Sales Automation for Manufacturing: Chase Every RFQ, Sample and Reorder on Schedule

An RFQ arrives by email, sometimes as a photograph of a drawing on WhatsApp. It waits for the sales engineer, who is at a customer plant. The costing sheet waits for the works manager. A quote goes out eight days later with a validity period nobody will look at again, and then everyone waits.

The loss is quiet and cumulative. Samples despatched and never asked about. Quotes that expired before the customer decided. Regular buyers whose ordering interval slipped by a month and then by a quarter, discovered at a year-end review when the account has already moved.

The RFQ acknowledgement fires on enquiry creation and does two things: it tells the customer their enquiry has been received, and it names the drawings, grades or tolerance details still needed to quote. The same trigger starts an internal turnaround clock that alerts the sales head if no quote has left within your own standard.

The sample chase starts when a sample is marked despatched, asking for feedback on day seven and raising a call task on day fourteen. Quotation validity reminders count down to the date already on the quote. Reorder cadence alerts compare each customer own interval with time elapsed. Rate contract renewals fire sixty days before an agreement ends, with last year volumes attached.

A trigger is an event on a record: created, stage changed, field changed, a date approaching, or no activity for a period. A filter narrows by product line, value band, plant or customer type. Steps are ordered with waits between them, and each step can message the customer, raise a task, notify a manager or change a field.

Industrial sequences need two extra rules. Working-day scheduling, so nothing lands during a plant shutdown, and approval awareness, so a quote held for internal costing chases the approver rather than the customer. Any inbound reply, a stage change or a received document stops the sequence immediately.

Start with the RFQ acknowledgement and the internal turnaround alert. Together they fix the most visible failure, which is a customer hearing nothing for a week. Add the sample chase next because samples cost real money. Quotation validity and reorder cadence come once the quote date and last order date fields are reliably filled.

Keep price negotiation, technical application advice, quality complaints and anything involving a rejection or a delivery failure entirely manual. Keep capital equipment pursuits off automated chasing and use dated review tasks instead. In industrial selling the relationship between a purchase manager and a sales engineer is the asset, and automation exists to protect their time, not to imitate them.

Enquiry to quote turnaround, which is the number your customers feel first. Quote to order conversion by product line. Sample to order rate, which tells you whether sampling is a sales tool or a habit. And overdue reorder value, which is usually the largest recoverable number on the board.

Automation cannot shorten a costing cycle, improve a drawing, or make a purchase manager decide. It removes the delay caused by nobody chasing, and it makes internal delay visible, which is often the harder conversation. This is not an ERP, an MES or a production planning tool, and it does not manage inventory. It manages enquiries, quotations, samples, reorders and the conversations around them.

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