Your Fleet Data Profile

You might have the sneaking suspicion that you miss selling to a lot of fleets? You see them driving by. Or you hear of them online. But you don’t see them in the data you get.

This is because, not all fleet data is the same.

Data can affect your ability to reach potential customers, and you deserve to know the inside baseball about this.

Once you know, you can make better investments in data. You’ll be able to ask questions of data vendors and evaluate if they can meet your needs. (And of course ask these questions of us too, if you explore our data.)

Most fleet data has only the headquarters location. This might not be an issue for you, if you sell nationwide and need only the total fleet information for a company.

Here’s an example of a waste management company, where you can see its headquarters location in Houston, versus all of its fleet locations:

The problem is, if you are not in Houston, you would not get information about this company. But what if they have fleet locations in your area?

This is only one example of tens of thousands of companies that have locations regionally or nationwide.

There is also state data available from a small number of partners. But some states have privacy laws that limit how commercial fleet data can be used. If you sell in any of the 10 states below, there may be very little or no data about fleets available:

If you need info about local fleets or fleets in these states, there are options for you. We talk more below about data that could meet your needs.

If you want more detail about these data sources, we have a longer article with more information.

If you are looking for light duty fleets, you likely won’t find enough information about these fleets in “trucking databases.”

Why? Because most of these databases are using federal registration information from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). The FMCSA focuses on fleets that must follow federal regulations, and they’re more likely to have medium duty trucks, heavy duty tractor-trailers, and larger passenger vehicles like 15-passenger vans, school buses and motorcoaches. The federal government is focused on data about interstate commerce and safety. Their job is not to collect data about 100% of fleets with any type of vehicle.

Now, we’re not here to criticize FMCSA data. Not at all. We include it in our database because it’s good data if you’re looking for medium and heavy duty trucking and federally-regulated fleets.

If you need local light duty fleets, it might not be the best data for you.

Let’s compare some numbers. Here’s a search for fleets with 5 or more light duty vehicles in Illinois:

• Fleet database with many sources: 22,400 companies and 33,700 locations
• FMCSA data: 8,300, and it’s unknown how many of these have 5+ light duty vehicles

Let’s try another one. Here’s a search for fleets with 5 or more light duty vehicles in the Pacific Northwest Region:

• Fleet database with many sources: 64,100 companies with 87,400 locations
• FMCSA data: 8,000 companies, and it’s unknown how many of these have 5+ light duty vehicles

The difference is the huge number of light duty fleets that are not in FMCSA data.

This shows how data can be very different when it comes from different sources. A database that combines these two searches would give you a more complete fleet market.

When you’re trying to find enough fleets to sell to, it’s important to know that the vast majority of fleets have fewer than 5 vehicles. This is true from any data source:

If you are looking for the small fleets, this is good news for you.

But if you’re looking for larger fleets, well, as an example, fleets of 50+ vehicles are only 2% of all fleets.

So it’s important to invest in the data that has enough fleets for your prospecting.