The Cheapest Way for Freight Brokers to Maximize Their Tech Spend

If maximizing gross margin is a freight broker's ultimate goal, smart tech investments are becoming increasingly important to achieving it.

The right tools and "tech stack" (a set of systems working together) will help a freight broker compound the efforts of their core team, allowing sales team members to sell better and ops team members to deliver excellent service at a lower cost. The wrong tools will keep the broker relegated to the technical "Stone Age," preventing them from integrating, automating, or adopting new technologies like AI that could improve margins.

Believe it or not, you can't just buy technology and expect it to solve your problems. Even with a perfect, well-suited tech stack, you can still fail to convert the tech investment into value and margin improvement.

Many factors determine your ability to convert tech spend into value, including integration capabilities, tech configuration, change management, and ongoing team effort to incorporate new innovations into operational work (this one is increasingly important). Teams that understand and do these things well will maximize tech value and get a competitive advantage; it's not about buying the best tech, it's about wielding it most effectively.

In this article, I'll go through each one in depth, giving freight broker leaders a framework for evaluating tools and maximizing their value once purchased.

Integrations in freight tech are a vast and often boring subject, but I cannot stress enough how important it is to get this right to maximize tech value. Let's simplify this into two camps: TMS integrations and integrations between other tech tools.

The best enterprise data architecture puts your TMS at the center of your universe. From your TMS, customer loads come in, data is updated throughout the process, carriers are booked, documentation and billing materials are generated, and eventually loads are closed out. All freight tech tools need to integrate with your TMS to pull relevant data so they can do their work.

Here is the hierarchy of TMS integration capabilities:

I've worked with TMS systems across this entire spectrum, and I can tell you with confidence that brokers with best-practice TMS integration capabilities have an enormous advantage in adopting and integrating new tools fast. They also get higher-quality output from their tech vendors because they have richer, better-structured data to automate and execute work.

While not as important as a TMS integration, the ability to integrate with other tools like Slack, Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, Front, and the myriad of other general tech or freight tech solutions is powerful. That means the tools can more directly model the systems your team uses, enabling more powerful automation.

It's a buyer's job to learn about these capabilities and consider them when buying. I would say they're important to know, but generally shouldn't be a deal breaker for a tool that fits. Great tech tools keep adding these integrations, so it's worth asking whether the vendor is willing to take on the integration.

Perhaps the biggest free opportunity to maximize your freight tech spend is making sure the tool is configured properly.

Often, a tool is configured when purchased and implemented, but then configurations aren't updated as the business evolves, leaving functionality on the table. This creates drift: the tech worked well at one point, but over months and years it doesn't work as well with your team's workflow. Teams will say the tool has gotten worse or no longer works, but in reality, it just needs reconfiguration to meet your team's current needs.

The best way to solve this is to meet with the vendor every quarter, half year, or year to make sure the configurations are up to date and you're using the latest and greatest functionality included in your subscription. Asking the vendor is the best choice because they live and breathe the tool every day; they'll know more than you about what you're missing.

In the age of AI coding, your vendors should be releasing tons of new functionality, often turned off behind an on/off switch somewhere in the tool (because vendors generally don't turn things on without your approval). Set up a recurring meeting with your vendors at a cadence that works for you, and make sure your core systems are configured properly and up to date; that way, you get the most out of your existing spend.

About once a week I hear some version of this sentence: "Yeah, the team is doing great; we're using the new X feature except Doug, who does it his own way." Other times, I hear from managers that the team adopted the X feature, but then I look at adoption metrics and see a few very clear stragglers who weren't truthful with their managers. A less experienced leader would be frustrated, but these days I just get curious.

Change management is the hardest part of adopting tech, but a critical lever for maximizing tech value. It's the final mile to value: the tool is up and running, but your team not using it or not using it right could torpedo the whole value. Ultimately, there are a few best practices that I've seen to help make change management go as smoothly as possible:

If you nail all of the above items, your team will adopt the tech thoroughly and correctly and get the most value. No change management goes perfectly from the outset; it's often challenging, but it needs to be done well for you to get maximum value. The vendor can only do so much here; much of the success is up to you.

In 2026, this will become more important as vendors use AI coding to release more and more innovation in their tools.

What may have been quarterly releases for new features in 2016 is now weekly or biweekly releases in 2026. The best vendors are releasing updates and sometimes new functionality multiple times a week (and sometimes multiple times a day). That means it's becoming more important to stay on top of what your vendors are releasing and see whether it's useful for your team. This is the cutting edge of maximizing your tech spend: staying current with vendor releases and integrating them into your operation fast. If you do this reliably, you'll be light-years ahead of the competition in the coming years.

All in all, the recommendations above for maximizing tech spend cost you time, not money. If you put in effort and intention to do each one well, the ROI on that time will be substantial, and you'll be on the cutting edge among brokers.

I can tell you for a fact that many brokers think that just because they buy good tools, their business will improve. That is not the case. If you buy great tools and do the above to get the most leverage out of them, I have little doubt your business will improve.