It isn’t a load board. Trimble’s Jonah McIntire wants to make that clear.
The new Freight Marketplace offering from Trimble (NASDAQ: TRMB) resides in the same space as a load board; they both match demand for carrier services with freight that needs to be moved to market. But Freight Marketplace is in the news this week because it announced its first significant shipper joining the platform, Procter & Gamble.
And while there are significant differences between the Trimble Freight Marketplace and a classic load board, the fact is a series of transactions on the trucking battlefield means the old basic definition of a load board doesn’t work anymore. Just this week, a deal between Highway and Triumph Financial (NASDAQ: TFIN) dealt with freight fraud issues that have become a major challenge for load board companies. DAT buying the Convoy tech stack from Flexport is another example of a load board widening its reach with new capabilities.
McIntire, the chief platform officer for Trimble’s transportation group, said in an interview with FreightWaves that Freight Marketplace has what it does right in its name. “Marketplaces are meant to match buyers and sellers of things,” he said. “They’re matching buyers and sellers of transportation capacity.”
But there are several key differences between Trimble’s Freight Marketplace and a traditional load board model.
Shippers are the targets
It starts with the fact that Freight Marketplace is primarily targeted at shippers, McIntire said. And those shippers using Freight Marketplace are not going to be using the platform to find carriers for spot loads except in rare instances.
Rather, he said, it will be for various types of business that have an element of term to them, with a large amount of freight that needs to be moved over a period of time designated by the shipper.
“It’s focused on what I would call the primary market,” McIntire said. “They’re typically very large or medium-sized shippers.”
While there has been activity on Freight Marketplace for several weeks, without a formal announcement of a launch but with a reference to it by Trimble CEO Rob Painter on the company’s recent second quarter earnings call, Trimble this week made public its deal with Procter & Gamble. (NYSE: PG)
P&G is being identified as shipper number one on Freight Marketplace. McIntire said there had been other activity on the platform prior to P&G’s entry but mostly by companies that already had been using the freight matching capabilities at Transporeon, the European company that Trimble acquired in 2023 for almost $2 billion. That platform has more than 7,000 carriers, shippers and brokers operating in Europe and is the basis for Freight Marketplace.
McIntire some shippers on Transporeon who also have operations in the U.S. had been active on the platform in recent months, familiar with its operations.
Freight Marketplace, unlike a load board, is focused more on contractual-type arrangements than a spot load looking for capacity, McIntire said.
Mini-bids, mini-RFQs
“It handles strategic RFQs, things you would run once or twice a year,” he said. “It handles what are often called mini-bids, or mini-RFQs, the kind of filler events that happen each month.”
He ticked off other potential uses that Trimble believes are better suited to be on a platform designed for shippers rather than on a load board: a shipper decides they can’t work with a particular carrier that it had a deal with, so the shipments need to be rebid. Or there’s a new customer of the shipper, and that capacity needs to be secured on more than a spot basis. “It’s a new lane,” he said. “It wasn’t in their previous RFQ. And instead of doing it as a spot deal, they redo it as a mini-bid.”
Another difference with a load board, according to McIntire: “it goes all the way through to assignment or agreement.”
The platform is designed to be the place where all the post-deal fulfillment gets done. Negotiations to conclude a deal from a traditional load board transaction take place offline, McIntire said, “whereas in our marketplace, it’s done online. It’s in the tool.”
“Most load boards are there for people to find each other who didn’t know each other before,” McIntire said, summing up the distinction. “And the Freight Marketplace is really about organizing a buying and selling event between companies that already had some contact with each other.”
In its announcement of the P&G deal, Trimble boasted that it had 400 carriers on the platform. Given that it just launched in the U.S., where did those 400 come from?
P&G brings a bunch of carriers
A basic concept in the platform is that shippers who go on it can provide a list of approved carriers who can interact with them on Freight Marketplace. About 150 of those carriers came with P&G, according to McIntire. The balance came from those early users who migrated over from the Transporeon system and provided their approved carriers to bring it up to about 400.
Procter & Gamble is putting the entirety of its monthly procurement needs through Freight Marketplace, McIntire said. “They’re not using it in addition to something else,” he said. “This is really their primary procurement mechanism.”
The consumer product giant’s cost for being a shipper on the platform: zero. Freight Marketplace’s financial structure calls for carriers who are on the system–through the approval of the shippers that use them–to pay $100 per month to be on the site, with the ability to have several free transactions as part of an introductory period to test satisfaction with the system and the process, according to McIntire.
Freight Marketplace works as a website, rather than an app, according to McIntire. But there is an interface so that data and information from transactions in the Trimble tool can be integrated into a shipper and carrier’s transportation management systems.
When a shipper signs up to use the Freight Marketplace, they are assigned a “post-sale consultant,” McIntire said, “to handle this hyper care phase where someone has just agreed to use the marketplace, and they need to be guided and supported in that process.”
Given that the financial barrier to entry is zero–a shipper’s cost to use the system–it’s easy for a shipper to say, “ok, I’ll try it for one event,” McIntire said. “So we hand hold them for one event, and if they have a good outcome, then they’ll say I’ll try for another event. It sort of spreads smoothly, rather than with a big evaluation and commitment and then a project.”
McIntire said Trimble expects to have a “steady stream” of announcements of new shippers signing up for Freight Marketplace. But he also said even though a shipper’s financial barriers to entry are about as low as they can be, at least in terms of money paid to Trimble, the process to sign up a new “logo” can take many months.
More articles by John Kingston
Two state troopers who falsified CDL test results get short jail sentences in Massachusetts
BMO’s transportation numbers show slight improvement in trucking credit conditions
NFI driver misclassification case in New Jersey could reach individual payouts of $50k
