1. Improve Your Profits : Shift Your Customer Mix
While large enterprises generate massive shipping volumes, their contracts are intensely price-sensitive and low-margin. Small and medium businesses (SMB) shipments, in contrast, have become an increasingly valuable focus for carriers because they represent a high-growth, higher-margin, resilient segment in a changing landscape.
Why are SMBs appealing to carriers:
- Diversified Customer Base and Stability: Relying heavily on a few major corporations can create volatility when those companies shift to self-delivery or alternative networks (as seen with Amazon and Walmart). Many small customers reduce concentration risk and smooth market cycles.
- Potential for Long-Term Growth: SMBs are more loyal when service is consistent. They often scale significantly as their customer reach expands and market data shows they are a primary source of volume growth as many large retailers bring logistics in-house.
- More profitable on average per shipment: Industry analysts note that one SMB shipment can equal the profit of several enterprise ones, due to fewer discounts and premium service uptake.
Industry leaders like UPS and FedEx have already made this shift part of their core strategy. SMBs now represent a growing share of their customer base.
According to UPS CFO Brian Dykes, SMBs accounted for 32% of UPS’ U.S. volume in Q2 2025, up 230 basis points year over year. (Source: Supply Chain Dive and UPS Q2 2025 Earnings Webcast Deck)
But to capture and serve SMBs efficiently, logistics providers must focus on simplified digital experiences, transparent, agile and automated pricing, reliability, and long-term partnerships that evolve alongside business growth.
2. The Challenge: You Can’t Scale SMB Sales Manually
The SMB segment brings a new operational reality: many more deals — smaller in size, but far greater in volume.
Traditional quoting processes without a pricing system were built for enterprise contracts. They involve manual data entry, pricing validation, and long approval loops. But when you multiply these steps by hundreds or thousands of SMBs, manual methods collapse under the weight.
Without automation with a system:
- Sales cycles become slow
- Errors multiply
- Your pricing team becomes a bottleneck
- You end up leaving money on the table if you do not enforce validation guidelines
3. The Solution: Pricing Systems that Empower Your Sales Teams
Modern pricing and quoting platforms enable your teams to automate and govern SMB deal processing — ensuring agility without losing control. Below are four key capabilities that turn pricing systems into a growth engine for your SMB strategy.
a. Accelerate Your Quoting Process
Speed is everything in the SMB segment. With pre-packaged offers and ready-to-use templates, your sales reps can generate accurate quotes in seconds. Faster quoting means faster contracting — and faster revenue.
With Open Pricer, each offer template can be tailored by customer segment, industry, or volume tier, so your sales teams stay aligned with your commercial strategy while maintaining flexibility.
b. Keep Control and Protect Margins
Scaling does not mean losing control. To do so, your quotes should stick to your strategy.
The Smart Quote CPQ module by Open Pricer allows you to handle both standard and ad-hoc quotes with full governance. Automated approval workflows enforce your business rules (minimum margins, discount limits, deal scores), ensuring that no quote slips below profitability thresholds. Managers receive clear data and alerts to approve or reject quotes confidently, ensuring pricing integrity at every level.
c. Streamline Operations and Reduce Internal Friction
Your pricing experts shouldn’t spend their time validating small quotes. With Open Pricer’s automated workflows, repetitive tasks disappear — freeing your pricing team to focus on strategic accounts. Meanwhile, the Process Efficiency Dashboard highlights bottlenecks and delays in real time, helping you continuously improve quote-to-contract performance. Result: your operations scale without chaos.
d. Maintain Profitability at Scale
When your SMB portfolio grows, so does the complexity of maintaining profitable pricing over time. To achieve this, you can Review cost structures and discount tiers, and Define the external factors affecting your price and the data source to follow their evolution.
Technologies like Open Pricer’s platform helps you execute it seamlessly:
- Automate tariff updates in response to fuel, inflation, or service changes either through your pricing rules or with the web scrapping functionality.
- The Incentive Agreements feature lets you simulate and manage rebates or discount scenarios, ensuring long-term profitability.
- Re-pricing campaigns make it easy to update tariffs across hundreds of SMB contracts at once — keeping your pricing aligned with costs and market evolution.
4. The Business Benefits for You
Investing in a pricing system brings immediate and measurable impact across your organization:
- Grow your SMB share while keeping costs under control
- Shorten your quote-to-contract cycle and win deals faster
- Preserve pricing governance even with thousands of smaller customers
- Reduce reliance on large shippers and stabilize your revenue mix
- Empower your sales teams with autonomy and data-driven confidence
Your Next Growth Engine Is SMBs — Powered by Automation
The shift toward SMBs isn’t a passing trend — it’s a strategic transformation. Your future success depends on your ability to scale smart, quote faster, and maintain pricing integrity across a growing customer base.
Now is the time to equip your teams with a pricing system that turns SMB acquisition into a competitive advantage. Discover how Open Pricer helps leading carriers automate their SMB pricing and win profitable growth.
