Freight forwarders often find that a majority of their work hours (about 60% on average) are spent on preparing and revising freight quotes, rather than on moving shipments or other productive tasks.
What it is:
Quoting in freight forwarding refers to the process of finding, validating, and confirming freightrates between the shipper, agent, and carriers for a particular shipment.
How it works (today):
In practice, each quote request typically passes through multiple communicationchannels (email threads, Excel rate sheets, messaging apps like WhatsApp), with forwarders manuallyrepeating steps to gather updated rates and schedules. By the time a response is ready, the information is often obsolete. One client’s rate inquiry can spawn a chain of sub-requests involving numerous people across organizations, all working on the same question with partial and out-of-sync data. As a result, quoting delays have become one of the hidden drains on efficiency in global freight.
Examples:
- Out of 100 quote requests a forwarder handles, on average only about 6 turn into actual bookings meaning roughly 94% of the effort spent on those quotes does not directly yield revenue.
- The typical response time per quote in the industry ranges from 4 to 6 hours. By contrast, a platform like Skypace can return a fully computed door-to-door quote in under a minute (often under 40 seconds), highlighting the gap between manual and automated processes.
Facts:
- Industry surveys indicate that around 60% of a forwarding salesperson’s time is spent on compiling quotes and related communications. This leaves less than half their time for customer service or other value-adding work.
- The quote-to-booking conversion rate in forwarding is very low, around 6% onaverage (in one survey of 100 global forwarders). In other words, for every 100 quotes sent, only about 6 result in confirmed shipments, underscoring how much quoting work is essentially wasted effort.
Misinterpretations:
A common misconception is that quoting faster must mean offering cheaper rates orcutting corners (i.e. underpricing to rush a deal). In reality, speed in quoting improves the chance to secure the booking without needing to lower the price. Faster responses build trust and give the customerconfidence to proceed, all while using current market rates. Modern tools allow quotes to be both fast andaccurate, for example, Skypace’s rapid quoting engine delivers prices with 99% accuracy, proving that reliability isn’t sacrificed for speed.
Who solves it:
The solution is to automate and streamline the quoting process. Skypace’s Planning & Pricing Engine addresses this inefficiency by aggregating live carrier rates, schedules, and surcharges,validating them automatically, and generating an instant, door-to-door price for the customer. By integrating an advanced rate management system, Skypace has cut rate processing times by 85% and canhandle over 20,000 quote requests per hour. This means what used to take hours or even days, with countless emails, can now be done in seconds. The result is a forwarder spending far less time on repetitive quote communication and more time on service, while customers get reliable quotes nearly on demand, greatly increasing the likelihood of converting those quotes into actual bookings.
