You’re deep in tender preparation.
Which questions are guiding your negotiations?
What outcomes are you prioritizing, and which risks must you avoid to protect the resilience and cost-efficiency of your supply chain?
Do you have the data to defend your strategy at the table? Is finance aligned with your approach?
If not, you risk locking in higher costs and unreliable carrier partnerships for the year ahead.
Now is the moment to rethink your strategy. Signing a 12-month contract at the lowest rate possible has become an increasingly risky business as market volatility continues. If rates decrease, you’re overpaying. If rates increase, your containers could be rolled or pushed onto the spot market as carriers prioritize higher-rate contracts.
A stronger approach is to underpin your negotiations with a wider variety of datasets to balance rates, carrier performance, and supply chain risk.
In a recent webinar, Shubham Bhattacharya, Lead Product Manager at Xeneta, and Peter Sand, Chief Analyst at Xeneta, unpacked the red flags hidden in long-term contracts – and how procurement teams can use intelligence to spot them early.
You can catch the full webinar on-demand, or read on for the key takeaways.
Three common pitfalls in long-term contract negotiations
Go into a tender unprepared and you don’t just risk a “bad” contract – you lock in unnecessarily higher costs for the next 12 months, weaken your leverage with carriers, and put service reliability on the line. With volatility at its peak, every missed insight today is paid for tomorrow in rolled cargo, blown budgets, and empty shelves. The only way to protect margins now is to set clear objectives and ground your negotiations in reliable, real-time insights.
Here are three of the biggest red flags you need to avoid if you want a favorable outcome.
- Unreliable, fragmented data sources: Relying only on your own historic benchmarks – or limiting yourself to entry-level, incomplete or delayed data – means negotiating global markets with blind spots. You can’t see where the market is moving, you can’t challenge carrier pricing with confidence, and you risk locking in rates or terms that put your supply chain at a disadvantage. The answer is a single, unbiased view of the market that closes those gaps and strengthens your position at the table.
- Misaligned priorities between procurement and logistics: Procurement pushes for lower costs. Logistics pushes for service stability. Finance pushes for predictability. If you don’t align these priorities before tender season, you walk in divided – and that weakens your hand. The strongest negotiations start with a shared view of what matters most to the business, backed by clear, agreed-upon insights.
- Information overload and complexity: Too many spreadsheets. Too many conflicting reports. When every source tells a different story, clarity vanishes. And without clarity, negotiations slip back into guesswork. That’s when costs creep up, service levels drop, and the resilience of your supply chain is put at risk. What changes the game? Clear, real-time insights – so you can validate costs, spot market shifts early, cutdown hours of admin, and put your energy where it counts: building a stronger supply chain strategy.
As Shubham Bhattacharya, Lead Product Manager at Xeneta, noted during the webinar:
"Carriers might have good on-paper transit times. But after you’ve made the deals, you might realize that particular carrier had very high blank sailings and a lot of their cargo gets rolled over. Then, by the time the issue surfaces, they've already cost you millions in potential revenue opportunities.”
What should you be considering before you sign
With an agreed objective within your organization and appropriate, timely, and accurate data to inform negotiations, you'll walk into tender season with leverage, cut through carrier noise, and secure contracts you won’t regret six months down the line.
To strike the best deals, you need more than just benchmarked freight rates. You need insight into multiple key markers for carrier performance.
Look for data on:
- Market trends to understand the bigger picture before you start diving into individual suppliers. That way you can establish an average across the whole market and get a point of comparison to quickly see how a supplier’s performing on your specific tradelanes.
- Carrier spread to see how carriers fare in terms of performance, not just rates. There might be a reason some are charging slightly more — and it might be worth it to make sure your cargo gets where it’s needed.
- Transit times (announced and actual) to check how consistently carriers are overpromising and underdelivering on a trade lane.
- Schedule reliability to identify how often a vessel arrives on time at the destination. Make sure this is measured against the original promise that the carrier made, and not a potentially misleading and continuously updated forecasted arrival time.
- Capacity and blanked sailings to see the likelihood that a carrier might roll your cargo over. Plus, look at trends on how quick carriers are to cut capacity and how fast they can bring it back.
Use data to achieve your tendering goals
Some CFOs will give procurement teams a specific budget, and that's all you’ve got to meet. Others will be more pragmatic and understand that the market's moving, so budgets need to shift with it, and instead set a relative position to the market as your objective.
With a freight intelligence platform like Xeneta, you can look at multiple datasets on a holistic level — getting a true picture of both the Air and Ocean freight markets. You can then dive into specific carrier performance before you sign your contracts and see exactly which supplier can meet all your objectives.
Plus, with Xeneta data as an objective benchmark, you can have more productive negotiations with fewer disputes and a tighter focus on what you want to achieve: a reliable service at a fair rate.
As Peter Sand, Chief Analyst at Xeneta notes:
“If you don't know, how can you act? That's basically the name of the game — that you use your data in an intelligent way.”
If you’re a Xeneta customer, make sure you’re getting the most from the Tender Benchmarking Tool. Pair it with our on-demand webinar, What Data Actually Matters in a Tender, to strengthen your next negotiation.
What the industry won’t tell you about tendering
You can’t avoid market volatility – no business can. But you can avoid making it more painful than it needs to be. Rigid tendering cycles, outdated pricing models, and limited flexibility expose your shipments to unnecessary risk: higher costs, weaker service, and contracts that don’t hold up when the market shifts.
Great for carriers. Expensive for shippers trying to protect margins.
Forward-thinking procurement teams have already rewritten the rules of freight procurement. By using freight intelligence and real-time insights, they’re negotiating smarter, building resilient supply chains, and protecting budgets.
Get the same advantage. Download our Tender Rules ebook today.
