Fast Freight Quoting
Why Your Sales Team Secretly Hates Your Quoting Process
I was having dinner with a freight sales manager in Hyderabad. After a couple of drinks, I asked him a question I'd been curious about: "What's the worst part of your job?"
I expected him to say difficult customers. Or unrealistic targets. Or carrier delays.
Instead, he said something that surprised me:
"Honestly? Getting quotes out of my own company."
He wasn't joking. And the more he talked, the more I realized this wasn't just his problem. It was an industry-wide frustration hiding in plain sight.
The Confession
"Let me tell you what my day looks like," he said.
"A customer asks me for a rate. I say, 'Sure, I'll get back to you.' Then I send a request to operations. Operations is busy—they always are. I wait. Customer follows up. I follow up with operations. They say it's coming. Customer follows up again. I apologize. Finally, I get the rate. But by now, it's been 6 hours and the customer sounds annoyed."
He paused.
"I'm supposed to be selling. Building relationships. Finding new business. Instead, I spend half my day as a middleman between customers and my own operations team. I'm basically a courier for quotes."
"A courier for quotes." That phrase stuck with me.
The Hidden War Inside Forwarding Companies
Here's what I've observed after talking to dozens of freight forwarding teams: there's a quiet tension between sales and operations. And it's almost never about people. It's about process.
Sales brings in requests. That's their job.
Operations builds quotes. That's their job.
But the more successful sales is at bringing in requests, the more overwhelmed operations becomes. And the more overwhelmed operations is, the slower the quotes go out. And the slower the quotes go out, the worse sales looks to customers.
It's a system designed to create frustration.
I've seen sales reps start under-promising to customers ("I'll try to get you something by tomorrow") just to avoid the embarrassment of missing a same-day deadline. I've seen operations teams resent sales for "dumping" requests on them. I've seen managers stuck in the middle, refereeing a conflict that nobody caused but everyone suffers from.
What Sales Really Wants
After that dinner, I started asking sales teams a simple question: "If you could change one thing about how quoting works, what would it be?"
The answers were remarkably consistent:
"I want to quote while I'm on the phone with the customer." Not after. Not "let me check and get back to you." Right there, in the conversation, while I have their attention.
"I want to stop being the bottleneck." When a customer has to wait for me, and I have to wait for operations, I become the problem. I don't want to be the problem.
"I want to spend my time selling, not chasing." Every hour I spend following up on internal quotes is an hour I'm not spending finding new customers.
None of these are unreasonable asks. They're basic operational needs. But most freight companies can't deliver on them because their quoting process wasn't designed for speed.
The Real Cost of a Slow Quote
Here's what nobody talks about: slow quoting doesn't just frustrate customers. It burns out your best salespeople.
The sales manager I had dinner with? He told me three of his team members had left in the past year. When he asked them why, the answer wasn't money. It was:
"I can't do my job here. I spend more time fighting internal systems than talking to customers."
These weren't bad salespeople. They were good salespeople who got tired of looking bad.
When your process makes good people look incompetent, you don't have a people problem. You have a process problem.
What We Built For Sales Teams
At VoltusFreight, we designed our system with a simple goal: let sales be sales.
When a rate request comes in—whether by email, WhatsApp, or through a customer portal—our AI processes it immediately. It reads the request, identifies the lanes, pulls the rates, applies margins, and generates a professional quote.
Sales doesn't wait for operations. Operations doesn't get buried in routine requests. The customer gets an answer in minutes.
One sales rep told me: "For the first time in my career, I can promise a customer a quote in 10 minutes and actually deliver. Do you know how good that feels?"
I do. Because that feeling—the feeling of being able to do your job well—is exactly what we're trying to restore.
A Challenge
Next week, ask your sales team an honest question:
"What percentage of your time do you spend actually selling?"
If the answer is less than 50%, you don't have a sales problem. You have a quoting problem.
And that's a problem worth solving.
