Business Development Representative (Chicago)

Freightbull Logistics is hiring Business Development Representatives to open doors at shippers who don't know us yet. You'll run outbound — build the list, work the phone, qualify the opportunity, and put qualified meetings on an Account Executive's calendar. Do it well and you don't stay a BDR. This seat is built as the on-ramp to a full AE book.

This is not a career BDR role. We're hiring the people who will run our AE seats in 2027 and 2028.

About Freightbull

Freightbull Logistics is an asset-backed freight brokerage and carrier built around a simple idea: do what we say we'll do. Founded in 2012 by our owner — who started as the company's first driver — we've grown to a $50M operation with 250+ tractors and trailers moving freight for major global manufacturers, CPG companies, and food and beverage shippers across the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Our brokerage is our fastest-growing arm, and we're building the team to match.

We're not a traditional brokerage with a website, and we're not a pure-tech digital broker pretending to understand freight. We're building a next-generation logistics provider — combining decades of asset and operational depth with AI-assisted pricing, voice-enabled workflows, and intelligence tools built in-house. The future of this industry belongs to operators who can use both, and we're building for it.

About the role

You are the front of the funnel. Every new logo Freightbull wins in the next two years starts with a conversation you created. You'll own outbound prospecting into shippers across food and beverage, automotive, retail, packaging, and manufacturing — building targeted lists, running multi-touch cadences by phone and email, qualifying real freight opportunities, and handing off warm meetings to our Senior Account Executives.

You'll report to a Group Sales Manager and work side by side with the AE team — sitting in on the meetings you set, hearing how the deals get worked, and learning the freight before you're asked to close it. We move fast. Decisions get made the day they need to be made, not three meetings later. If you want a script, a dialer, and a quota you never think about, this isn't it. If you want a seat where the meetings you book turn into revenue you can point at — and a defined path to owning the account yourself — keep reading.

What you'll own

• Building and working targeted prospect lists — identifying shippers with freight that fits our lanes, modes, and service profile.
• Running consistent outbound: cold calls, email sequences, and LinkedIn outreach to logistics, procurement, traffic, and supply chain decision-makers.
• Qualifying before you book — understanding the shipper's lanes, volumes, modes, current provider, and pain before it hits an AE's calendar.
• Setting qualified meetings for the Senior Account Executive team, and making sure they hold.
• Clean CRM discipline in HubSpot — every touch logged, every opportunity documented, so the handoff is seamless and the pipeline is real.
• Hitting weekly activity and meeting targets, and owning your number the same way an AE owns theirs.
• Feeding what you learn back into the playbook — the objections you hear, the messaging that lands, the verticals that respond.

What success looks like

First 90 days — You know our services, lanes, and differentiators cold. Your cadences are live, your list is built, and you're consistently setting qualified meetings that hold.

First 12 months — A steady, predictable flow of qualified meetings feeding the AE team. Accounts you sourced are shipping and generating gross profit. AEs ask for your meetings by name because the qualification is tight. You're ready for the AE conversation.

What you bring

• 1–3 years of experience in freight — brokerage, carrier sales, dispatch, or 3PL operations. You know what a load is, how it moves, and what a shipper cares about.
• Real outbound experience. You've made the cold calls, taken the hang-ups, and kept dialing. You know that volume plus quality is what makes this work.
• The ability to hold a business conversation with a logistics or procurement decision-maker — asking about lanes, volumes, and pain instead of reciting a pitch.
• Discipline. You build your own week, work your list without being chased, and log your work in the CRM without being reminded.
• Coachability and ambition. You want the AE seat, and you're willing to earn it by doing this job at a high level first.
• Comfort with technology — CRM, sequencing tools, and AI-assisted research. You don't need to be technical, but you should want tools that make you faster.

The package — what you can earn

We pay BDRs for freight, not for activity. Nobody here gets paid for a calendar invite — you get paid when the account you opened starts shipping, and you keep getting paid as it grows.

• Base salary of $60,000.
• First-load bonus — $500 the first time freight moves for an account you sourced. Uncapped, and paid on every new logo you open.
• Gross profit bonus — 3% of the gross profit on accounts you source. Your work keeps paying after the handoff — full mechanics detailed in your comp plan.
• On-target earnings of $70,000–$80,000 in year one as you ramp, growing past $90,000 at full run rate. No cap on the upside.
• Comprehensive health, dental, vision, and PTO benefits.
• Hybrid — based out of our River North office in downtown Chicago.

The path to Account Executive

This is the reason the seat exists. Freightbull is building its brokerage team from the inside, and the BDR role is the entry point to a full Account Executive book — base, uncapped commission, and on-target earnings well into six figures.

Promotion is earned on performance, not tenure. Typically 12–18 months, against a defined set of criteria we'll walk you through in the interview: sustained meeting volume and quality, gross profit generated from accounts you sourced, freight and pricing fluency, and readiness to run a customer conversation end-to-end. We'll tell you exactly where you stand against those criteria — no guessing, no moving target.

This seat is built to be outgrown. That's the point of it.

The support behind you

You'll prospect with backing most BDRs don't have — so your meetings convert and your accounts stick:

• Carrier-grade execution, not load-matching. Freightbull operates like a carrier — capacity comes through our Elite Network, carriers held to the same safety, on-time, and tracking KPIs as our own fleet. You're opening doors on a service that actually delivers, so the accounts you source stay sourced.
• Senior AEs who close what you send. You hand off to producers, not to a black hole. You sit in on the meetings you book and learn the close from people doing it every day.
• A stack smarter than the average broker's. In-house AI research and pricing tools, market data, and modern sequencing — so you spend your time talking to shippers, not building lists by hand.
• Direct access to leadership. You'll work with our sales leadership and COO on a motion that's still being built. What you learn on the phone changes what we do next.

How to apply

Apply directly through the LinkedIn posting, or send your resume and a short note about why this role caught your attention to View email address on apply.placed-app.com . However you reach us, we review and respond to every applicant.

Freightbull Logistics is an equal opportunity employer. We make hiring decisions based on the work you do and the way you do it — nothing else.