The problem
Wholesale inquiries arrived after business hours and were often answered the following morning, after buyers had contacted competitors. Preparing an offer also required someone to check stock line by line. Follow-up depended on individual memory, so some opportunities received no follow-up at all.
What we built
We built a sales-response workflow with a defined scope, a dedicated mailbox, and explicit approval rules. When an inquiry arrives, it retrieves the buyer's CRM history, checks available inventory in Extensiv, and prepares a reply based on current availability.
- When a buyer responds positively, the owner receives an SMS, email, and Teams notification with a clear decision: take over personally or approve the next step.
- Each lead enters a three-message follow-up sequence on day 1, day 5, and day 14. Messaging varies by buyer temperature.
- Recurring offer emails are prepared from current stock data at the intended send time. The owner reviews and approves them rather than assembling them manually.
The approval rule
During the first phase, the workflow prepares messages and a person sends them. Additional autonomy is introduced only after the team has reviewed the output quality for that specific use case. Strategic or sensitive messages remain drafts in the owner's outbox for review.
What changed
Lead-response time moved from the next morning to minutes. The owner now spends under 30 minutes a week on approvals and escalations rather than several hours preparing routine correspondence. The same client engagement later expanded to include a daily customer-data sync for win-back email and an order database that supplies QuickBooks.