12 KPIs Every Freight Brokerage Should Track
The key performance indicators for freight brokers, from quote response time and win rate to margin per load, coverage time and customer concentration.
Hopelight Labs · · 2 min read
A freight brokerage generates huge amounts of data: quotes, loads, carriers, customers, emails. The challenge isn't collecting numbers, it's choosing the few that tell you whether the business is healthy. Here are twelve KPIs grouped by what they measure.
Sales and quoting
1. Quote volume
Number of quote requests received per day or week, by customer and lane. It tells you whether demand is growing and where it comes from.
2. Median quote response time
Time from receiving a request to sending a priced reply. Use the median, not the average. See why quote response time decides who wins the load.
3. Quote-to-load win rate
Loads booked ÷ quotes sent. Track it by lane, customer, equipment and rep. More in quote-to-load win rate.
4. New customers per month
Count of shippers who booked their first load. Growth depends on it.
Profitability
5. Gross margin per load (dollars)
Shipper rate minus carrier cost. Your most direct profitability measure.
6. Gross margin percentage
Margin ÷ shipper rate. Compare across equipment types and customers. See freight broker margins.
7. Margin leakage
Unbilled or under-billed accessorials, detention you paid but didn't bill, and similar losses. Our accessorial checklist helps reduce it.
Operations
8. Time to cover
Time from booking a load to confirming a carrier. Long coverage times signal pricing or capacity problems.
9. On-time pick-up and delivery
The share of loads picked up and delivered within the agreed window. Shippers remember this more than price.
10. Loads per rep
Loads handled per rep per week. It shows capacity and the effect of automation. See how to scale without hiring.
Customer health
11. Customer concentration
Share of revenue from your top three customers. High concentration is a risk: losing one account can sink the month.
12. Customer retention
Share of customers who booked last quarter and booked again this quarter.
How to use these KPIs
- Weekly: quote volume, response time, win rate, margin per load.
- Monthly: margin leakage, time to cover, on-time performance, loads per rep.
- Quarterly: customer concentration and retention.
Look at KPIs in pairs. Win rate up but margin down? You may be underpricing. Response time down and win rate up? Speed is working. A single number rarely tells the whole story.
The data problem
Many brokerages can't track quoting KPIs because quotes live in email and never reach the TMS. If a quote is lost, it leaves no trace. Logging every quote and its outcome is the foundation. Hopelight Quote records each quote, reply time and outcome automatically and shows them in a weekly dashboard by rep and lane.
