Industrial Manufacturer Accelerated Quote Turnaround by 68% and Grew Sales Pipeline 2.4X with AI-Powered RFQ Intelligence
A mid-market industrial manufacturer was losing deals not on price, but on speed. Sales engineers spent days assembling quotes manually, pulling from disconnected ERP data, supplier pricing sheets, and outdated margin tables. Conforge's RFQ Intelligence layer automated the heavy lift, putting accurate, margin-aware quotes in front of customers in hours instead of days.
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Every day a quote sat in the queue was a day the competitor's quote didn't.
The sales team at this North American industrial manufacturer operated in a market where response speed was a direct proxy for seriousness. Large OEM buyers and procurement teams routinely sent RFQs to three or four vendors simultaneously. The first credible quote back had an outsized advantage on the shortlist. The problem was structural. Each quote required a sales engineer to manually pull current material costs from the ERP, verify supplier lead times, apply the correct margin tier for the customer segment, check for active promotions, and format the final document to customer-specific templates. A straightforward quote took three to four hours. A complex multi-SKU RFQ could consume an entire day and sometimes two if it required supplier confirmation. With a team of 18 sales engineers covering 400+ active accounts, capacity was the ceiling. Engineers routinely deprioritized smaller RFQs to protect bandwidth for flagship accounts. A growing backlog of pending RFQs, some aging beyond 72 hours, meant no real-time visibility into which quotes were still competitive, compounding the risk of lost deals. Deals were being left on the table not because of price or product fit, but because the team physically could not respond fast enough.
“I used to spend half my Tuesday building one quote. Now I review five before lunch and spend the afternoon actually talking to customers. That's the job I was hired to do.”
