6 Compelling Benefits Parade’s New Advantage Product Offers Brokers

Advantage lets brokers confidently capitalize on those opportunities to win more freight by bidding competitively. It does this by starting with the industry-leading market rate from DAT and personalizing it with AI built on Parade’s rich data on brokers’ capacity, quotes, digital bookings, and carrier search activity. The result is the most accurate rate that reflects a broker’s unique position in the market.

Advantage Serves Brokerages in Several Ways

1. It Helps Brokers Win More Bids

Advantage helps brokers know when and how to price loads competitively where they have lower costs than the market. By helping brokers identify lanes where they have Advantage, brokers can use Advantage to find opportunities for profitable growth and focus their sales efforts on opportunities with the best chance for success. The result is increased win rates.

This product is also great for brokerages who are more focused on improving margins on the loads they already have coming in than generating new business. It can help reps find that sweet spot on each load and allow them to bid with confidence.

2. Advantage Reduces Risk

Because Advantage uses relationship data and algorithms to predict carrier behavior, it’s able to produce remarkably accurate rate suggestions, even in lanes with a little history. Additionally, unlike other pricing tools on the market, Advantage produces more accurate rates by getting more specific about commodities, equipment types, and accessorials, which can have a big impact on price. With more accurate pricing, brokers can reduce the level of risk they assume when reps bid on a load.

As an example, if a rep doesn’t take into account that their brokerage is short of their usual available capacity in that lane, the brokerage could lose money if the load winds up going to the spot market. Advantage knows that that lane is short, so it suggests a price that accounts for not just the market’s capacity, but that specific brokerage’s capacity.

3. Advantage Increases Efficiency for Sales Reps

There are typically several tools involved in effectively pricing loads. Bouncing around between those tools can make the process confusing and time-consuming. Advantage makes the pricing process more efficient by bringing all those tools into one place, tying many of the tools reps use to make pricing decisions together in one screen, including a trusted carrier price for your brokerage compared with the DAT market price, a calculator to determine your customer bid, your price history compared with market, your currently available capacity, and your complete load history from your TMS.

By speeding up freight pricing, sales reps may find themselves with more time on their hands. They can use that time to build stronger relationships with shippers and send out more bids to help win more business.

4. Advantage Helps Highlight New Opportunities

When broker sales managers can see all of their lanes mapped out by their buying power, excess capacity, and backhaul opportunities, it’s easy for them to identify new opportunities where they have an advantage. They can use this knowledge to target their sales calls, aiding them in winning loads in the lanes the brokerage wants the most.

5. Advantage Offers Reps More Confidence on Sales Calls

Imagine if your sales reps could go into a call with a prospect knowing exactly how many trucks they have in a lane. That rep could assure the shipper that they have plenty of capacity in the area to cover the load, and maybe even other loads that the shipper has in the lane.

The knowledge provided by Advantage can give sales reps the confidence to win more bids and build stronger relationships with shippers by offering fair, competitive rates that they can stand behind.

6. It Speeds Up the Onboarding Process for New Reps

Tools like DAT RateView, the leading market rate index, help reps get an idea of the market price of their load, but there are many less black-and-white factors like carrier relationships that require a little more expertise and finesse to quote around. There are so many factors to consider and few hard-and-fast rules. It can make pricing freight a difficult skill to learn (and teach).

Advantage, with its intuitive, all-inclusive pricing tools, can help new reps get up to speed faster. They don’t need to know every nuance of the brokerage’s capacity network to determine a good rate for a bid. The tool is using the information that Parade has collected, including how carrier relationships might play into cost, and market rates to show them how to price loads appropriately.

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Would you like to learn more about Parade’s Advantage product? Reach out to our team with any questions. You can learn more about this new product by viewing this webinar, which includes a product demo from Parade’s product team.