Quote flow for sales

The situation

A wholesaler in technical parts, fifteen salespeople, a few hundred quotes a month. A quote consists of a fixed company-introduction paragraph, lines with items from the ERP, terms from a template, and a personal paragraph from the salesperson.

The lines from the ERP come out as a CSV export. That gets pasted into the Word template by hand. The document then crosses last week's price list to verify discounts, and the brand-style check that is officially mandatory but in practice sometimes skipped.

The substantive thinking is a few minutes. The rest of the hour per quote goes into retyping, formatting, and checking. That is exactly the pass you let an AI do the same way you would yourself, every single time.

What we did

We first map how a quote actually comes together: which fields come from the ERP, which texts come from a template, which paragraph is always written by hand. Not everything that can be automated should be.

Then the flow: the salesperson types the customer request into a form or forwards the inbound mail to a dedicated address. The system pulls items from the ERP based on the request, fills the template, drafts a first version of the personal paragraph from earlier correspondence with this customer, and places a draft quote in the existing review tool.

The salesperson reads the draft, adjusts the tone, checks the prices, adds their handwritten nuance, and hits send. That is where their value sits, and where they should be sitting.

What it delivered

What we tend to see: the time from request to quote drops from days to hours. Not because the human works faster, but because they no longer wait for the retyping piece.

Formatting consistency improves because the template is followed strictly instead of slightly differently per person. The brand-style check is no longer a separate step, because the draft comes out tidy.

What stays manual: pricing decisions, judging whether a customer deserves a discount, the personal tone. That is exactly what sales is.

What this wasn't

Not a contract generator that signs itself off. The draft is ready, a human hits send.