Ask two operators to price the same lane and you’ll often get two different numbers. That’s not incompetence, it’s the reality of pricing from memory. Each person draws on the deals they happened to work, the carriers they trust, and a feel for what the client will accept. When one of them is on leave, the knowledge leaves with them.
The data to do better already exists. Every quote you’ve sent, won or lost, is a record of what the market paid on a lane and where your margin landed. The problem has never been a lack of data. It’s that the data is scattered across inboxes and spreadsheets, unsearchable at the exact moment you need it.
A benchmark on every card
SHIPO indexes that history and retrieves the comparable shipments whenever a new request comes in. Instead of a blank quote, the operator sees the won price band for the lane, the win rate at different price points, and the carrier you most often book. The number stops being a guess and starts being an argument you can defend.
It gets sharper as you go
Because won and lost outcomes feed back in, the benchmark improves with use. A lane you quoted twice last year becomes a lane you’ve quoted thirty times, with a clear picture of what closes. The knowledge that used to live in two people’s heads ends up on the screen, available to every operator on the desk, including the one who started last week.