Because a sent quote is the warmest commercial signal a forwarder holds, and almost nobody works it. In Freightos’ mystery-shopper study, 60% of quote requests never received a quote at all — and of the forwarders who did quote, only 8% followed up (a secondary figure, reported via Quotiss). An hour spent chasing sent quotes therefore competes against industry-wide silence. What makes the hour repeatable is mechanical: every logged touch ends with a next action and a date, so the chase never depends on a rep’s memory.
What did the mystery-shopper study actually find?
Freightos posed as a shipper and requested quotes across the industry. Sixty percent of the requests were never quoted — the enquiry simply died in an inbox. Of the forwarders who did send a price, only eight percent ever followed up on it. (Both figures reach us secondhand, via Quotiss’s reporting of the study — we label that plainly.) Read it from the shipper’s side: someone with cargo to move asked for prices, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, nobody ever called back. The competition, most days, is silence.
Why do good reps stop chasing?
Not laziness — arithmetic. Salesforce’s State of Sales puts actual selling at 28% of a rep’s week; the rest disappears into operations, admin and internal chasing. The quote goes out Tuesday afternoon. Wednesday brings a rollover, a customs query and two new enquiries. By Friday the Tuesday quote is three pages down the sent folder, and nobody ever wrote down “chase Thursday.” Follow-up doesn’t fail dramatically; it decays quietly.
How do next actions keep the chase alive?
The fix is structural, not motivational. Every activity logged in the CRM closes with an outcome anda next action with a date — “quoted Jebel Ali lane, chase Thursday.” When Thursday arrives, the follow-up surfaces in the queue; when it passes untouched, it escalates as overdue. Snoozing exists, but it’s visible — the board keeps the promises the calendar forgets. The rep’s only job is the one the study says almost nobody does: make the call. Price what the silence costs you on your own quote volumes.
Isn’t chasing quotes the quote desk’s job?
Two different jobs share the word “follow-up.” The quote desk owns the operational chase — getting the rate out fast and nudging the open quotation, which is AI Quote Desk’s territory on the same platform. The sales motion owns everything around it: whose account this is, what pipeline stage the deal sits in, what cadence the relationship is on, and what happens after the third silence. Desk workflow chases a document; sales methodology chases a customer. The methodology side — queue, cadence, pipeline — is what the complete guide covers end to end.
From reading to hunting.
Everything on this page runs live on a working board — queue, cadence, quotes, wallet share. Bring your pipeline and watch Monday morning rank itself.
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