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Not all lanes in a bid are equal. The best pricing teams have a framework for deciding which lanes deserve the most attention and how to think about each one.

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Prioritize by impact

When you open a bid with hundreds of lanes, don’t start at the top and work down. Instead, sort by the fields that have the biggest impact on bid profitability:
  • High-volume lanes first — a small rate adjustment on a 500-load lane matters more than a big adjustment on a 5-load lane
  • Long-haul lanes — more miles means more revenue per load, but also more exposure if the rate is wrong
  • Lanes with poor O/R — if FreightMath shows an Operating Ratio above 1.0, you’re losing money at that rate. Fix these first.
Use the sort and filter controls in Bid Detail to focus on high-volume, high-mile, and high-O/R lanes first. This is where the biggest pricing opportunities hide.

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Think about lanes in groups, not individually

Customers send bids with dozens or hundreds of lanes. Pricing each one from scratch is slow and inconsistent. Instead, think in groups:
  • Regional clusters — lanes that share an origin or destination region tend to have similar economics. Price the anchor lane, then adjust the rest relative to it.
  • Equipment type — flatbed, reefer, and van lanes have different cost structures. Group by equipment and set your RPM baseline per group.
  • Customer history — if you’ve priced this customer before, use your historical win/loss data to calibrate. Which lanes did you win last time? Which did you lose?

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Use RPM as your compass

RPM is designed to be the universal unit. When comparing lanes across customers, across bids, or across time, always compare on RPM — not on shipper rates, which are distorted by each customer’s unique terms. Over time, your analysts will develop intuition for what lanes are worth in RPM terms. “Chicago to Dallas is a $2.15 lane” becomes a shared vocabulary across your team.

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Know when to walk away

Not every lane is worth bidding. Look for:
  • Lanes you can’t cover — if Operations flags a lane as difficult to service, price it high enough to justify the effort or skip it
  • Lanes with no margin — if O/R is above 1.0 and there’s no strategic reason to take the lane, don’t force it
  • Low-volume lanes with high complexity — sometimes the juice isn’t worth the squeeze