Future-Proof Your Freight Sourcing Strategy

An RFQ creates competition between carriers, but without independent market data there is no way to know whether the winning bid reflects true market value or simply the lowest price a carrier was willing to offer at that moment.

Carriers bid strategically, they know what you know, and they price accordingly. Xeneta gives procurement teams an independent reference point: the actual contracted and spot rates paid by thousands of comparable shippers, segmented by lane, contract type, and volume. Customers using Xeneta in active tenders consistently find that first-round bids come in above market benchmarks even after a competitive RFQ, and that having data to challenge those bids drives meaningful additional reductions in subsequent rounds.

Xeneta's Tender Benchmark Tool makes this process scalable, automatically benchmarking incoming bids across hundreds or thousands of lanes in minutes, showing exactly where each bid sits relative to the market low, mid, average, and high. What previously took days of manual analysis is available before the next round of negotiations begins.

Target setting between rounds is one of the highest-impact decisions in a tender process and one of the most difficult without external data. Set targets too high and you signal unrealism and damage carrier relationships. Set them too low and you leave savings on the table.

Xeneta's market benchmarks, showing the market low, average, and high for each lane, give procurement teams an objective basis for round-two targets. Best practice is to target the market mid-range as a default, with ambition toward market low on lanes where you have volume leverage. This approach is credible to carriers and defensible to leadership.

There is no single answer, but Xeneta gives you the data to make the call with confidence rather than guesswork. The clearest signal to go to market is when your contracted rates are drifting above the market benchmark on a meaningful portion of your spend. Xeneta's continuous monitoring surfaces this gap in real time, so you're not relying on annual calendar cycles or supplier prompts to tell you when your contracts are no longer competitive.

Market conditions also matter. When spot rates are significantly below long-term contracted levels, the spread signals that long-term market pricing has softened and buyers are in a stronger negotiating position. Conversely, when spot and long-term rates are converging or spot is rising, extending existing contracts may deliver better outcomes than going to market.

The honest caveat is that most organizations operate within tender cycles shaped by internal procurement calendars, contract expiry dates, and business planning cycles and Xeneta doesn't change that structure. What it does is tell you whether the timing you're working to is commercially sound, and give you the evidence to accelerate or delay when the data makes a strong case for doing so. When you are ready to go to market, Xeneta's Tender Benchmark Tool automates the benchmarking process across all your lanes, cutting what typically takes several days of manual work down to minutes and ensuring every round of your tender is grounded in live market data.

Most experienced procurement teams find that more than three tender rounds produces diminishing returns while consuming significant time from both internal teams and carrier partners.

What Xeneta changes is the dynamic within those rounds. When carriers know from the outset that bids will be benchmarked against independent market data, first-round submissions tend to be more realistic, which can compress the overall process significantly. Rather than using multiple rounds to gradually close the gap between carrier bids and market reality, Xeneta brings that transparency to the table from the start, meaning fewer rounds are needed to reach a commercially sound outcome, and both sides spend less time on positions that the data makes indefensible.

A full tender is time-consuming, resource-intensive for both your team and your carrier partners, and disruptive to supplier relationships.

It is justified when your contracted rates are meaningfully above market, when the market is moving in your favor, or when you need to restructure your carrier base. Xeneta's continuous monitoring capability lets you track contract performance versus market without running a tender, alerting you when rates drift out of competitive range. When your contracts are performing well against the market, an extension with index-linked adjustments may deliver better outcomes than the effort and relationship cost of a full RFQ process.