Freight forwarding software for the sales teams enables freight forwarders to easily manage, organize, and automate freight rates and quotes.
The ultimate goal of freight forwarding software is to automate sales and improve experiences for the people who matter most for your business: your sales team and your customers.
It may sound obvious, but your sales team is the first department to meet & greet your clients. It is very important to ensure that they have the right digital tools to efficiently interact with clients.
Freight software relates to the following commercial business processes:
- Freight rate management
- Automation of freight quotes
- Automated follow up on deals
- Sales performance stats
1. Excel as Freight Forwarding Software
Forwarders with small to mid-size businesses typically rely on Excel and email to manage their freight tariffs and quotes, and they do so for a reason… First of all, it’s free. Second, until the organization reaches a certain size of the client database, there is no pain in maintaining Excel files and templates. Third, Excel files are very flexible and have no limits in editing possibilities.
The basic features and functions offered by Excel and email may be sufficient … until they’re not. If you’re reading this, you likely already know that. There will come a time when relying on a simple Excel file can lead to disaster.
As your client database and the sales team grow, you’re going to face the limitations:
- Hard to track quote requests: which ones are already addressed, which are still pending, which have been accepted, and more. This is causing frustration for both – your sales team and your customers.
- Hard to track freight rate revisions: maintaining your actual freight rates in Excel file can lead to disaster faster than you think.
- Hard to collaborate: you’ll eventually need to assign multiple customers to your sales teams. This makes it easy for quote requests to go ignored, with each team member assuming someone else is taking care of it.
Using Excel and email can be ideal through the initial stages of growth. But, it will eventually become an ineffective solution as your customer base grows larger and more complex.
2. Less-than-Optimal Freight Software
Perhaps you’re a bit further along and are currently using a freight forwarding software solution that, well … isn’t exactly optimal for your company. There are a number of freight forwarding tools on the market, not all of them are created equal. And, really: they’re not supposed to be.
Some tools are developed with small businesses in mind; others are created for enterprises. Some tools cater to those with complex needs, while others are more holistic. And some solutions are built for companies operating in a specific niche.
Freight software solutions objectively high in quality can be worthless in your situation. In fact, using freight software that isn’t a great fit for your company can actually do more harm than good:
- If the software is too technical, your team might not have the ability to use it to its highest capacity.
- If the software is too feature-heavy, you’ll likely be paying for features you’ll never end up using.
- If the software is too expensive, it may not actually be worth the value it provides your company in the first place.
And, of course, your current software simply might not meet your current standards or needs. Perhaps it’s lacking in more advanced features, or it doesn’t integrate with some of your other tools.
Whatever the case may be, the last thing you want to do is continue using it. Start looking for a better fit moving forward.
3. No Freight Forwarding Software
If you haven’t been focused on sales optimization processes at all, you’re simultaneously at an advantage and a disadvantage. On the plus side, you haven’t invested in any wrong tool. The downside – you’re losing on sales automation benefits.
No matter which of these three categories you fall into, your commercial business processes probably aren’t currently running at their highest capacity. Even if nothing is going wrong in this area, your sales team can absolutely benefit from switching to a freight automation solution tailored specifically to their needs.
The truth is you don’t want to look for the “best of the best.” Rather, you want the best-fit solution for your business. In our next article, we’ll explain how to choose the best freight software for your business. In the meantime, you can register for a free trial with Quotiss software.
Click here to register your company online. We’ll activate your company’s profile and help with the initial settings and user onboarding. You can start uploading your freight ratesheets and quoting freight instantly on the same day we sign the deal.
