The hunter’s vocabulary, defined properly.

The two halves of a forwarder sales team. Hunters open: they build queues, run cadences and win the first shipment. Farmers grow: they take over the account and expand wallet share, shipment by shipment. The split is standard in 3PL sales literature, with handoff typically after three to six months or around ten shipments. The economics favour both jobs done deliberately — in the WebCargo/Freightos 500,000-quote analysis (2025), existing customers won at 22.7% versus 13.4% for new. The hunt gets you into the game; the farm doubles your odds.

The written rules of contact for a pipeline: first touch within N days of a lead arriving, a touch at least every N days after that, cold after N days of silence, and a closing-soon window for deals with an expected close date approaching. In SalesCRM AI the cadence policy is tenant-configurable and drives the Focus Engine — a rule-based prioritization, deliberately not a black-box score. Every prospect gets a visible state (never contacted, due, overdue, going cold, closing soon, on track), and the rules stay yours to read, argue with and change.

The maximum time a cadence policy allows between a lead arriving and the first human contact. The evidence for keeping it brutally short is old and unrefuted: the MIT/Oldroyd Lead Response study found calling a web lead within 5 minutes gave 100x the contact odds of waiting 30 minutes, and Harvard Business Review (2011) found firms responding within an hour were 7x likelier to qualify the lead than those who waited even an hour more. In forwarding, where an RFQ email is a buyer actively shopping, the first-touch window is the cheapest win rate you will ever buy.

A lead nobody has touched inside the cadence window — cold because the policy says so, not because a rep feels it or a model guessed it. Defining cold by rule matters: it makes 'going cold' an objective, arguable state that surfaces in the queue and in the manager's coverage snapshot, instead of a private judgement that conveniently never applies to one's own book. The cure is equally mechanical: a touch resets the clock.

The number of days before a deal's expected close date at which it starts outranking everything else in the queue. A deal inside the window has real money and a real date attached; the cadence policy floats it to the top of the day with the full activity and stage history behind the card. The window is part of the tenant's cadence policy — set it to match how long your closes actually take, not how long you wish they took.

Constructing the ranked list of accounts a hunter will actually work — not a static prospect list, a queue. The incumbent phrase is 'prospect list building', with common guidance of 150–500 target accounts per rep; queue building adds the missing half: ordering. A queue has a top, and the top is decided by rule — never-contacted leads inside their first-touch window, overdue follow-ups, deals going cold, deals closing soon. A list answers 'who could we call?'; a queue answers the only question a sales morning has: who do we call first?

Building shipper target lists from bill-of-lading and customs manifest data, filtered by HS code and trade lane — finding companies that demonstrably ship what you carry, where you carry it. Providers range from Panjiva (2B+ records, roughly $15–50k/yr) to Volza (3B+ records, 209 countries, around $1,500/yr, strong on India), plus ImportGenius, Trademo and Revenue Vessel. One caveat worth knowing before you buy: India's Notification 140/2016-Customs (N.T.) ended daily publication of import/export lists in 2016, yet Indian importer-name data is still openly sold — a legal grey zone, not a settled market. This is methodology, bring-your-own data: the queue you build from it lives in the CRM; the data itself comes from providers like these.

Selling to the party who chooses the forwarder — which, on routed transactions, is not the shipper in front of you. In a routed export transaction (the formal term), the overseas buyer controls the main carriage and nominates the forwarder; the export-side forwarder either sells to the nominator directly or wins the business through overseas agent relationships. Hunters who only call local shippers are invisible to half the decisions on their own lanes; nomination selling is the discipline of chasing the party holding the pen.

The specific, common case of nomination selling: cargo sold on FOB terms, where the buyer pays for and controls the main carriage — and therefore nominates the forwarder. The exporter's 'own' shipment is routed by someone on the other side of the ocean. For a hunter this cuts both ways: FOB volumes on your export lanes are won in the destination market (via agents or the buyer directly), and inbound FOB nominations from your agent network are leads that deserve the same first-touch clock as any RFQ.

The fraction of a customer's total freight spend that flows through you — the farmer's scoreboard, and the number most forwarder CRMs never compute. The case for watching it is hard data: in the WebCargo/Freightos 500,000-quote analysis (2025), existing customers won at 22.7% versus 13.4% for new, and customers who sent a single quote request won at 10.5% versus 20.6% for those at 21–50 quotes. The path from new to existing roughly doubles your win rate — wallet share is where that compounding lives.

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The revenue view of an account owner's portfolio: which accounts, invoiced how much, trending which way. In SalesCRM AI the Book of Business reports invoiced revenue per account and per owner from the platform's own billing data — not self-reported CRM numbers — because the CRM sits on the same platform that runs the quotes, jobs and invoices. It is the difference between 'my accounts are healthy' as a claim and as a report.

The three lives of a customer record. A lead is a name with a reason to call — from an inbound RFQ email the platform turned into a pipeline card, or from an imported list. A prospect is a lead being actively worked through pipeline stages. An account is a prospect that passed the win gate: contract on file, credit terms set, billing contact captured, finance-ready. The lifecycle is what separates a CRM from a contact list — each stage carries different obligations, and the graduation points are explicit.

The freight-native step most CRMs skip: what happens after 'Closed Won'. Winning a deal in SalesCRM AI opens the activation gate — contract document and effective date, currency, credit limit, payment terms, billing email — captured while the handshake is still warm. The platform's AI checks the uploaded documents and raises mismatch flags for correction, and the customer graduates from prospect to account. In forwarding the win is not the signature; it is the first invoice that gets paid, and the gate exists so sales hands finance an account, not an anecdote.

Using payment terms as the competitive lever they actually are. Net 30/60/90 open-account terms, documents-against-acceptance (DA) and usance letters of credit are standard weapons in forwarder deals — often the difference between winning and losing a rate-identical bid. Selling terms is the sales side of a two-sided discipline: the terms you offer are a sales lever; the credit-control policy that keeps them from becoming bad debt is its own function (our sibling receivables-ai.com owns that half). The win gate is where the lever gets recorded: limit, terms and billing contact, captured at the moment of the win.

The win likelihood assigned to each pipeline stage — 10% at first contact, 60% at proposal, whatever your funnel's history supports — used to compute a probability-weighted forecast instead of a fantasy one. A $100k deal at a 30% stage contributes $30k to forecast, not $100k. In SalesCRM AI stage probabilities are configurable per tenant and feed the forecast-versus-target view; the honesty of the forecast is exactly the honesty of the probabilities, which is why they should come from your closed deals, not your optimism.

How long deals spend in each pipeline stage before moving — the funnel's speedometer. Velocity turns the pipeline from a snapshot into a diagnosis: a proposal stage averaging 40 days when your quote validity is 14 is not a pipeline, it is a waiting room. Tracked per stage alongside the conversion funnel, velocity shows where deals stall, which is where coaching, pricing or process actually needs to change.

The manager's answer to the uncomfortable question: which rep's book is quietly going cold? The snapshot buckets each rep's prospects by cadence state — never contacted, going cold, overdue — so neglect shows up as counts, not vibes. Because the states come from the same rule-based cadence policy the reps see, the conversation it starts is about the rules and the work, not about whose memory of the week is correct.

A CRM for US domestic truckload brokerages — loads, carrier capacity, DAT/SONAR market data, MC numbers. It is the noisiest neighbour in every 'freight CRM' search result, and it is a different product for a different trade. Freight forwarding is international and multi-modal, runs on agent networks and credit terms, and grows by wallet share across lanes — none of which a broker CRM models. If you forward freight, a broker CRM is the wrong shape no matter how good it is.

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The rule that no activity ends without a successor: every logged call, email, meeting or site visit closes with an outcome and a next action with a date, which seeds the next follow-up automatically. Follow-ups in SalesCRM AI also arrive from beyond the rep's own notes — playbooks and automatic events raise them cross-module against leads, companies, quotes, job orders and invoices — and they can be snoozed but not silently dropped. It is the mechanical fix for the industry's quietest leak: in the Freightos mystery-shopper study, only 8% of forwarders who quoted ever followed up (secondary, via Quotiss).