A simple enquiry: six frozen pallets a week to the North East
A food producer emails asking for a price: six frozen pallets a week from their site to three depots, plus some chilled. The sales office opens the rate sheet for frozen groupage, looks up postcode zones, checks whether the depots need timed slots, adds the current fuel surcharge, looks for any storage element and wonders whether multi-temp works out better.
It is not hard, but it takes time, and the sales person who knows the sheets best is out seeing a customer. The quote goes out two days later. The producer has had two other prices already.
Why quoting is slow
Temperature-controlled pricing has many variables. The rates are known; they are just spread across sheets that only a few people can read confidently.
- Different rate sheets for chilled, frozen and multi-temperature.
- Postcode zones held in yet another sheet.
- Surcharges for timed deliveries, tail-lifts and remote areas applied by memory.
- Fuel surcharge changes monthly and old sheets hang around.
- Storage and handling priced separately by the store team.
What slow quoting costs
Enquiries lost to faster competitors. Quotes that miss a surcharge, making the work less profitable than it looks for the life of the contract. Quotes that double-count, pricing you out. And no record of what was quoted, so follow-up and win-loss analysis do not happen.
It also ties up your most experienced sales people in arithmetic.
How we build a quote tool from your rates
- We load your rate cards: regimes, postcode zones, pallet types, volume bands, and every surcharge with its rule.
- The fuel surcharge is held as a single figure updated when you change it, and applied to every new quote.
- The sales person enters the enquiry: collection and delivery postcodes, regime, pallets per week, service options and any storage.
- The tool produces a priced quote with each element shown, and suggests alternatives your rules allow, such as multi-temp against separate chilled and frozen runs.
- Anything outside the rules, such as an unusual postcode or volume, is flagged for a manager to price by hand.
- Every quote is saved with its status, so follow-up is prompted and wins and losses can be reported by lane, regime and reason.
| Price element | Rule source |
|---|---|
| Base pallet rate | Regime, zone and volume band |
| Service surcharges | Timed, tail-lift, remote |
| Fuel | Current surcharge figure |
| Storage and handling | Store rate card |
Rates and margins are yours. We put them in one place and apply them consistently.
What quoting looks like after
A standard enquiry is priced in minutes by anyone in the sales office, with the same result whoever does it. Unusual ones are flagged for the people who know. Every quote is tracked, followed up and reported on.
When you change a rate or the fuel surcharge, the next quote uses it, and old sheets stop circulating.
Tenders become less painful too. When a customer sends a spreadsheet with dozens of lanes, the tool prices the standard ones in one pass and leaves the sales team to think about the few that are genuinely unusual, instead of spending days on arithmetic.
Is quoting your bottleneck?
- Quotes take a day or more to send.
- Only one or two people can price confidently.
- Surcharges are sometimes missed or doubled.
- Old rate sheets are still in use somewhere.
- You do not track which quotes win or lose.