Who decides which freight broker a company uses?
At a company with a few thousand employees, freight is bought by a VP or Director of Supply Chain. At a company with sixty, the same decision belongs to an Operations Manager, a Plant Manager, or the owner. There is no single title to filter on, and filtering on the senior one returns empty rows across most of the market.
Who decides which freight broker a company uses?
The person who controls carrier selection holds a different title at every company size. Above roughly 500 employees it is usually a VP or Director of Supply Chain, Logistics or Transportation. Between 150 and 500 it is a Transportation, Logistics or Distribution Manager. Below 150 the function often has no dedicated owner at all, and the decision sits with a Plant Manager, an Operations Manager, or the owner.
This is the single most expensive thing to get wrong in freight prospecting, and it is not obvious from the outside. Every general B2B database lets you filter by job title. None of them adjust that filter as the company gets smaller. So a search for "VP of Supply Chain" across a list of manufacturers returns a good result for the largest companies on it and an empty row for everyone else — and the smaller half is where a 2 to 40 seat brokerage actually wins business.
The rule that matters: seniority is a function of headcount, not of importance. A 70-person extruder that ships four loads a day is not a less serious prospect than a 2,000-person CPG. It just does not have anyone whose business card says Supply Chain.
The four tiers, and what to call each one
We classify every contact into one of four tiers. The tier is not a quality score — a Tier 2 Transportation Manager at the right company is a better call than a Tier 1 VP at the wrong one. It describes what kind of conversation you are about to have, and that changes how you open.
| Tier | What it is | Typical titles | What they control |
|---|---|---|---|
| T1 — Economic buyer | Senior leadership over the freight function | VP / Director / Head of Supply Chain, Logistics, Transportation, Distribution or Operations; Chief Supply Chain Officer; COO; VP of Procurement | Carrier contracts, routing guides, whether to add a broker to the list at all |
| T2 — Operational | The people who tender loads day to day | Transportation Manager, Logistics Manager, Traffic Manager, Distribution Manager, Warehouse Manager, Shipping Supervisor, Logistics Coordinator, Inbound/Outbound Planner | Which carrier gets tomorrow's load, within whatever the routing guide allows |
| T3 — Adjacent | Buys the freight indirectly, through the goods | Procurement Manager, Sourcing Manager, Purchasing Manager, Materials Manager, Buyer, Plant Manager, Production Manager | Inbound freight terms, and often more of them than anyone expects |
| T0 — Small-company fallback | No dedicated freight function exists | Owner, President, General Manager, Managing Director, CEO, Proprietor | Everything, including whether they take your call |
Why the owner is only a real answer below about 150 employees
T0 is the tier that gets abused. At a 60-person manufacturer the owner genuinely does pick the carrier, and reaching them is the fastest route to a load. At a 2,000-person company the President has never tendered a load and never will, so returning them is worse than returning nothing — it wastes the call and it teaches the rep to distrust the list.
So the owner tier is gated on headcount. In our own configuration the threshold is 150 employees: below it, an Owner or President is a valid contact; above it, that title is rejected even when it is the only thing a search can find. The number is a judgement call rather than a law of nature, and it is the one value in the taxonomy most worth arguing about. But having some threshold is not optional, because without one every list fills up with CEOs.
What the titles look like at each company size
| Company size | Who owns carrier selection | Who you can usually reach first |
|---|---|---|
| 1,000+ employees | VP or Director of Supply Chain / Transportation | A Transportation or Logistics Manager under them |
| 500–1,000 | Director of Logistics or Distribution | Transportation Manager, sometimes the Director directly |
| 150–500 | Transportation, Logistics or Distribution Manager | The same person — this is the tier where one manager owns it end to end |
| 50–150 | Operations Manager or Plant Manager, often with the owner signing off | Operations Manager, Plant Manager, or the owner |
| Under 50 | The owner, or whoever handles purchasing | The owner |
Why procurement matters more than most brokers expect
Inbound freight is frequently bought by the person buying the goods, not by anyone with a logistics title. A Purchasing or Materials Manager negotiating delivered pricing is making a freight decision inside a procurement decision, and they often do not think of it as freight at all. That is why Buyers and Materials Managers sit in the taxonomy as a real tier rather than being filtered out as non-logistics.
It is also why a broker calling a manufacturer about inbound gets a different reception than one calling about outbound. Outbound belongs to the shipping department. Inbound belongs to whoever owns the supplier relationship, and that is usually a different floor of the building.
What happens when the title filter does not degrade
We measured this on our own pipeline, and the failure was larger than expected. An early version of the taxonomy matched only senior titles for supply chain, required the domain and role words to sit next to each other, and stopped at a short list of role nouns. It dropped 43% of the contacts it found — not junk contacts, but Operations Managers, Directors of Operations, Supply Chain Managers, Purchasers, Logistics Specialists and a Head of Procurement.
A title like "Shipping & Receiving Coordinator" failed only because the two halves were separated by an ampersand. Rebuilt from token groups rather than fixed strings, the same runs left 12% of contacts unclassified, and most of that remainder is correct rejection — Truck Drivers, Office Administrators, a Director of Business Development. Measured across 5 seed companies, 166 companies and 368 contacts in August 2026.
If you take one thing from this: a prospect list with empty contact rows at the bottom half of the market usually does not have a data problem. It has a title filter that was written for enterprise companies and never adjusted.
How to use this on a call list
- Sort your list by headcount before you sort it by anything else. The right title to look for changes at roughly 150 and again at roughly 500.
- At small companies, stop looking for a logistics title. It does not exist, and the time spent hunting for it is the time you could have spent calling the owner.
- At large companies, do not open with the VP. The Transportation Manager knows the lanes, answers the phone, and will tell you whether there is a routing guide you have no chance of getting into.
- Treat Procurement as a freight contact when you are selling inbound. Treat it as a dead end when you are selling outbound.
- When a company returns no contact at all, check whether it is actually a shipper before blaming the contact data. A large share of unreachable rows turn out to be 3PLs, carriers or trade publications rather than companies with a shipping department.
Common questions
- Who is responsible for shipping at a manufacturer?
- It depends on headcount. Above about 500 employees, a VP or Director of Supply Chain, Logistics or Transportation owns it, with a Transportation Manager handling day-to-day tendering. Between 150 and 500 it is usually a single Transportation, Logistics or Distribution Manager. Below 150 there is often no dedicated role, and it falls to an Operations Manager, a Plant Manager, or the owner.
- What titles book freight?
- Day-to-day tendering is done by Transportation Managers, Logistics Managers, Traffic Managers, Distribution Managers, Warehouse Managers, Shipping Supervisors and Logistics Coordinators. Carrier selection and routing guides are set above them by a VP or Director of Supply Chain, Logistics or Transportation. At companies under about 150 employees both jobs usually belong to the owner or an Operations Manager.
- Should I call the VP of Supply Chain or the Transportation Manager?
- Call the Transportation Manager first at any company large enough to have one. They know the lanes, they answer the phone more often, and they can tell you whether a routing guide exists that would rule you out anyway. The VP decides whether a new broker gets added at all, which matters later in the conversation rather than at the start.
- Why does my prospect list have empty contact rows for smaller companies?
- Almost always because the title filter was written for large companies. A search for VP or Director titles returns nothing at a 70-person manufacturer, because nobody there holds that title — the decision belongs to an Operations Manager or the owner. The fix is a filter that changes with headcount rather than better contact data.
- Does the owner really pick the carrier at small companies?
- Below roughly 150 employees, frequently yes. That threshold is a judgement call rather than a hard rule, but some threshold is necessary: above it, returning the President as the freight contact wastes the call, because at a company that size they have never tendered a load.