For most distributors, a request for quotation (RFQ) is where revenue starts — and where it quietly leaks. Requests arrive as WhatsApp messages, forwarded emails, photos of handwritten lists and spreadsheets with inconsistent part numbers. Someone on the sales team has to read each one, look up every item, check price and stock, and type a quote. The slower that loop runs, the more deals go to whoever answered first.
RFQ automation does not mean letting software send prices to customers unchecked. It means taking the repetitive steps off your team so they spend their time on judgement: margins, substitutes and relationships. Here is how to approach it.
1. Map where your RFQs actually come from
Before choosing any tool, list every channel customers use to ask for prices. For most distributors it is a mix of:
- WhatsApp — individual reps’ phones, a shared business number, or both.
- Email — a sales@ inbox plus each rep’s personal mailbox.
- Attachments — PDFs, Excel sheets and photos of purchase lists.
- Phone calls that end with “send me the prices on WhatsApp”.
Requests that live on personal phones are invisible to managers and lost when a rep leaves. The first win from automation is simply getting every RFQ into one shared queue.
2. Capture every request in one place
Connect your WhatsApp Business number through the official WhatsApp Business Platform so messages arrive in a shared inbox instead of one phone. For email, use a dedicated address and set up automatic forwarding from your existing mailbox, so customers do not have to change anything.
3. Extract items and quantities automatically
The slowest manual step is turning free text into line items. “Need 200 of the 25mm PVC elbows and 50 m of the 4 sq mm cable, same as last time” has to become a structured list with product, quantity and unit. Modern AI extraction handles this well — including messy formatting, abbreviations and mixed languages — but only if the output is reviewed against your catalogue rather than trusted blindly.
4. Match to your catalogue with confidence scores
Matching a customer’s wording to your SKU is where errors become expensive. A good system gives every match a confidence score and treats them differently:
| Confidence | What should happen |
|---|---|
| High | Accepted automatically onto the draft quote. |
| Medium | Flagged so a person can glance at it before sending. |
| Low | Held until someone confirms the right product. |
You set the thresholds. Nothing uncertain should be quietly guessed — a wrong item on a quote costs more than the minutes saved.
5. Apply your pricing rules — and route the exceptions
Once items are matched, prices come from the rules you already use: customer-specific price lists, volume breaks and discount limits. Anything outside those rules — a discount above a rep’s limit, a margin below your floor, an item flagged during matching — should go to the right approver before the quote leaves the building.
6. Send the quote and follow up
The finished quote goes back on the channel the customer used. Then the work most teams forget: follow-up. Track which quotes are open, which were viewed and which need a nudge, so a quote is not lost just because nobody chased it.
What to measure
- Time to first quote — from message received to quote sent.
- Share of lines matched without edits — tells you whether your catalogue data needs cleaning.
- Quotes awaiting approval — a growing queue means rules are too strict or approvers are a bottleneck.
- Win rate by response time — usually the clearest argument for automating at all.
Start small
Pick one channel and one product family, run the automated draft alongside your current process for a couple of weeks and compare. Once matches are reliable, widen the scope. If you want to see the full flow on your own RFQs, book a demo and bring a few real examples.