Are there any smart and simple ways to automate and improve the quality of the freight quotes rates which can work without any extra expense? Let’s look at some ways to optimize the quoting process and save the time to use it for the actual selling.
GROUP SIMILAR ACTIVITIES
Following the conveyor belt principle, grouping the repetitive tasks and using pre-defined templates where possible is a real time saver. Actually, it’s not only saving time, but also helps to reduce the number of typing errors. For instance, if you use an email to send quotes to the customer, you can prepare a reusable template (or several templates, for new & existing clients and for prospects) – it will save you time when you want to send the quote to the customer. You can also invest into marketing and sales automation tools and distribute your freight quote in one click.
Automation tools allow to create several mailing lists, and you can also reuse the same email template. Just make sure that your mailing tool is trustworthy enough not to be blocked by the corporate spam filters. And remember, that when you send professional and personalized quotes regularly, you increase your conversion ratio. According to the statistics, most of the clients do not receive anything back on their rate requests, so by simply sending quotes regularly you can convert a customer from potential to active.
REPLICATE
Another statistical data tells us that about 90% of the quotes in freight forwarding are repetitive. Let’s assume that you have a client in Berlin, who always orders from the factory in Wuhan. This client will ask for the rate from Wuhan to Hamburg on the regular basis until the moment when he will switch to doing business with another factory. Automate this by replicating the same quote template which you’ve created the first time. In 90% of the cases, locations, equipment and shipping terms will be the same, only the freight rate itself and the validity dates will differ from time to time.
ANALYZE
It’s always important to look at statistics, nothing is more powerful than data you collected doing your business. You should collect as much information as possible about the sales performance in your company to be able to estimate your revenues and budget. By looking at the data, you can also identify the bottlenecks of your commercial process. Imagine, if you send 100 freight quotes, but only 10% of those quotes are opened (read) by your customers? This is a red flag that something is wrong with the email setup or the customer base. It’s a must to take action on this, but you can only manage it if you can measure it.
TRACKING & FOLLOW UP
A solution to the above example could be a Marketing or Sales Automation tool that allows email tracking – seeing when the recipient read the email with the freight quote (if at all). Some solutions even offer the statistics that show how much time the reader spent on each page of the email and even the attachment to the email. It is an excellent opportunity for the sales person to do the immediate follow up on the quote once they know that the quote has been opened.All these features can be found in Quotiss logistics software.
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