Blog
Dec 29, 2025
The state of industrial sales today
Why industrial commercial teams are hitting a scaling wall: document overload, expensive engineering time lost to admin, and knowledge that can’t be reused at speed.
Manual work is the default operating system
In many industrial companies, sales still run on manual RFQ triage, manual requirement review, and manual cross-checks across dozens of files.
RFQ packages routinely contain tens of documents and hundreds of pages of specs, drawings, and commercial terms, with critical requirements buried in the details.
The result is predictable: work expands linearly with RFQ volume, and efficiency and productivity collapse under peak loads.
Teams are forced into a speed vs quality trade-off, and the cost of a miss often shows up late, during engineering, procurement, or delivery, when it is most expensive.
Engineers are doing paperwork, not engineering
Proposal engineers and sales engineers are among the most expensive people in the process, yet a large share of their week is spent on repetitive reading, copying, formatting, and reconciling information.
They are asked to produce technical and commercial proposals while spending hours just getting to a baseline understanding of scope, constraints, and risks.
This is not a talent problem; it is an allocation problem. When expert time is consumed by admin, strategic work gets squeezed out: technical strategy, risk framing, value narrative, and customer alignment.
The outcome is slower response times, less consistency across bids, and weaker control over margins.
Knowledge is scattered and Ctrl+F doesn’t scale
Most organizations already have the answers they need, especially in past proposals, deviations lists, clarification sheets, product manuals, supplier quotations, but these are not structured to be reused.
The critical context sits across folders, versions, email threads, and individual experience, so every new bid becomes a rediscovery exercise. Searching inside a single PDF is not the same as retrieving the right precedent across thousands of pages and years of history.
The operational risk is obvious: know-how is centralized in a few senior people, onboarding takes too long, and turnover or retirement quietly removes capability from the business. Without a repeatable way to find and reuse institutional knowledge, scaling sales becomes synonymous with scaling headcount.
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