You spent weeks winning that shipper. You made the calls, sent the packet, survived the vetting, and proved yourself on the trial load. Now you haul their outbound freight every week, and you think you have the account. You don’t. You have half of it — and in many cases, the smaller half. Because while your truck is backed into their shipping dock, other trucks are backed into their receiving dock, delivering the raw materials, packaging, components, and supplies that keep the plant running. That freight pays somebody every single week. It just doesn’t pay you.

Almost no small carrier ever asks about it. The shipping manager who books your outbound loads usually doesn’t control it, so the subject never comes up. Today’s lesson is the system ILG teaches for going after it: the Inbound Flip — three moves that turn one outbound relationship into freight in both directions, often on the exact miles you are currently running empty.

The Freight You’re Missing Comes Through the Same Dock

Every manufacturer, food processor, and distributor you haul for is also a receiver. A plant that ships you ten outbound loads a week might receive fifteen inbound — resin, steel, corrugate, ingredients, parts. And here is what makes that freight winnable: most of it is moving on what the industry calls vendor prepaid terms. The supplier arranges the truck, pays the carrier, and buries the freight cost in the invoice price of the goods — routinely with a markup added on top. As freight consultancy PartnerShip explains, a vendor’s handling markup on prepaid freight can exceed the actual cost of the transportation itself. Your shipper is paying for those trucks. They just can’t see the price.

That’s why supply chain veterans Jack Ampuja and Ray Pucci, writing in Supply Chain Management Review, call inbound freight “often a missed opportunity” — their work across more than ten large companies found that actively managing inbound freight generates savings of 5 to 8 percent, and that sloppy inbound paperwork regularly causes companies to pay for the same freight twice. When you walk into a shipper’s office and show them the inbound freight they aren’t managing, you are not selling trucking. You are handing them found money — and asking to be the carrier who delivers it.

The Inbound Flip: Three Moves

The Inbound Flip has three moves, and you run them in order. Move one is the Dock Census: you find out what’s actually coming into the facility, using access you already have. Move two is the Purchasing Pitch: you take one specific inbound lane to the person who actually controls it, priced as savings instead of trucking. Move three is the Routing Letter: you get your company written into the purchase orders so the freight moves to you automatically. None of it requires a sales team. All of it requires that you already haul for the account and haul well — if your outbound service is shaky, fix that first, because the Flip runs entirely on earned trust.

Move One: The Dock Census

You cannot pitch freight you can’t name, so the first move is intelligence — and you are already inside the building to gather it. Every time you or your driver sits at that facility for a pickup, run the census. Count the inbound trucks at the receiving doors. Read the trailers: whose names are on them, and are they fleet trucks from the vendor or common carriers? Ask the receiving clerk one easy question while your paperwork prints: “Busy morning on the inbound side — where’s all that coming in from?” Dock staff will tell a familiar, respectful driver almost anything, which is exactly why we teach carriers to build those relationships deliberately in the Facility File system.

After two or three weeks of visits, you want a short written list: the top three to five inbound origins by frequency — supplier name, city, and roughly how many trucks a week. Then apply one filter: which of those origins sit in or near lanes you already run? The gold-standard find is a supplier located near where your outbound load delivers, because that inbound move is currently your deadhead. That one origin is your pilot lane. You only need one to run the Flip.

Move Two: The Purchasing Pitch

Here is where most carriers who stumble onto inbound freight lose it: they pitch the wrong person. The shipping manager who tenders your outbound loads usually has zero authority over inbound — that belongs to purchasing, materials management, or the plant manager, because inbound terms are set on the purchase order, not at the dock. So the ask starts with a warm handoff. At the end of a normal check-in with your shipping contact, say: “I’ve noticed a lot of your inbound comes out of the Atlanta area, which is exactly where my trucks go empty after your deliveries. Who handles inbound freight terms here? I think I can save them real money on a lane or two.” You are not going around your contact — you are asking them to walk you down the hall, which they will, because a carrier who saves their company money makes them look good.

When you get fifteen minutes with purchasing, the pitch is savings first, trucking second. Say this:

Notice what that script does. It leads with proof they already trust, names a specific lane instead of “your inbound freight,” explains the prepaid markup in one sentence, and shrinks the ask to a single no-risk quote. If purchasing says they don’t know what the freight portion of the invoice is — and they often won’t — that is not a dead end, it’s your opening: “That’s exactly the problem. Ask your supplier to quote the goods FOB origin, without freight, and let’s see what the truck really costs.”

Move Three: The Routing Letter

A verbal yes from purchasing wins you nothing until the supplier’s shipping office knows to call you. The instrument that makes the Flip permanent is the routing letter — a short instruction from your shipper to their vendor, referenced on the purchase order, naming your company as the designated carrier for collect shipments. Offer to draft it yourself; purchasing managers say yes to work they don’t have to do. Here is the template we teach:

Start with a thirty-day pilot on the single lane you quoted. Then treat those inbound loads like the audition they are: confirm every pickup, deliver on the receiving schedule, and flag problems before the plant feels them — the same discipline that runs the 90-Day Lock-In System on a new account. When the pilot holds, go back to the Dock Census list and ask for origin number two.

The Math That Sells It

Run the numbers on a real shape. You haul outbound Charlotte to Atlanta at $950 and drive back roughly 250 miles empty. The Dock Census shows your shipper receives two loads a week of packaging from a supplier forty minutes outside Atlanta, moving prepaid inside the invoice at an effective $1,150 a load. You quote $875 collect. The shipper saves $275 a load — over $28,000 a year on one lane — and can finally see their freight cost on paper. You convert 500 empty miles a week into $1,750 of revenue whose only real marginal costs are the short deadhead to the supplier and the loading time, because the truck was coming home anyway. That is why the Flip clears margins a broker’s backhaul never will: you are not underbidding a market rate, you are replacing a marked-up prepaid rate while filling miles you had already paid for. One caution before you quote: an inbound lane still has to pass the same gates as any freight — equipment, schedule, dock hours, and cash flow — so filter it through the Five-Gate Fit Filter before you commit your truck to it.

This Week’s Assignment

Start the Dock Census at your best account. On every pickup this week, you or your driver logs three things: how many trucks are on the receiving side, which company names are on the inbound trailers and paperwork, and one origin city learned from a friendly question to the receiving clerk. By Friday, write down the single inbound origin that sits closest to your existing deadhead miles — supplier name, city, loads per week. That one line of intelligence is the seed of your Purchasing Pitch, and you will have gathered it without making a single cold call.

Bottom Line

The cheapest freight to win is freight moving through a dock you already visit, for a customer who already trusts you, on miles you are already driving empty. The Inbound Flip is nothing more than the discipline to see that freight, take it to the person who actually controls it, and put your name in the routing instructions so it keeps coming. You don’t need a new customer this month. You need both directions of the one you’ve already earned.

Innovative Logistics Group