Manufacturing and B2B enquiries

The three kinds of question in one enquiry#

The value is in the sorting rather than the answering. A works inbox that receives forty enquiries a week does not have forty engineering questions in it; it has thirty document lookups, six commercial ones and four that genuinely need an engineer. Separating them is the work, and it is the part that happens reliably.

What Connect can read, and what it cannot#

• Read: PDF (the text layer, or the model reads the page), DOCX, XLSX, CSV/TSV, PPTX, TXT, MD, JSON, and PNG, JPEG and WebP images. A drawing exported as a PDF is usable; a photograph of a part is readable as an image.
• Stored but not read: anything outside that list. A native CAD file is an attachment a person opens; Connect will not pretend to have interpreted it.
• Refused outright: files carrying DOCTYPE or ENTITY declarations, and zip bombs. That refusal is deliberate and it happens before any parsing.
• Created as new versions: when Connect writes or modifies a file it creates a version with provenance and an audit entry rather than overwriting yours.

The certification question, which will be asked#

Industrial buyers ask about approvals and standards early. Connect will repeat what your own Knowledge says about your accreditations, because those are facts about your business that you have supplied and can evidence. It will not extrapolate one approval into another, will not state a scope that the document does not state, and will not claim anything about its own compliance posture — Connect itself holds no certification of any kind, and no page here says otherwise.

Where two of your documents disagree — an old scope on the website and a current one in the certificate — the conflict is surfaced rather than silently resolved in favour of whichever was read last. On a quality question that is exactly the behaviour you want, because the wrong answer is a contract problem rather than an embarrassment.

The escalation, and what it carries#

1. Let the enquiry become a Person, a Company and a thread as usual.

   Result The next enquiry from the same buyer knows about this one, even if it arrives from a different address on the same company.

2. Let Connect answer the documented part of the enquiry immediately.

   Result The buyer has something useful within minutes and knows the rest is with an engineer, which is a materially better position than silence.

3. Let safe_sales refuse the commercial part.

   Result No price, lead time or warranty is improvised. The refusal is recorded as a decision, because a refusal is a decision.

4. Take the residue as a task follow-up with a reason.

   Result It appears as work for a person on the follow-ups screen, with the thread attached, and no drain will ever send it.

5. Open an opportunity when it becomes a quotation.

   Result The pipeline carries the value in minor units, stage rules apply, and the follow-ups hang off the deal rather than off somebody's memory.

Where the money goes#

Reading, mostly. A long technical thread with attachments is a bigger model call than a two-line enquiry, and a hundred-page datasheet read repeatedly is the pattern worth avoiding — extract the facts once into Knowledge rather than re-reading the document on every enquiry. Voice is the usual expensive exception: audio tokens at four times the text input rate, the session re-billed for its whole context every turn, and a duration charge even where no tokens are reported.

Questions#

Related#

• File formats Connect reads
• When two sources disagree
• Escalating a commercial decision
• A B2B sales team
• Instructions hidden in content
• Follow-ups for a person to do