The five minute quote, and the sentence that keeps it honest
A rate on a lane you have never run, in five minutes. The method, the margin, and the one sentence that lets you adjust it later.
It happens on a good day. A shipper you have been calling for months finally says, can you give me a rate on Birmingham to Nashville, dry van, picking up Friday. You have never run it. You have ten minutes before somebody else does.
Guess low and you cover the load at a loss or fail to cover it at all, which is worse. Guess high and the shipper files you under expensive and stops picking up. The answer is not to guess. It is to have a method you can run in five minutes on any lane in the country, and a sentence that keeps you honest when the market moves after you hang up.
Minute one: the market number
Pull the seven day average for the lane and the equipment. DAT RateView, Truckstop, Greenscreens, whatever you pay for. If you pay for nothing, use the posted rates on the load board for the same origin and destination markets over the last few days, and call two carriers you trust and ask what they would want. Write down the all-in number, not the per mile number. Shippers think in totals.
That number is the truck's price on an average day. It is not your quote. It is the floor you build on.
Minute two: what makes this load worse than average
Now look at what you know about this specific load and mark it up for every reason a driver would rather take something else.
Direction. Is this the headhaul or the backhaul? Freight into a market where trucks go to die is priced differently than freight out of it.
Timing. Friday afternoon pickups, Monday morning appointments, and anything that eats a driver's weekend cost more. Same for a pickup inside 24 hours. Call that the short notice tax, and it is usually 8 to 15 percent.
The dock. Tight appointment windows, known slow shippers, lumpers, no detention terms. Every one of those is money the driver will want or money you will be paying later.
Season. Produce, harvest, holiday retail, hurricane cleanup. If the region is in one of those, the seven day average is already behind.
Add those on top of the market number. That is your expected carrier cost.
Minute three: your margin
Put your margin on top. On spot freight with no history, 15 to 20 percent of the carrier cost is normal. On a lane you expect to run every week, take less and say so, because the shipper will remember it. Do not quote a thin number to win the first load and then try to raise it. Shippers forgive high. They do not forgive bait.
Example, so you can see the shape of it. Birmingham to Nashville dry van, seven day average all-in $650. Friday afternoon pickup with a 7 AM Monday delivery appointment, so add a short notice and weekend tax of about 10 percent, $715. Your margin at 15 percent puts the quote around $840. Round it to $850. That is a number you can defend line by line if the shipper asks how you got there.
Minute four: the sentence
Now say this, in exactly this order:
That's today's number. I'll confirm capacity within the hour.
Two things just happened. You quoted with confidence, which is what the shipper wanted from you. And you bought yourself an hour to go find the truck before you are committed to the number. If the market is where you thought, you call back and confirm. If it moved, you call back with the new number and the reason, and you are still the broker who called back, which is rarer than you think.
Minute five: the second call
The second call is where you actually win the lane. Whether the number held or moved, you call back inside the hour with information: what you found, what the trucks are asking, whether Monday is tight because of something in the market. Shippers get quotes all day. Almost nobody calls them back with a reason.
Then write the lane down. Origin, destination, equipment, what you quoted, what you paid, what the shipper said. The second time they ask about Birmingham to Nashville, you are not quoting a lane you have never run. You are quoting a lane you know.
This week
Pick three lanes you get asked about and have never run. Run all five minutes on each one now, while there is no clock. Put the numbers in your tracker. The next time one of those shippers calls, you will have a quote before they finish the sentence.
Next Tuesday, Ch. 9: the rate con, line by line. What each clause actually does, which ones are protecting you, and the three most people leave out.
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