The scenario

Meet a fictional but realistic shop: 12 people, three machinists on swing shift, one owner who still quotes the tricky jobs himself, and one estimator handling 35–45 RFQs a month. Quoting runs through Pipedrive — sort of. Quotes get created there, but follow-up lives in the estimator’s intentions.

Sample data, start to finish: every customer, part, and dollar figure in this walkthrough is synthetic.

The before-state

The demo data mirrors what we typically find in a first export:

  • 31 open quotes spread across the last five months, worth far more than the shop’s monthly billing.
  • 24 of them with zero recorded activity after the quote email went out.
  • Three quotes from the same buyer — who has been silently comparing the shop’s responsiveness against another vendor’s.
  • Two quotes the estimator was sure he’d followed up on. The sent folder disagrees.

What the system does

The walkthrough shows four stages on the live demo platform:

  1. The pull. Open quotes extracted from the CRM into one inventory — age, value, owner, last touch — in minutes, not a weekend project.
  2. The scoring. Each quote classified: recoverable, long-shot, or dead, with the reasoning visible. Eleven of the 31 score recoverable.
  3. The drafts. Follow-up messages generated per quote, each referencing the actual part, quantity, and original conversation. The estimator’s review pass: approve, edit, or hold — about 15 minutes for the batch.
  4. The board. The open-quotes board every shop ends the sprint with: every quote, its age band, its next scheduled touch, and what came back.

The math of the outcome

Illustrative example on the demo numbers: 11 recoverable quotes averaging $8,400. If follow-up converts even 2 of them, that’s ~$16,800 of work from a $1,497 sprint — and the board keeps running after the sprint ends. Your inputs will differ; the demo exists so you can see the mechanics, not to promise the multiple.