In our Great Freight Experiment, we tried to get freight quotes from the websites of the world’s 15 largest freight forwarders. And….we were disappointed with the results. Online B2B networking is growing rapidly in every industry…but clearly hasn’t reached freight quoting. So we tried another experiment – the Great Freight Experiment, Part II.
Online Freight Sales: How long does it take top freight forwarders to quote by phone, email or online?
Not in the mood to watch?
Basically, we requested seven quotes (LCL, FCL and Air ) from a leading freight forwarder. We presented ourselves as a new business prospect, with the potential for more business down the line and were careful to convey all relevant information in the first encounter, unless certain details were not requested.
The results were far from impressive. Only ~60% of the quote requests ended up with a quote on our table. Yep, three requests were totally ignored.
The quotes that weren’t ignored took days (literally!) to get to us, ranging from about 24 hours to 4 days. One particular example we telling: it took only 37 minutes to get 2/3 legs of a shipment…and another 4 days to get the third leg quoted.
But what does it mean?
There are three big take-aways from this experiment:
- Freight companies are a little better at quoting over the phone, compared to online freight quotes. But that’s not saying much; it still takes days.
- One major sticking point in freight quotes is as the seam between agents or offices. Every office a pricing professional needs to contact can add days to the timeline.
- Freight quoting is really (really!) slow.
P.S: If you’re ready to automatically generate spot quotes and tenders, want to get great business intelligence insights into your company and love the idea of automated B2B networking, you should check the free Freightos demo out.
