Your Fleet Data Profile

National + Light

Key info you need is:
  • Regional or nationwide data
  • Light duty data (like sedans, pickups, cargo vans)
What you should know:
  • Light duty data can be hard to find.
  • Most fleet data focuses on medium and heavy duty trucking, and only headquarters locations.

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.)

Location 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:

ProsperFleet HQ and Local Fleet and Trucking Location Data

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:

Restricted States

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.

Light duty vehicles

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.

Fleet size

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:

FMCSA Fleet Database and State Fleet Data

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.

Checklist: Get the fleet data you need

These are questions you could ask data vendors, that can help you evaluate how much light duty data is available:

  • How many fleets with light duty vehicles are available in the area you sell to? Try to identify a quantity. (Just like how we shared quantities in the examples above.)
  • If your revenue is driven by number of vehicles: How many light duty vehicles are in your area?
  • Do they have corporate linkage and fleet locations?
  • Can you find data for your specific geographic area, if it’s a region?

In addition, some of these questions might be relevant:

  • Can they give data only for specific fleet sizes that are important to you? How much data is available for the fleet size you target?
  • Do they have SIC/NAICS/Industry filters? Because you might want to focus on data from industries where your best customers come from. Does the data have good coverage in those industries? You might also want the ability to exclude some industries.
  • What job titles do they have? Data sources tend to have fleet data OR extensive contact data and it is rare to find both.

How to find light duty fleets nationally or regionally

As we worked with our customers on analytics, we heard that they had a fundamental problem: Reaching enough of their fleet market to power their growth.

They tried many data vendors. But it was hard to find the millions of companies with the light duty sedans, pickups and cargo vans.

So we created a database of companies with fleet vehicles called ProsperFleet. It’s multi-sourced to eliminate the weaknesses of single-source data. The numbers shared above from a “fleet database with many sources”? Yes, they’re from ProsperFleet.

We can give a complete fleet market view for all 50 states, from local contractor fleets to the largest long haul trucking companies. Our data includes fleet locations as well as headquarters.

If you’re looking for light duty fleets, we invite you to learn more about our data and see how it might help you too.

Largest Fleet and Trucking Database to Find More Companies with Fleets

Keep this checklist: email these results to yourself.