01 · Enquiry leads
Freight forwarding lead management software that reads your inbox.
Your leads are already here. They arrived this morning as emails with a lane in the subject line and a container count buried in paragraph three. Lotic classifies each one on arrival, pulls the shipment out of the body, and puts every live enquiry on one board.
A shared inbox is not a lead list.
Almost every small forwarder runs quoting out of a mailbox — sales@, quotes@, or somebody's personal address that customers learned years ago. It works until it doesn't:
- Enquiries fall through. One that needed a reply on Tuesday is on page three by Thursday, and the customer has already been quoted by someone else.
- Nobody knows whose it is. Two people open the same enquiry; one assumes the other has it; neither replies.
- There is no state. An email is read or unread. It is not "quoted, waiting on the customer" or "needs the volume before we can price it".
- Nothing is countable. How many enquiries came in last month, how many were quoted, how many were won — none of that exists as a number anywhere.
Lead management software for freight forwarding has to solve that without asking customers to change anything. They will not use your portal. They will email you.
Classified on arrival.
Connect the mailbox you already give customers. As mail arrives, Lotic works out what each message is — a quoting enquiry, a reply on a quote already out, a booking, an invoice question — and only the quoting work becomes a lead.
For the ones that are enquiries, it reads the body and pulls out the facts a quotation needs:
Origin and destination as stated — a port pair, a city pair, or a door address the enquiry mentions in passing.
FCL container count and type, or LCL volume and weight. "2 × 40′HQ" and "3 pallets, 1.8 cbm" both land as structured load lines.
Incoterm, commodity and readiness date where the customer has given them — and a clear flag where they haven't.
That last point matters more than the extraction itself. A lead missing the volume is not priced on a guess; it is marked needs info, so the next action is obvious and it is one reply rather than one re-quote.
One board. Whose court is the ball in?
Every live lead sits in one of three columns, and the board reads left to right as work leaves your desk.
Yours. New enquiries to quote, and quoted leads where the customer has come back with a question. If this column is empty you are genuinely up to date.
Theirs. Quotes that are out and awaiting a reply, and enquiries where you have asked for information you don't have yet.
Accepted. The quotation carries through to an invoice from here, so the number you quoted is the number you bill.
The distinction that matters is the first two. "I am waiting on them" and "they are waiting on me" look identical in an inbox, and they are completely different kinds of problem.
Why a general CRM is the wrong shape.
| General CRM | Lotic | |
|---|---|---|
| How a lead gets in | Typed in, or captured from a web form | Read out of the mailbox your customers already email |
| What a lead is | A deal with a value and a close date | A shipment: lane, mode, load, incoterm, readiness |
| Pricing | None — the number is whatever you type | Priced from your own rate cards across six cost modules |
| Stages | Generic funnel stages you configure | Needs attention, waiting, won — by who owes the next move |
| Upkeep | Maintained by hand, alongside the real work | Produced by the work: quoting is what updates it |
None of this makes a general CRM bad software. It makes it software built for a different job — and a forwarder who has tried to bend one into a quoting desk already knows exactly where it stops fitting.
Frequently asked questions.
What is freight forwarding lead management software?
It is software that treats an incoming freight enquiry as a lead and follows it through to a won or lost shipment. Unlike a general sales CRM, the unit of work is a shipment — a lane, a mode, a container count, a readiness date — rather than an abstract deal, and the leads arrive by email rather than being typed in by a salesperson.
Do I have to change how customers send me enquiries?
No. You connect the email inbox you already use. Lotic reads the enquiries as they arrive, classifies them into leads and organises them into one workspace. Your customers carry on emailing you exactly as they do now — there is no portal to sign into and no form to fill in.
What does Lotic pull out of an enquiry email?
The shipment facts a quote needs: origin and destination, mode, container count and type or LCL volume and weight, the commodity, incoterms and readiness dates where they are stated. Where something a quote needs is missing, the lead is marked as needing information rather than being priced on a guess.
Can I just use a normal CRM for freight leads?
You can, and many forwarders do. The friction is that a general CRM has no idea what a 40ft high cube on a Shanghai to Melbourne lane is, so every shipment detail has to be re-typed into a note or a custom field, and nothing in the CRM can price it. The record ends up being maintained by hand alongside the real work rather than produced by it.
Does a lead become a quotation automatically?
Pricing runs from your rate cards once the shipment details are complete, and the quotation is assembled ready to send. Sending it is your decision — Lotic prepares the quote, it does not email your customer behind your back.
What happens to enquiries that are not quoting requests?
They are classified as what they are rather than being turned into leads. Classification on arrival is what keeps the board a list of live quoting work instead of a second copy of your inbox.
Be the first to quote.
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