Salesforce for freight brokers. Carrier performance, in the shipper record.

The missing layer in a Salesforce freight brokerage

Salesforce is the default CRM for mid-market and enterprise freight brokerages managing more than a handful of shipper accounts. Pipeline management, shipper contacts, rate history, contract terms — the shipper side of the brokerage is well-covered. Salesforce was built for exactly this.

The carrier side is a blind spot. Carrier performance data lives in email threads, TMS records, and the memories of individual brokers. When a broker leaves, that knowledge leaves with them. When a shipper asks whether the carrier they used on last month's load is the same one who dropped a shipment in January, the answer requires someone to go digging through email archives rather than running a Salesforce report.

Keelway closes this gap by pushing carrier-side activity into Salesforce automatically, every time a load is booked. No manual logging. No end-of-day CRM updates. The carrier record, trust score, agreed rate, and outcome flow into Salesforce alongside the shipper account they belong to.

This is not the Revenova integration

Keelway has a separate integration for Revenova — the TMS that runs inside Salesforce as a native Salesforce app. That integration is for brokers who use Revenova for operational TMS work: load entry, dispatch, invoicing, all inside Salesforce.

This page is for a different configuration: brokers who use Salesforce only as a shipper CRM, with a separate TMS (McLeod, Tai, Aljex, Tailwind, or none) for operations. For those brokers, Salesforce is the relationship management layer — and that is the layer Keelway needs to feed with carrier intelligence.

The two integrations can coexist. If you run Revenova as your TMS and also manage shipper accounts in a separate Salesforce Sales Cloud org, Keelway can write operational data to Revenova and CRM data to Sales Cloud simultaneously.

What Keelway pushes into Salesforce

Two integration tiers — choose based on your Salesforce setup

Tier 1: Activity logging (no admin required)

Keelway connects to Salesforce via a standard Connected App authorization. Carrier booking events, trust changes, and fraud flags are logged as Tasks against the relevant Account. Setup requires Connected App permissions in Salesforce — no custom objects, no admin. A Salesforce-literate broker can complete this independently.

This tier gives your team a basic audit trail: every carrier used for a shipper account, logged automatically, searchable from the account record.

Tier 2: Carrier Performance objects (admin setup, under 2 hours)

For brokerages that want structured reporting, Keelway ships a lightweight custom Salesforce schema: a Carrier Performance object with fields for MC number, trust score, lane (origin/destination), agreed rate, outcome (on-time, late, claim), and booking date. The object relates to both the Account (shipper) and a custom Carrier record.

With this schema deployed, your Salesforce admin can build reports and dashboards showing:

• Carrier on-time rates by lane for a specific shipper account
• Rate trend for a given lane over the last 12 months — useful for shipper rate negotiations
• Carriers with declining trust scores currently active on open loads
• Total loads booked per carrier, segmented by broker or by shipper

Keelway provides the object definitions, field mappings, and setup guide. Most admins complete the deployment in under two hours.

Using Salesforce carrier data in shipper conversations

The practical value of this integration shows up in shipper QBRs and rate negotiations. Instead of arriving at a quarterly review with a spreadsheet you compiled the night before, your account manager opens the Salesforce Account record and pulls up a report that shows every load moved for that shipper in the past quarter: lanes, carriers used, rates, on-time rates, and any flagged events.

That level of visibility into carrier performance — tied directly to a shipper account — is what separates a brokerage that can have a data-driven conversation with a shipper from one that is guessing.

How Keelway feeds both TMS and Salesforce in parallel

For most brokerages using Salesforce as a shipper CRM, there is also a separate TMS handling operational load management. Keelway is designed to write to both in parallel. When you accept a carrier:

1. The carrier record, MC/DOT, agreed rate, and contact push back into the TMS load record (for Tai, McLeod, Aljex, and others).
2. Simultaneously, a carrier booking Activity or Carrier Performance record logs to Salesforce against the relevant Account.

No manual entry in either system. Operations has what it needs in the TMS. Shipper relationship management has what it needs in Salesforce. The broker confirms one decision in Keelway and both systems update.

Full capability overview and comparisons

For the full Keelway carrier-email triage capability independent of CRM or TMS, see Carrier Email Automation. For brokers evaluating the broader product decision, the Brokers solution page covers the full context. For a comparison with Parade's carrier capacity matching approach, see the Parade alternative page. Pricing is on the pricing page.