Improve your sales efficiency, get rid of manual tasks, streamline recurring activities, automate deals follow up, and more – thanks to sales automation in freight forwarding.

 

If you are considering automating your sales process, but still unsure what value will it bring, ask yourself these questions:

• Have you ever wasted half an hour digging through your multiple Excel ratesheets or emails to find the freight rates you needed?
• Have you ever lost a booking because you forgot to reply to that rate request?
• Have you ever gone back and forth with a quote request figuring out how to calculate all charges correctly?
• Have you ever lost a booking because you forgot to follow up on the deal?
• Have you ever miscalculated your sales performance and ended up with an unfulfilled sales budget?
• Have you ever spent precious time looking for that freight quote that you sent a few weeks ago?

If you said yes to any (or all) of the above, your company can definitely benefit from sales automation. This article will guide you through sales automation tips in freight forwarding.

 

Top 10 Benefits of Sales Automation in Freight Forwarding

 

Sales automation is the digitization of manual, time-consuming sales tasks using software, artificial intelligence (AI), data analysis, and other digital tools. It aims to simplify the daily sales workflow and bring transparency to the commercial aspects of the business.

Sales automation benefits your business, sales team, and bottom line in multiple ways:

1. Boosts the productivity and performance of your sales team
2. Ensures your sales deals are followed up, timely
3. Increases the quality of your freight quotes
4. Accelerates your business efficiency
5. Improves the accuracy of your sales process
6. Simplifies quoting and freight rate management process
7. Reduces response time which directly improves customer satisfaction
8. Keeps commercial data consistent across your sales organization
9. Brings transparency to your commercial process
10. Allows efficient use of sales team resources

With sales automation on your side, you can accomplish more on an average day than you used to on your best days. Your results will speak for themselves.

 

The Danger of Sales Automation

 

Obviously, you can’t automate everything in your sales process, some aspects must stay human. Interaction with customers has always been the most important value differentiator for every freight forwarder. You never want to automate sales to the point when customer relationships will feel completely robotic and soulless. Think of hundreds of distributed emails with the freight rates from China that you receive every day. Usually, those emails immediately go to the spam folder. Wonder if they get any conversion with this tactic?

Sales automation is not about replacing your sales team with email distribution software. Your professional sales team is a critical and irreplaceable element to your deals. Sales automation allows your sales reps to focus less on administrative tasks and more on selling. It also ensures that your sales process is structured, easy to follow, and unified across the organization.

Your sales automation tool is the most important element for your sales automation. It is the main engine of your sales process. If the engine is not the right fit for the job, your sales process will not work at the maximum efficiency and minimal resource. If you use Excel ratesheets and manual quotes instead of freight software, you need a bigger sales team to achieve the same revenue.

 

Sales Automation with Quotiss

 

Quotiss software is everything your sales organization needs for freight rate management and sales automation. With Quotiss, you can easily upload your freight rates and local charges, automate your freight quotes (yet keep them personalized and human), track and follow up on the deals in the pipeline, and monitor sales performance in real-time.

The software itself has automation tasks — such as carrier integration, quote replication, direct reply to a quote request, quote receipt confirmation, quick access to archive data, and much more. It also feeds data via API into the other software your company uses.

Click here to register your company in Quotiss. We’ll activate your account, and help with the initial settings and implementation. You can start using Quotiss on the same day we sign the deal.

We will guide you through the basics of sales automation in freight forwarding software and how to choose the best software for your business.

 

Freight Forwarding Software for Sales Automation

 

Sales automation software empowers freight forwarders to automate the sales process: quick freight rate discovery, instant reactions to a freight quote request, automating the follow-up on sent deals, etc. As a result, you enjoy the boost of freight sales, keeping control of your costs, and getting real-time market analytics – all in one platform.

Sales automation software feels out of reach for many small and medium-sized freight forwarding businesses because:

• You think it requires a lot of time to implement,
• It seems like a high cost / low rewards idea,
• Your clients aren’t asking for it directly.

Let’s look at these assumptions and see why—with the right freight forwarding software—every business (yes, even yours!) can benefit from sales automation.

The software for freight rate management, freight quote automation, and sales analytics was not often searched some 5 years from now when Quotiss just started as a small startup project. At that time, we were struggling to find the right definition for our product, because the analogs didn’t exist. Some CRM and ERP systems offered the functionality, but it was so cumbersome that most companies never succeeded to adapt it to their business process, sticking to Excel.

Today, freight forwarders can choose from plenty of software options, available on the market. Are they all good?  No, they are not. How to find the best freight forwarding software for your sales and pricing teams? Well, the easiest way is to click here and start your Quotiss free trial now. Or just keep reading the article.

 

6 Best Features for Sales Automation in 2021

 

The best sales automation software shall include the following features:

1. Freight Rate Management

In order to automate the freight quoting process (the output), you have to start with digitizing the input (freight rates). Upload your freight tariffs and local charges, add spot rates on the go, and get instant access to the online rates via API. With the rate management software, you can keep all freight rates on one platform, ensure data consistency, enable instant data sharing across the organization and do your own market analytics.

Quotiss is the only software on the market to offer an exclusive freight tariff uploader, suitable for every freight ratesheet format and product type. You get rid of Excel ratesheets and can keep control of your negotiated freight rates in-house.

 

2. Quoting Tool

Quoting is the core process in sales automation. Imagine creating a perfect personalized multimodal freight quote & emailing it to your client in a couple of clicks. Sounds like a dream come true.

Email integration is essential – personalized communication with your customer is very important because it increases loyalty and response rates. A large variety of customization options is very important – your freight quote shall be tailored to the needs of your client. Quotiss is the best freight quoting tool on the market – or else, why would it be called Quotiss?

 

3. CRM

To really offer the best customer experience, you’ll need to have all of your customer data stored in one place. Sales automation software that includes some sort of CRM—even a simple panel with basic customer data, quoting history, business potential, average product margins, payment settings —helps sales support agents to quote and follow-up faster.

 

4. Market Intelligence and Analytics

Ideally, your sales automation software accumulates the data and connects the dots creating a larger sales funnel. You can collect, segment and analyze the information from the sales deals to encourage upsells, or set up new services and products to further build your company strength.

 

5. Booking API

The best sales automation software is tied to your TMS system, to make the most out of software integration. Choose to automatically send the successfully accepted freight quotes to the booking team. Select the data which will be automatically uploaded to your booking software, including Buy and Sell rates and freight margins, product and service details, etc.

 

6. Website Quote Widget

Enabling your customers to retrieve freight rates online through your website can sound like a crazy idea. However, with the powerful rate engine in the background, it can release some workload from the sales team, increase your customer loyalty and boost your sales!

The most important condition is to make sure that your customer will get the same rate online and via a sales rep. Quotiss software has the best rate management engine to power your digital customer portal with the most accurate freight quotes.

How to choose the best freight forwarding software for your sales team?

 

If you haven’t selected freight software for your sales team, 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.

You can find all the above benefits and many more in Quotiss software, which is designed to automate sales for freight forwarders.

As a small or medium-sized freight forwarder, you can apply the right software solution and increase your sales productivity without increasing the headcount. When your sales process is powered by Quotiss, you become fast, efficient, and win more deals.

Sign up for the free trial now – go digital today.