Your weekly Laycan feed is a ranked list of importers with active or upcoming booking windows, their current freight forwarder, and everything your sales team needs to displace that incumbent. This page explains every field and every button.
Freight booking decisions are made 2–4 weeks before the vessel's scheduled departure. Laycan tracks each importer's historical shipment cadence from public US Customs manifest data and predicts when their next booking decision will fall — that predicted window is the Strike Window.
Calling a prospect whose booking window is open means you are talking to someone who is actively comparing quotes or renewing an existing contract right now. Calling outside the window means you are asking them to switch forwarders at the worst possible moment — mid-shipment or mid-contract. The Strike Window removes that guesswork.
Each card shows one of four signal states:
The Incumbent field names the freight forwarder or NVOCC currently moving this importer's cargo. It is derived directly from the carrier / booking party field on the public US Customs bill of lading — the same document that proves the shipment happened. This is not an inference; it is a matter of public record under 19 CFR 103.31.
Use this to enter the conversation from strength. Instead of a generic cold pitch, you know exactly who you're displacing — their name, and by extension, their rates, their service profile, and their weak points. When you open with "I see you're moving through [Incumbent] — here's what we do differently on [their trade lane]", you are speaking to a decision the importer has already made, not asking them to imagine a hypothetical switch.
If the Incumbent field is blank, the booking party on the manifest was either the vessel carrier directly (BCO — Beneficial Cargo Owner filing their own entry) or the name was not resolvable against known forwarder records. BCO accounts are high-value targets: they are managing freight themselves, which means they have no forwarder loyalty to overcome.
Every lead on your feed has already cleared the baseline bar — it is a real importer in your niche with a measurable shipping cadence. The Grade and POACHABLE badges tell you which ones to work first.
Grade A — strongest available signal combination:
Grade B — strong, one dimension weaker. Common reasons:
POACHABLE means the manifest data shows at least one recent shipment booked through a different forwarder than the importer's established incumbent. That is a reliable signal of dissatisfaction, a competitive bid in progress, or a deliberate vendor split. In practice, POACHABLE accounts close faster than non-POACHABLE accounts at the same grade because the conversation starts from "I already know you're shopping" rather than "I'm asking you to consider switching."
Shipment count is the number of distinct bills of lading filed for this importer in the manifest dataset. One BOL typically corresponds to one vessel loading event — a booking, a rate agreement, and a forwarder relationship.
TEU (twenty-foot equivalent unit) is the standard container volume measure. A standard 20-foot container = 1 TEU; a 40-foot container = 2 TEU. TEU is more useful than shipment count for sizing revenue because a single shipment can range from a small LCL movement to a multi-container block.
Est. Freight Spend is estimated from TEU volume × a trade-lane-weighted average rate derived from market benchmarks for the relevant origin-destination pair. It is an order-of-magnitude indicator, not an exact figure — use it to rank opportunities and prioritize outreach, not to undercut a competitor's exact quote. Actual rates vary by contract terms, commodity, and season.
Every card has a full action panel below the data lines. Here is what each control does.
🌐 Visit Website / 👔 Search LinkedIn / 🔍 Google Search
One-click research shortcuts that open in a new tab. Visit Website goes directly to the importer's domain, resolved from their customs filing. Search LinkedIn pre-loads a company + "Supply Chain Logistics" search to surface the decision-makers you need to reach. Google Search opens a "[Company] logistics contact" query for quick contact discovery when LinkedIn yields nothing.
Request Contact (amber button)
Sends a request directly to the Laycan analyst. Within 24–48 hours, you receive a personal reply with up to three verified logistics decision-maker contacts for that importer — name, title, direct email, phone, and LinkedIn — sourced from licensed commercial databases. This is a one-time request per lead; the button disables once submitted. Reply to any Laycan email to ask a follow-up.
Mark Contacted & Mark Claimed
Private tracking labels, visible only to you. Mark Contacted records that you have reached out. Mark Claimed reserves the lead as an active pursuit. Both labels persist across weekly feed regenerations — your progress is not reset each Monday. Click an active button a second time to remove the label.
Copy ↗ (Copy for CRM)
Copies all card fields — company, grade, lane, volume, freight spend, incumbent, domain, email format, and strike window — as plain text to your clipboard. Ready to paste into any CRM, note-taking app, or email without reformatting.
Email format
When Hunter's domain search returns a known email pattern (e.g. {first}.{last}@domain.com),
it is shown on the card so you can construct a direct address without guessing.
When the pattern is unknown, the card shows first.last@domain.com
as a statistical starting point — verify via Hunter.io or LinkedIn Sales Navigator
before sending.
Export CSV
Two export buttons appear at the bottom of your feed:
Export All Leads downloads every card as a spreadsheet.
Export Claimed Only exports only the leads you have marked Contacted or Claimed —
useful for handing off a qualified list to a BDR or importing into a sequence tool.
Files are named laycan-targets-YYYY-MM-DD.csv and include all visible fields.
Won / Dead / Already a Customer
Outcome links at the bottom of each card log the final result of your pursuit. These work from a plain email client as well as the browser. Won — you closed the account. Dead — the prospect went cold or chose a competitor. Already a Customer — you were already working with this company under a different contact or division. Outcomes are logged to help calibrate future lead scoring.
Double-click a card header to collapse it
Any card can be collapsed to a single header line by double-clicking the company name row. Useful for hiding leads you have already fully processed so the active ones stay visible. Click again to expand.