Your Fleet Data Profile

Trailers

Key info you need is:
  • Trailer data
  • Possibly heavy duty tractor data
What you should know:
  • Local data can be difficult to find.
  • Most fleet data focuses on only headquarters locations.

You might have the sneaking suspicion that you miss selling to a lot of fleets that use trailers? You see them driving by. And maybe 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

For some fleet suppliers like retail locations, maintenance and repair services, mobile and onsite fleet services, it’s critical to find nearby businesses and governments with fleets of vehicles and trailers. And beyond that (literally!) businesses with headquarters elsewhere – all across the country – can have fleet locations in your area.

But most fleet data has only the headquarters location.

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. Because trailers need license plates, they must be registered with state Departments of Motor Vehicles. 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 local 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.

Meanwhile, if it’s been hard to find enough relevant local fleets with trailer assets to grow your business, this explanation about federal and state data should shed light on why.

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

Trailer data

The most common source of trailer data is from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA). If you’re experienced in working with trailers and heavy duty and possibly hazmat fleets, you may be familiar with this data.

If you are looking for fleets with trailers, you likely won’t find all these fleet locations in “trucking databases.”

Why? It’s the same reason we explain above for local data. Because most of these databases are using the FMCSA data, and the FMCSA has information only about headquarters locations.

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 fleets with medium and heavy duty vehicle, and trailers. We include that data in our ProsperFleet database.

To get the most complete view of the fleet market, it’s better to use a database where information comes from many sources.

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 trailer data is available:

  • How many fleets with trailers 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 trailers: How many actual trailers are in your area?
  • Do they have trailer type?
  • Do they have corporate linkage and fleet locations?
  • Can you find data for your specific geographic area, whether it’s nationally, regionally, a state, county, metro area, city or town, ZIP code, radius?

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 fleets with trailers

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 wasn’t always easy to find trailer data.

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 fleets with trailers, 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.