volume sits with a single dedicated lane already under a multi-year agreement. Between them those cuts removed most of the original pool. Volume bands tell you who could buy. Contract timing and a recent service failure tell you who is buying this quarter. Both are needed, and the first one on its own produces a list of companies perfectly happy with the broker they have. The first pull: every shipper contact the filters allowed, 1,095,680 of them. The same market at 438,272 once the volume bands and the exclusions went on. ### We put the on-time number in the first email and asked them for theirs. The opener names the service standard the brokerage holds itself to and asks one question about where the recipient's current on-time percentage sits. A logistics manager either knows that number or is uncomfortable that they do not, and both reactions produce a reply. Every send left as plain text, spun line by line, so no two messages leaving the estate were identical. The four-touch sequence and the opener that carried it. The winning opener as it went out, spun on every line. That works because the ask is something the recipient can settle from memory in one line. There is no deck to sit through and no discovery call standing between the question and the answer, so the cost of replying is lower than the cost of ignoring it a fourth time. ### We ran four touches on tight gaps and routed only qualified replies to the account team. Four touches, gaps of two, three and five days, six variations on the opener and two on each follow-up, all tested against each other. A qualification step sat in front of the replies so the account managers only opened conversations with real volume behind them. The gaps are deliberate and they are short. A freight decision gets made inside a week, usually the week a contract lapses or a load misses a delivery window. A sequence spread across a month arrives politely after the lane has already been rebid. Counting the 5,879 out of office responses at 1.6%, 8,140 messages came back across the programme, and the 430 that mattered were reachable while the decision was still open. ### We read the angle data weekly and cut whatever was losing. Angles were judged on the share of replies that came back positive rather than on the raw count. Losers came off inside days and their volume went to the ones working. At a 0.6% reply rate the difference between an angle converting a fifth of its replies and one converting none is the entire outcome, and 19.0% of the 2,261 replies finished positive. 04 ## The seven angles we test, in every market Which message a market answers is decided by the market. We do not guess at it, we put all seven in front of the list at once and read what comes back. These seven travel between sectors because each is built on how a buying decision gets made rather than on what is being sold. 05 ## 1. The direct pitch Say what you carry, what you hold yourself to and what it costs, then ask whether it is needed. Works where the buyer is busy, practical and would rather be told than warmed up. We run contract and spot capacity for shippers your size with a dedicated account team on the lane. Who covers yours at the moment? 06 ## 2. The short window Attach the ask to a window that closes without your help. Deadlines the sender invented get ignored. Deadlines the buyer already lives inside do not. If your contract rates are up for rebid before the quarter turns, capacity has to be committed in the next few weeks. Is that the timeline on your side? 07 ## 3. The benchmark Place them against comparable shippers on one measurable thing. Not knowing where you sit is uncomfortable, and the ask is only to see the figure. We pulled on-time percentages for shippers moving your volume out of the same region. Want to see where yours would land against them? 08 ## 4. The status quo challenge Name the default course of action and ask whether it still holds. Lands hardest when the default is expensive and everybody has privately stopped believing in it. Most shippers we talk to renew with the incumbent because rebidding is a month of work. Is that roughly the reasoning on your end? 09 ## 5. The partnership frame Position the ask as capacity held in reserve rather than as a switch. It costs the buyer nothing to accept and it puts you in the room the day their primary fails. Not asking you to move anything. Worth having a second broker who already knows your lanes for the week one falls over? 10 ## 6. Pain led Name the constraint they live with, in the words they would use themselves, then ask whether it is true for them. Works where the problem is something the whole sector complains about privately. Most logistics managers we speak to are chasing a tracking update on a load nobody can locate. Is that a normal week for you? 11 ## 7. The referral sideways Give them permission to hand you to somebody else. The reply takes one line, and the name it returns arrives with an internal endorsement already attached. If carrier selection sits with someone else there, happy to be pointed their way instead. 12 ## How we use them All seven ship together across a split list from the first week. Inside a few weeks the reply quality has already named the one or two this market wants, and the rest come off before they burn any more contacts. Which one wins changes every time. That one of them wins does not. Seven at once converts a guess into a measurement, and the same seven port to LinkedIn on shorter wording with the underlying logic untouched. 13 ## What did not work, and what we did about it Three things. We would rather set them out here than have you discover them on your own engagement. ### We ramped sending too fast and lost a domain cohort in week three. The estate was brought up to full volume faster than the newest domains had age to carry. In week three a cohort of them started landing outside the inbox, then bouncing, then getting rejected at the gateway. It shows up first as a reply rate that halves for no visible reason, and by the time it is obvious the domains are already scorched. That cohort was written off, and the contacts it had touched sat cold for the rest of the month because re-approaching them from a new domain that soon reads as the same sender again. The estate in week three, with the burned cohort showing against the rest. What we changed: send volume per domain was stepped up on a fixed schedule tied to domain age rather than to how much list was waiting, and the burned cohort was retired rather than nursed. The estate settled at 980 mailboxes across 327 domains, capped at 20 a day each, and held 91.0% placement for the remainder of the run. ### The subject lines were too clever for the market. The early subject lines were written to be interesting. This audience reads email on a phone, standing in a yard or a dock office, with drivers waiting. Anything that asks the reader to work out what it means gets left, and a curiosity line reads as a sales email from six feet away. The clever set underperformed the plain set consistently enough that there was nothing to argue about. What we changed: subject lines went plain and literal, naming the lane, the freight type or the on-time question directly. Nothing withheld and nothing to decode. Plain beat interesting in every test after that, and it was never close. ### The warm reserve was under-provisioned. When the burned cohort came out of rotation there was nothing ready to take its place. Domains cannot be conjured at short notice, because a new one needs weeks of warmup before it carries campaign volume, and sending from it early only produces the same failure again. Volume dropped for a stretch while replacements aged, and that gap is visible in the middle of the programme. What we changed: a standing reserve of warmed, idle domains now sits behind every estate we build, aged in parallel with the live ones and rotated in the day anything degrades. Capacity became something held in hand rather than something ordered after it was needed. A programme running seven months at this volume does not stay clean, and a document that reads as though one did has had this section removed. These three are the corrections most likely to appear again on your engagement, which is why they are printed. 14 ## Why this works for freight brokerage specifically Every brokerage we talk to is stuck in the same place. The carrier network is good, the account team is good, and every shipper on the book came through somebody who already knew somebody. That works until the growth target stops matching the number of people the sales team has ever met. Three characteristics of freight carry most of the result: - Every shipper already has a broker. That sounds like an obstacle and it is the opposite. There is no category to explain and no budget to create. The purchase exists, somebody else is fulfilling it, and the only question is whether they are fulfilling it well. - The account pays for itself quickly. At an average of $179,806 in annual gross margin, two or three signings cover a programme like this, and the volume repeats the following year without anybody sending another email. - The comparison is a number. On-time percentage, tender acceptance and claims rate are all things a logistics manager already tracks. An offer that competes on a figure the buyer measures weekly does not need a discovery call to become concrete. 15 ## Why would this work for your business? It may well not, and the cheapest place to establish that is here rather than four months into a programme. Read down the table. This works ifThis does not work if Your buyers sit in identifiable companies you can list by volume, role and geographyYour buyers are individuals who cannot be found by any firmographic filter The purchase already exists and somebody else is currently supplying itYou are creating a category and every conversation starts by explaining it One account is worth six figures a year or repeats without further sellingA single sale is worth less than the cost of the conversation that produced it Buyers move in and out of a buying window that recurs and can be spottedBuying is random, rare and gives off no signal in advance Somebody on your side can answer a live reply the same day it landsReplies will sit in a shared inbox for a week before anyone opens them A brokerage that recognises itself on the left of that table can expect the method to transfer, because nothing about this client was unusual. A regional brokerage with reliable capacity, a competent account team and no way of reaching a shipper who had never heard of them. What produced the result was process, and process behaves the same way against your market as it did against theirs. 16 ## Before and after Before After New account revenue in seven months$1,990,709 $5,573,986 Accounts closedReferral and inbound RFP only 31 signed from outbound Qualified accounts in progressWhatever the team happened to know 129 worth $17,802,000 How a shipper first heard from the brokerageAn existing relationship 376,914 contacts approached directly Where new business came fromThe sales team's own network A list rebuilt against the market every month Freight outbound is a timing problem before it is a messaging problem. A shipper with eleven months left on a contract and no service complaints is unreachable by any email ever written. The same shipper six weeks before renewal, or the Monday after a load missed a delivery window, will answer a mediocre one. That means the list has a shelf life measured in weeks. A pull built in January is describing a market that no longer exists by March, because contracts have turned over, service has failed somewhere new and half the names have moved roles. Running the same file for seven months would have meant sending to a market's memory of itself. So the list was rebuilt every month. 1,095,680 contacts in the broad pool, 438,272 after the volume bands and exclusions, and that narrow set was re-derived from scratch each cycle rather than topped up. Companies whose window had closed came out. Companies whose window had just opened went in. The sequence stayed the same and the audience underneath it kept changing. That is the part most brokerages get wrong when they try this internally. They build one good list, work it until it is exhausted, and conclude the channel does not perform. The channel performs when the file is refreshed at the speed the market actually turns over, and in freight that speed is monthly. 17 ## If you want to know whether your market has this in it A short call covers it. Tell us the freight profile you want on contract, the volume band that makes an account worth having, and what one is worth in annual gross margin. We come back with how many of those shippers are genuinely reachable, how many are likely to be inside a buying window in any given month, and what conversation volume that supports. If the answer is that outbound is the wrong instrument for your market, you will hear it in that conversation. Neither of us gets anything out of finding it out in month five. ## Want to know whether your market has this in it? The first conversation is short. You tell us who your buyers are and what one is worth to you. We tell you how many we can actually reach, what the meeting volume looks like, and whether outbound is the right lever for you at all. If we think it is not, we will say so. Book a consultation call → ## Read another one [Managed IT Services Provider](https://stonehaven.capital/showcase/managed-it-services-provider/)[How we put $7,179,450 of managed IT contracts on the book for an MSP in eight months.](https://stonehaven.capital/showcase/managed-it-services-provider/)[Medical Billing & RCM](https://stonehaven.capital/showcase/medical-billing-rcm/)[How we put $3,190,000 of new billing revenue in front of a revenue cycle management firm in six months.](https://stonehaven.capital/showcase/medical-billing-rcm/)[All case studies](https://stonehaven.capital/case-studies/)