A $35M industrial component manufacturer with 80 employees and a 6-person field sales team. Quotes required input from engineering, and the bottleneck was the time engineers spent translating specs into proposals. After a Treetop Implementation engagement, the company rebuilt its sales-engineering interface. Here is what happened.
Composite case study: a synthesis of patterns we have seen repeatedly across similar engagements. Specific names, numbers, and details are illustrative; the patterns and outcomes reflect real client results.
Company: $35M industrial manufacturer of specialty components. 80 employees, 6 outside sales reps, 4 sales engineers.
Volume: ~120 quote requests per month, average deal $25K-$180K, often customized.
Pain: Quote cycle averaged 7-9 business days. Sales engineers were the bottleneck — each quote required engineering judgment about specs, materials, and lead times.
Existing AI usage: Limited. A few salespeople used ChatGPT for email drafts; engineering had not adopted any AI tools.
Week 1: Audit of last 90 days of quotes — which closed, which lost, and why. Identified the 4 quote archetypes that covered 80% of volume.
Week 2: Built a Quote Generation Project loaded with: full product catalog with pricing logic, common configurations, standard lead-time rules, past winning quotes.
Week 3: Built a Spec Analysis Project that ingests customer RFQ documents and produces a structured engineering checklist before any human review.
Week 4: Trained the 6 sales reps and 4 sales engineers on the workflow. Built escalation rules for complex configurations that still required human engineering.
Old workflow: Sales rep gets RFQ → emails sales engineer → engineer reads spec (45 min) → engineer drafts quote (3-4 hrs) → rep formats and sends (1 hr). 7-9 day cycle.
New workflow: Sales rep gets RFQ → uploads to Spec Analysis Project (5 min) → reviews structured checklist with engineer (30 min) → Quote Generation Project produces draft → engineer 30-min sanity check → rep formats and sends. 2-3 day cycle.
Quality: Quote accuracy held steady. Win rate increased modestly because faster quotes won more competitive deals.
Engineering capacity: Sales engineers freed up to work on the genuinely complex 15% of quotes that needed full engineering thinking.
Sales cycle: Average quote-to-close cycle compressed from 38 days to 23 days.
Win rate: Win rate on competitive bids increased from 28% to 36%. Speed mattered more than they had realized.
Revenue: Same headcount processed 40% more quotes. Quarterly revenue grew 18%.
Investment: $7,500 Implementation + $500/month Claude Team for 12 seats. Total first-year cost: ~$13,500. Estimated value: $2M+ in incremental annualized revenue.