As a once-in-a-generation freight recession — hopefully — nears its end, businesses are looking at lessons learned and integrating them into leaner, more efficient workflows. At the heart of many of those lessons are new uses for data gleaned from a variety of sources.
Trucks generate massive amounts of data through telematics, diagnostics and more. Then there’s the peripheral data that stacks up from sources such as registrations and financing. Businesses can mine those data streams and sift out some real gold.
A matter of strategy
For dealership Vanguard Truck Centers, data isn’t necessarily a way to find new customers but a way to manage their resources more effectively. It uses RigDig (owned by Fusable, parent company of Trucks, Parts, Service), as a way to achieve clarity in its decision making.
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“We use RigDig to make sure we’re being intentional, not ad hoc, in how we are approaching customers from a parts and service perspective,” says Ryan Goodlett, Vanguard’s vice president of parts sales. It’s not using data to chase leads every day. Instead, it’s using it to support its strategic planning. Does it have the right people or positions assigned to a customer or an area? Does it have the right resources?
As Goodlett says, “Most of our customers have been around a long time. RigDig helps us decide where our time, people and delivery resources make the most sense.”
Here’s an example. Vanguard uses RigDig to spot trends in DOT violations for brakes. When it finds its customers on the violations list, it invites those customers in for brake training. There’s no sales pitch, Goodlett says, “We’re simply offering resources and education.” It turns the data into training and product knowledge, growing their customers’ confidence.
“Customers want to know you’re the expert,” he says.
Finding strength in numbers
Jon Ward at First Call Truck Parts remembers when finding a phone number meant looking up index cards in a desk drawer. For the distributor with locations in north Florida and southern Georgia, it wasn’t that long ago. Now, First Call is using RigDig, along with other products, to identify and help customers.
“We have three or four different systems,” Ward says, including Prokeep (added at Heavy-Duty Aftermarket Week in 2025). “That has been phenomenal. People can text the store and the biggest value add is it’s a great CRM.”
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He also uses Sales-i as a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. Ward says they use it for data analytics and also to enable its outside sales associates to share notes on customers. He takes sales data from Sales-i, removes identifying customer information, and uploads it to an AI agent to have it predict which customers he should talk to.
“It’s like having a full-time analyst at your fingertips,” he says.
First Call had a normally high-volume customer that was down year over year in 2025. Ward used his process to see what products were the biggest losers for the customer and did a deep dive into its needs. Instead of a traditional sales call, Ward opted for a customer appreciation event at their shop — a low-country boil — to show their support for the business in a down year. Those kinds of relationships make sure that company stays a strong customer, Ward says, and he hopes to soon have the data to support that.
“The goal is to identify three customers for Q1, do that three times, and kind of measure it for the first quarter,” Ward says.
Data on the go
David Robinson is on the parts sales team at Birmingham Freightliner in Alabama. He uses RigDig to identify new customers, especially fleets.
“The app is really handy,” Robinson says. “It gives the fleets registered in the area that we are in and gives the number of trucks and the types of engines they run.”
Robinson says he not only uses it to identify potential new customers, but also to give him potential inroads for establishing the relationship that is so critical to doing business in the heavy-duty space.
“It gives me great insight into what is out there and how I can approach the customer from a sales standpoint,” he says. “It gives me insight of what I can push and it enables me to know something about the customer upon arrival and gives me great starting talking points.”
Robinson says his dealership also uses Daimer’s Excelerator e-commerce platform for truck and bus parts, extended coverages and connectivity services. This makes sure Robinson’s customers find and buy the right parts.
How to make sure you can see the data
Robyn Spitzke at Fort Garry Industries is in the middle of transitioning to a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. For decades, the distributor has run on its own, in-house system that dates to the 1970s. But it’s getting difficult to find programmers who can still write in that language, so Fort Garry is switching to Epicore P21.
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“We’re almost taking a step back on certain elements,” she says, owing to the fact the company’s own programmers could customize solutions on the fly. “But overall, it will have a better, solid, database platform. Our hope is to have better visibility and faster visibility to trends.”
Spitzke says she hopes the new system, which goes live in June, will give the company insights into trends and backfill the necessary inventory. She also thinks it well help her team quickly identify customers whose volumes dip to set up meetings and turn things around.
“Having the right inventory to support the sales team is very important,” Spitzke says, adding Fort Garry will use the ERP data to track upticks and declines so it can right-size its inventory. She says the company also looks at related product lines for its customers. Are there complimentary products for what that customer is buying? Is it the right solution for them?
Spitzke is looking to her systems to quickly and nimbly help shape the company’s go-to-market strategy.
“(We need it) not to go look for the needle in the haystack,” she says, “but to hand us the needle so we can sew.”
