Sales Proposal Template

Cargomind

Sales Proposal · Confidential

Prepared for

Meridian Logistics Group

A unified freight visibility platform — built to cut your detention spend.

Replacing four disconnected tracking tools with one real-time control tower across road, rail, and ocean.

Annual Investment

$148,000

Go-Live

10 Weeks

Projected Year-1 ROI

3.4×

Issued

Apr 18, 2026

01 Executive Summary For: J. Okafor, COO

Meridian moves 142,000 loads a year across three modes — but no single system can tell you where any given shipment is right now. This proposal lays out how Cargomind consolidates that visibility into one platform, and what it returns in the first twelve months.

Your operations team currently stitches together four tools, six carrier portals, and a wall of spreadsheets to answer one question customers ask every day: where is my freight? The cost of that gap is not abstract. In 2025 Meridian paid $1.9M in detention and demurrage that earlier visibility would have largely prevented, and your team logged 5,100 hours of manual track-and-trace.

Cargomind replaces that patchwork with a single real-time control tower. We ingest telematics, EDI, and carrier API feeds into one event stream, flag at-risk loads before they become penalties, and give your customers a self-serve tracking portal that deflects the calls flooding your service desk.

$1.9M

Detention & demurrage paid in 2025 — the primary target of this engagement

68%

Of those charges traced to late or missing status updates

3.4×

Projected first-year return on the recommended plan

What we are proposing

A 10-week implementation of the Cargomind Control Tower on the Scale plan, integrated with your TMS (MercuryGate) and your three largest carriers in phase one. Pricing, scope, and the acceptance page are in Sections 06–09. We have priced three tiers so your team can match commitment to appetite — our recommendation is the middle option.

02 The Challenge Current State

Meridian's visibility problem is not a lack of data — it is data trapped in silos that never reconcile. Here is what we heard across four discovery calls with your operations, IT, and customer-success leads.

Where it hurts today

• Four tools, zero source of truth. Project44, two carrier portals, and a homegrown ETA sheet disagree on the same load by hours.
• Detention found too late. By the time a driver is sitting, the meter has run 90+ minutes and the charge is locked in.
• Service desk drowning. 41% of inbound tickets are "where is my shipment?" — pure status lookups.
• No mode parity. Ocean and rail are effectively dark between milestones.

What it costs per year

Detention & demurrage	$1,900,000
Manual track-and-trace labor	$268,000
SLA credits to customers	$340,000
Tooling & portal licenses	$96,000
Addressable cost	$2,604,000

Figures supplied by Meridian Finance, FY2025, validated against carrier invoices in discovery.

Why it persists

Each tool was bought to solve one mode or one customer's mandate. None were built to talk to each other, and none own the full lifecycle of a load. The result is a team that is excellent at firefighting and structurally unable to get ahead of a problem. Closing the gap requires a single ingestion layer and a rules engine that acts before a milestone slips — not another dashboard to check.

03 Proposed Solution Approach

One control tower that ingests every signal, reconciles it into a single shipment record, and acts on exceptions automatically. Below is how Cargomind is built and how we roll it out.

The platform, in one line

Cargomind is a freight visibility control tower: a real-time event pipeline, a normalized shipment graph, an exception rules engine, and a customer-facing tracking portal — delivered as managed SaaS with a 99.9% uptime SLA.

How it fits your stack

We sit beside MercuryGate, not on top of it. Cargomind reads your TMS and carrier feeds, enriches them, and writes exceptions and ETAs back via API. No rip-and-replace, no migration freeze.

Our four-step approach

01

Connect every signal

Integrate MercuryGate plus your three largest carriers (Knight-Swift, Schneider, Maersk) over EDI 214 and API. One pipeline, all three modes.

02

Reconcile into one record

Our shipment graph deduplicates conflicting updates and assigns a single, confidence-scored ETA per load — the source of truth your team has never had.

03

Act on exceptions automatically

The rules engine flags detention risk, missed appointments, and dwell anomalies, then routes them to the right dispatcher with a recommended action.

04

Deflect the status calls

A branded self-serve portal gives Meridian's customers live tracking and proactive ETA alerts — removing the lookups clogging your service desk.

04 Scope & Deliverables Phase One

Everything included in the 10-week phase-one engagement, organized by workstream. Anything outside this list is handled through the change process in Section 08.

Workstream	Deliverable	Owner / Notes
Integration	TMS connector — bidirectional MercuryGate integration with field mapping and write-back of ETAs and exceptions	Cargomind, IT joint
Integration	Carrier feeds — EDI 214 + API ingestion for Knight-Swift, Schneider, and Maersk across truckload, rail, and ocean	Cargomind
Platform	Shipment graph & ETA engine — unified load record with confidence-scored predictive ETAs	Cargomind
Platform	Exception rules engine — 12 prebuilt rules tuned to Meridian's detention and dwell thresholds	Configured with Ops
Platform	Customer tracking portal — branded, self-serve, with proactive ETA and delay alerts	Cargomind
Enablement	Dispatcher workspace — live exception queue, map view, and one-click carrier outreach	Cargomind
Enablement	Training & runbooks — 2 live sessions, recorded walkthroughs, and a written operations runbook	Cargomind
Enablement	30-day hypercare — dedicated Slack channel and daily standup through stabilization	Cargomind

Out of scope for phase one: carriers beyond the named three, customs/brokerage modules, a native mobile app, and historical data backfill beyond 90 days. Each can be added via change order or a phase-two statement of work.

05 Expected Outcomes ROI Model

Conservative year-one impact, modeled on the addressable cost in Section 02 and benchmarked against comparable Cargomind deployments. We commit to the targets in bold during quarterly business reviews.

Outcome	Baseline	Year-1 Target	Annual Value
Detention & demurrage reduction	$1,900,000	−32%	$608,000
Manual track-and-trace hours	5,100 hrs	−55%	$147,000
"Where is my freight" tickets	41% of volume	−60%	$132,000
SLA credits avoided	$340,000	−35%	$119,000
Retired tool licenses	$96,000	−100%	$96,000
Total modeled year-1 value			$1,102,000

The headline

Against a $148,000 platform investment and a $26,000 one-time implementation fee, the modeled return is $1.10M — a 3.4× first-year ROI and a payback period under 8 weeks of go-live.

How we measure it

• Detention dashboard shared with Finance weekly
• Ticket-deflection tracked in your Zendesk instance
• Quarterly business review against every target above

06 Implementation Timeline 10 Weeks

A phased 10-week rollout, sequenced so Meridian sees live detention alerts by week 6 — before the full portal launch. Bars show each phase's span across the engagement.

Phase 1

Weeks 1–2

Discovery & data mapping

Kickoff, environment access, MercuryGate field mapping, and detention-rule workshop with your ops leads.

Phase 2

Weeks 2–5

Integration build

TMS connector and the three carrier feeds wired into the shipment graph; ETA engine calibrated on live loads.

Phase 3

Weeks 5–7

Exceptions live + dispatcher rollout

Rules engine switched on, dispatcher workspace deployed, first live detention alerts in production.

Phase 4

Weeks 7–9

Customer portal & training

Branded tracking portal launched to a pilot customer cohort; two live training sessions and runbook delivery.

Phase 5

Weeks 9–10

Go-live & hypercare

Full production cutover, all customers onboarded, and the start of the 30-day hypercare window.

Timeline assumes IT access and carrier credentials within 5 business days of signing, and named ops stakeholders available for two workshops. Slippage on either shifts go-live proportionally.

07 Investment Choose Your Plan

Three plans, priced annually. Every tier includes the full control tower — they differ in carrier coverage, rule depth, and support. We recommend Scale for Meridian's volume and detention exposure.

Core

$84K/yr

Single-mode visibility for teams starting with their highest-volume lane.

• Up to 2 carrier integrations
• Truckload mode only
• 6 prebuilt exception rules
• Customer tracking portal
• Email & chat support
• 99.5% uptime SLA

Scale

$148K/yr

Full multimodal control tower sized for Meridian's 142K annual loads.

• Up to 5 carrier integrations
• Road, rail & ocean
• 12 rules + custom rule builder
• Branded portal + proactive alerts
• Dedicated CSM + priority support
• 99.9% uptime SLA

Enterprise

$236K/yr

Unlimited coverage with custom modeling and procurement controls.

• Unlimited carrier integrations
• All modes + customs module
• Unlimited custom rules & ML ETA
• White-label portal + API access
• Named solutions architect
• 99.95% SLA + SSO/SOC 2

Investment summary — recommended plan	Amount	Terms
Scale platform subscription	$148,000 / yr	Annual, invoiced on signing
One-time implementation & integration	$26,000	50% on signing, 50% at go-live
30-day hypercare	Included	—
Total year-1 commitment	$174,000	Renews at subscription rate

All amounts in USD, exclusive of applicable taxes. Multi-year discount of 8% available on a 2-year Scale commitment. Pricing held for 30 days from the issue date.

08 Why Cargomind Proof

We do one thing — freight visibility — and we have done it for carriers and 3PLs that look a lot like Meridian. Here is the evidence.

"Cargomind paid for itself in the first quarter. We cut detention 31% in 90 days and our customers stopped calling to ask where their loads were."

— D. Reyes, VP Operations, Trailbridge Freight (118K loads/yr)

Trailbridge

3PL · 118K loads

PortNine

Drayage · 64K loads

Halden Rail

Intermodal

Coast2Coast

Brokerage

Why teams pick us over the incumbents

• Acts, not just shows. A rules engine that resolves exceptions — not one more dashboard.
• True multimodal. Road, rail, and ocean in one record, not three bolt-ons.
• Live in weeks. Median go-live of 10 weeks versus 6+ months for legacy TMS visibility add-ons.
• You own the data. Full export, open API, no lock-in clauses.

By the numbers

29%

Avg detention reduction across deployments

9wk

Median time to go-live

SOC 2 Type II certified. 99.9% measured uptime across the last 12 months. Backed by Sequoia Capital and Flexport Ventures.

09 Terms & Conditions Commercial

The commercial terms governing this engagement. The signed acceptance page and Cargomind's Master Subscription Agreement together form the binding contract.

1. Term & renewal. The subscription runs 12 months from go-live and auto-renews for successive 12-month terms unless either party gives 60 days' written notice.
2. Payment. Subscription invoiced annually on signing, net-30. Implementation billed 50% on signing and 50% at go-live. Late balances accrue 1.5% monthly.
3. Service levels. Cargomind guarantees 99.9% monthly uptime on the Scale plan, with service credits per the MSA for any shortfall, measured by our public status page.
4. Data ownership & security. Meridian retains full ownership of its data. Cargomind processes it solely to deliver the service, encrypted in transit and at rest, under our SOC 2 Type II controls.
5. Customer dependencies. Meridian provides TMS and carrier credentials, named stakeholders for two workshops, and pilot-customer sign-off within the windows in Section 06. Delays shift go-live proportionally.
6. Change control. Work beyond Section 04 is scoped and quoted as a written change order before any work begins; no out-of-scope work proceeds without approval.
7. Confidentiality. Each party protects the other's confidential information and uses it only to perform under this agreement, surviving termination by three years.
8. Termination for convenience. After the initial term, Meridian may terminate with 60 days' notice; prepaid unused subscription fees are refunded pro-rata. Implementation fees are non-refundable once work begins.
9. Liability. Each party's aggregate liability is capped at the fees paid in the 12 months preceding the claim, excluding breaches of confidentiality or data-security obligations.
10. Governing law. This agreement is governed by the laws of the State of Illinois; disputes are resolved by good-faith negotiation, then binding arbitration in Chicago.

Acceptance

Let's cut Meridian's detention spend.

Countersign below and we begin within five business days. This proposal and pricing are valid through May 18, 2026.

Selected Plan

Scale

Year-1 Commitment

$174,000

Go-Live

10 Weeks

By signing, both parties agree to the scope in Section 04, the investment in Section 07, and the terms in Section 09, together with the Cargomind Master Subscription Agreement referenced therein.

Accepted for — Meridian Logistics Group

Signature

Jordan Okafor

Chief Operating Officer · Date

Authorized by — Cargomind, Inc.

Signature

Priya Nair

VP, Enterprise Partnerships · Date

Questions before you sign? Priya Nair · priya@cargomind.io · +1 (312) 555-0147 cargomind.io/meridian