Scoring built around industrial buying signals: how specific the RFQ is, whether a drawing was shared, where the sample has reached, the quantity and schedule, and vendor registration progress.
Quick answer
By whoever emailed most recently, or by whichever enquiry mentions the biggest quantity. Both are poor guides. Marketplace enquiries arrive in volume, a large share of them are price surveys, and estimation is the scarcest resource in the building. A single detailed costing can take an engineer half a day, which means the real cost of a badly ordered enquiry list is measured in engineering hours, not in missed calls.
The most reliable tell is how much the buyer has already written down. Part number, material grade, tolerance, finish, annual volume, delivery location. Every one of those took someone effort. An enquiry asking only for your price list took none.
A shared drawing means engineering time has been spent on your side of the conversation. A sample that has been dispatched, received and approved means your part has passed a test that a competitor did not. In most component businesses, sample approval is the closest thing to a leading indicator of a purchase order.
In industrial selling the gate is often procedural rather than commercial. A buyer who has started vendor registration, asked to audit your shop floor, or opened a conversation about who funds the tooling has already shortlisted you.
RFQ attributes set the opening position. Process milestones, drawing received, sample approved, registration progressed, move it up in steps. Quotations that go unanswered decay. The estimation queue reorders itself, and every score opens to show which signals produced it.
| Signal on the RFQ | Why it predicts here | Effect on score |
|---|---|---|
| Sample approved by the buyer | Passed a technical test | Strong lift |
| Drawing and tolerance shared | Engineering time invested | Strong lift |
| Vendor registration started | Procedural gate opened | Strong lift |
| Annual quantity with schedule | Rate contract, not a trial | Moderate lift |
| Plant visit or audit requested | You are on the shortlist | Moderate lift |
| Tooling ownership discussed | Planning a relationship | Moderate lift |
| Rate list requested, no specs | Price survey | Drop |
| Quotation unanswered for a month | Decision has moved on | Decay |
Make grade, tolerance, quantity and schedule structured fields on the enquiry rather than paragraphs in an email. Turn the sample process into stages with dates and owners. Raise quotations from the record so revisions and values are captured. Track vendor registration as a workflow. Then record lost reasons in categories your estimation team argues about, because that is the material the score reads.
Scoring prioritises enquiries. It does not price, it does not check machine capacity, and it has no opinion on whether a customer settles invoices on time. It is blind to anything kept off the system, which in factories usually means the sales engineer who works from his own diary. And it needs a real history of quoted and lost enquiries before its ordering beats a good manager. Use it as the starting order for estimation each morning, not as a decision about what to quote.
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Every IndiaMART and web enquiry is treated as an RFQ, so the estimation team spends a week costing enquiries that were never going to place an order.
Specificity is scored. Enquiries with a drawing, a grade, a tolerance and a quantity rise to the top; a request for a rate list without any of those is parked for a qualifying call first.RFQ qualification
Samples go out and nobody tracks whether they were received, tested or approved, so the follow-up call happens two months late.
Samples move through tracked stages with owners and dates. An approved sample raises the score and creates the commercial follow-up task automatically, while a stalled one is surfaced.Sample tracking
Quotations sit in a folder and a spreadsheet, and the only person who knows their status is the one who sent them.
Quotations are raised from the enquiry record with revisions, values and dates attached, so the pipeline reflects real quoted value and follow-up does not depend on one memory.Quotation pipeline
Vendor registration paperwork stalls for weeks and nobody notices until the buyer awards the business elsewhere.
Registration is a tracked stage with its own steps and reminders, so a delayed document is chased while the enquiry is still live rather than after the order is lost.Vendor registration tracking
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