In most distribution, wholesale and manufacturing businesses with under 200 staff, a quote request goes through the same five or six steps. A customer emails an RFQ with part numbers, quantities and a delivery date. Someone opens the ERP to check list prices, customer-specific pricing and stock, then checks lead times with a supplier if the item isn't on the shelf. They build the quote in a Word or Excel template, export it to PDF, send it, and add the opportunity to the CRM if they remember. If the customer doesn't reply, a follow-up depends on whether anyone has time that week. Each step is simple on its own, but together they take long enough that quotes often leave two to four days after the request arrived.

That delay costs orders. Trade buyers who send an RFQ to three suppliers often place the order with the first one to come back with a clear price and lead time, provided the price is in range. A distributor can have better stock and better prices than its competitors and still lose the order because the quote sat in someone's inbox while they handled a delivery problem. Cadr's Quote Desk coworker was built to take this whole process off the sales team, from reading the request to following up on the quote, inside the systems the business already uses.

What the Quote Desk coworker does, step by step

The Quote Desk coworker has its own email address and its own logins to your ERP and CRM. Customers can send RFQs to it directly, or the sales team can forward requests or copy it in. When a request arrives, the coworker reads the email and any attachments, picks out the part numbers, quantities, delivery address and requested dates, and matches them to products in your ERP. Where a customer writes a description instead of a part number, it matches against your catalogue and past orders from that customer, then flags anything it can't match with confidence.

Next it prices the request using your own rules. It applies the customer's pricing tier, any agreed contract prices, volume breaks and minimum order quantities, and it checks stock and lead times before it commits to a delivery date. It then builds the quote as a PDF from your approved template, with your terms, validity period and payment conditions. The opportunity is logged in the CRM with the value, products, expected close date and a link to the original email, so the pipeline is up to date without anyone typing it in.

Once the quote is sent, the coworker follows up on the schedule your company has set, for example two working days after sending and again a week later. If the customer replies with a question about a lead time or an alternative product, it answers from the same ERP data, or passes the thread to the salesperson when the question needs their judgement. When the customer accepts, it can raise the order in the ERP or hand it to the order coordination coworker, depending on how your process is set up. The salesperson can see every quote, reply and follow-up in the CRM and in the email thread, in the same way they would see a colleague's work.

Permissions and approvals built into every quote

The Quote Desk coworker works within the permissions of the role it supports, so it can only use prices, discounts and terms that the role is allowed to offer. If your salespeople can quote list price and the customer's tier price but need a manager's approval for anything beyond that, the coworker follows the same limit. A discount above your threshold, a product that is out of stock with no confirmed lead time, or a customer with an overdue account are all sent to the right person before the quote goes out. The person approves or edits the quote, and the coworker sends it and records who signed it off.

Companies choose how much independence the coworker has, and they can change it at any time. New coworkers start in review mode, where every quote is drafted and held until a person approves it. Once the team is satisfied with the quality, the coworker can move to exceptions mode, where standard quotes go out on their own and only the unusual ones wait for review. Every action is logged with the request, the prices used, the document sent and the approval, so a manager can check exactly how any quote was produced.

It learns your pricing and quoting habits over time

Each time a salesperson edits a draft quote, the coworker records the change and applies it to similar quotes in future. If the team always rounds lead times up for a particular supplier, adds a freight line for a certain region or quotes a substitute product when an item is discontinued, the coworker picks up the pattern and starts doing the same. Over the first weeks of use, the share of quotes that need editing falls, and the share that can go out without changes rises. Managers can see this in the activity log, where each quote shows whether it was sent as drafted or corrected first.

These rules stay with the company. When an experienced salesperson leaves, the way they handled awkward customers, odd product codes and freight calculations usually leaves with them. With Cadr, the quoting rules the team has taught the coworker remain in place, and a new hire can see how quotes have been handled for each customer from their first day.

How the Quote Desk compares to other ways of handling quotes

SMEs that want faster quotes usually try one of four approaches before they look at an AI coworker. Each one solves part of the problem, and the table below shows where each one stops.

Manual quoting is flexible and needs no setup, because a person can handle any request however it arrives. The cost is time: every quote takes someone away from selling, and follow-ups and CRM updates are the first things to slip when the team is busy. It also depends heavily on who is in the office, so quote speed varies from week to week.

CPQ (configure, price, quote) software is built for pricing complex products and producing consistent documents. It works well for companies with dedicated sales operations staff who can set up and maintain the product rules. For a 30-person distributor, the setup project is often larger than the problem, and a person still has to read the email, enter the request into the CPQ tool, send the quote and chase it.

Workflow automation tools such as Zapier or Make connect systems with fixed rules, for example creating a CRM record whenever an email arrives with a certain subject line. They are useful for simple, predictable steps, but RFQs are rarely predictable. Customers write part numbers in different formats, attach spreadsheets or photos and ask questions in the same email, and a fixed workflow stops or produces errors when the input doesn't match what it expects.

Chat assistants such as ChatGPT or Gemini can help someone write a cover email or tidy up a quote description. They have no access to your ERP prices, customer tiers or stock, and they can't send anything or update your CRM. The employee still does every step of the process, with a little help on the writing.

The Quote Desk coworker combines the parts that matter for a small sales team. It reads requests in whatever form they arrive, as a person would, and prices them from your own systems and rules the way CPQ software does. It completes and records every step, as an automation tool would, and it sends unusual cases to a person instead of failing on them. Because it works inside the email, ERP and CRM you already have, there is no new system for the team to adopt.

Who the Quote Desk is built for

The Quote Desk suits manufacturing, distribution and trading businesses with roughly 10 to 200 staff that handle a regular flow of quote requests by email. Typical examples are industrial and building-products distributors, equipment suppliers, wholesalers and specialist manufacturers. These firms often quote dozens of requests a week across many product lines, with customer-specific pricing and lead times that change with supplier stock. The decision to use Cadr is usually made by the managing director, operations director or head of operations, who sees the cost of slow quotes in lost orders and in the hours the sales team spends on admin.

Most companies start with a pilot on their own live quote requests, with the coworker in review mode for two to four weeks. During the pilot, the team approves or edits each draft, and the business can measure how quickly quotes go out and how often drafts need changes. At the end of the pilot, the company decides whether to keep the coworker and how much independence to give it.

Frequently asked questions

Can the Quote Desk read RFQs that arrive as attachments? Yes. It reads the email body and common attachments such as PDFs and spreadsheets, and pulls out part numbers, quantities and dates. Anything it can't match to your catalogue with confidence is flagged for a person to check before the quote is built.

Will it quote prices or discounts we haven't approved? No. It uses only the price lists, customer tiers and discount limits that the role it supports is allowed to use. Anything outside those limits is sent to the right person for approval, and the approval is recorded against the quote.

How is this different from CPQ software? CPQ software helps a person build an accurate quote once the request has been entered into it. The Quote Desk coworker handles the full process around the quote as well: reading the request from email, pricing it, sending the PDF, logging it in the CRM and following up. It also works with your existing ERP and templates, so there is no separate product catalogue to build and maintain.

Does it get better over time? Yes. It records every edit your team makes to its drafts and applies those changes to similar quotes later. The share of quotes sent without changes is visible in the activity log, so you can track the improvement week by week.