The shortlist forms before the RFP, and the page that gets you onto it is already three years old

Freight buying is relationship-led and RFP-shaped, which makes it easy to believe that marketing's job begins when the RFP arrives. The published buyer research says the opposite: 61% of the journey is complete before a seller is contacted, 95% of purchases come from the shortlist the buyer already had on day one, and the first vendor contacted wins roughly eight of ten deals. By the time a request for proposal is written, most of the outcome has been decided by who the buyer could already name.

By the time the RFP is issued, the buyer has a shortlist they arrived with. The bid is a confirmation exercise for one vendor and a courtesy for the rest.

1. 01

   The RFP is a confirmation, not a competition

   95% of purchases coming from the day-one shortlist means the bid process mostly ratifies a decision made earlier. An operator whose entire commercial effort begins at the RFP is competing for the five percent.

2. 02

   The pages that rank are old, which is a scheduling fact rather than a discouragement

   72.9% of top-ten pages are more than three years old and the top result averages five years. Only 1.74% of new pages reach the top ten inside twelve months. But 40.82% of the pages that do get there arrive within a month, so the signal about whether a page will ever work shows up early even though the payoff does not.

3. 03

   Two clocks run at once and the plan has to fund both

   The shortlist clock runs now — referrals, named presence, being someone the buyer can already name. The content clock runs in years. Funding only the first produces a business with no compounding asset; funding only the second produces a very good website and a quiet year.

4. 04

   Organic is the cheaper published channel in freight and also the slower one

   $505 organic against $670 paid. The model does not treat the cost advantage as a reason to move budget without stating the lag in the same sentence, because the two facts arrive together or the second quarter is a difficult conversation.

5. 05

   Neither of the two datasets in this model was measured on a freight buyer

   The buyer research is all-B2B on deals averaging $250,000 with committees of ten or more. The ranking research is all-web. Both are directionally useful, neither is vertical evidence, and the model says so on the page rather than in a footnote.

**95% of B2B deals go to a day-one shortlist vendor**; the first vendor contacted wins **~80%**; **72.9% of pages ranking in Google's top 10 are more than three years old** (typical #1 page ~5 years old).

The model runs the two clocks as two separate budget lines so neither can quietly consume the other. The shortlist line funds named presence: the operations leaders and the lanes the business actually wants, referral relationships made legible, and content that exists to be recognised rather than to rank. The content line funds question-shaped pages on lanes, modes and the operational problems a shipper searches on, published on a schedule that assumes years rather than quarters, with early ranking movement read as a signal about the page rather than as a result. Reporting asks every closed opportunity, won or lost, when the buyer first heard of the operator, which is the only way to see the shortlist clock at all.

1. 1

   Weeks 1–4

   Visibility audit

   Win/loss interviews on recent bids: who was shortlisted, when the buyer first heard of us

   Owner: OmniFlow + operator

2. 2

   Weeks 4–6

   Two budget lines

   Shortlist line and content line separated, each with its own measure and its own clock

   Owner: OmniFlow + operator

3. 3

   Month 2 onward

   Named presence

   Lane and operations content under named people; referral relationships made visible

   Owner: Operator + OmniFlow

4. 4

   Months 2–12

   Content programme

   Question-shaped lane, mode and operational-problem pages on a multi-year schedule

   Owner: OmniFlow

5. 5

   Quarterly

   Review

   Share of closed opportunities where the operator was named on the buyer's day-one shortlist

   Owner: OmniFlow

The model reports the share of closed opportunities, won or lost, in which the operator was on the buyer's shortlist before the process began. At the published rates that is the number that decides the other numbers, because a 95% day-one composition means late entry rarely converts regardless of the bid. Ranking progress is reported separately and on its own timescale, with the one-month signal read as a leading indicator rather than as an outcome.

Modelled. Inputs: 6sense, B2B Buyer Experience Report 2025 (~4,000 respondents); Ahrefs, How Long Does It Take to Rank in Google? 2025 (1.3M keywords); First Page Sage, Average Cost Per Lead by Industry (updated December 2025). Modelled outputs are not a forecast or a guarantee of results. Cited: 6sense *2025 Buyer Experience Report*; Ahrefs (May 2025, 1.3M keywords).

Every figure below is published research, not a client result. They are the inputs to the arithmetic above, listed so it can be checked rather than taken on trust. The bracketed number points to the full citation at the end of this page.

These are the surfaces this engagement is run and measured from, shown with representative figures built around the benchmarks cited on this page. Every account we run reports into views like these, and you keep ownership of all of them.

Each figure on this page, the system it is read from, and the definition and window it is measured over.

Not applicable — this is a modelled engagement. Its weakest input is that neither dataset describes freight. The buyer research is built on deals averaging $250,000 with buying committees of ten or more, which resembles enterprise software procurement far more closely than a lane award to a regional carrier, and the ranking study is all-web rather than B2B. The model is honest that it is applying general B2B behaviour to a vertical nobody has surveyed, and the win/loss interviews in the first month exist to find out how badly that assumption fits.

A modelled capability, not a client account. Figures illustrate what the model produces and are labelled as modelled wherever they appear. See all our work

Full citations for everything cited on this page, with the sample and period each study covers, so you can go and read the original.