Building a quotation that survives the shipment

Qualify before pricing

The information needed is the same each time and is rarely offered unprompted: what the goods are, their packed dimensions and weight, how they are presented, whether anything is regulated, where they are ready and when, where they must reach, the delivery term agreed in the sale, and who is expected to pay at each end. Missing any of it means pricing an imagined shipment. The delivery term deserves particular attention because it determines which charges fall to the enquirer at all. Quoting a full door-to-door price to a party whose obligation ends at departure produces an offer that looks expensive against competitors who understood the question.

Cost upwards from the purchase, not downwards from a target

Assemble the buy side leg by leg, including collection, origin handling and documentation, main carriage, destination handling, clearance coordination and final delivery. Only then apply the intended spread. Building the other way round, by starting from what the customer is expected to accept and squeezing the components to fit, hides the fact that a particular leg is being sold below its cost. Where any component is an estimate rather than a held rate, it should be visible as such internally. A quotation resting on an assumed haulage price nobody has confirmed is a position, not a calculation.

Assumptions, exclusions and validity are part of the price

Stating what the offer covers is half the job; stating what it does not is the half that protects it. Waiting beyond an agreed allowance, storage, inspection costs, duties and taxes, additional attempts at collection or delivery, out-of-gauge handling and anything arising from a description that turns out to be inaccurate all belong in the exclusions. So does the basis: the validity period, the currency, and whether the price is subject to space being available. Customers rarely object to clear exclusions at the time of quoting. They object strenuously to charges that appear afterwards without warning, which is the same information delivered at the worst possible moment.

The cost of quoting, and when to decline

Quoting is not free. A bespoke offer consumes pricing time, correspondent enquiries and sometimes carrier requests, and a desk answering everything indiscriminately is subsidising enquiries it has no realistic prospect of winning. Tracking conversion by customer and by lane shows where the effort is producing business. The useful discipline is to standardise the common enquiries so they can be answered from a rate base with little effort, and to reserve bespoke work for business worth winning. Declining politely and quickly is a service to both parties.

Frequently asked questions

How long should a freight quotation remain valid?

No longer than the shortest of the rates behind it. Where main carriage is held on a contract but haulage or handling is quoted on the day, the validity should follow the day-rate component rather than the contracted one.

Why does the invoice so often exceed the quotation?

Usually because the shipment differed from its description or because events occurred that were excluded. Both are avoidable at the quoting stage, by collecting real dimensions and by naming the exclusions in the offer rather than in the terms attached beneath it.