Quoting is where electrical distributors win and lose jobs. A contractor sends over a fixture schedule, or a photo of a nameplate on a twenty-year-old motor starter, or an email that says "need pricing on the attached." The distributor who comes back first with a clean answer often gets the order, and the others never hear about it again.
The trouble is that quotes pile up. Your inside team is buried in them, and the hard ones, the obsolete breaker or the lighting spec with a discontinued fixture, sit at the bottom of the pile.
AI Quick Quote: describe it, get a price
With AI Quick Quote, a customer says or types what they need in plain words and gets a priced quote back. "Two hundred feet of 10/3 MC, a box of 1/2-inch EMT set-screw connectors and a 60 amp non-fused disconnect" turns into a quote with your items and prices.
Customers can also start from a photo or a competitor's description. If the quote includes items crossed from another supplier's description, each of those lines is checked again right after the quote shows, against the competitor's full description, and updates on screen. Every crossed line shows the competitor's text, so your customer can see what was matched.
Get this for me: the hard-to-find request
Electrical has a long tail. Replacement parts for discontinued panels, a specific ballast for an old fixture, a control relay for a piece of equipment the plant bought in 1998. Most of it isn't in anyone's catalog.
Get this for me lets a customer ask for anything they don't see. The request goes straight to your purchasing team and comes back to the customer as a quote. No lost emails, no sticky notes. Your reps can do the same thing from the field: buy what a customer asks for, or send it to purchasing.
Those requests are often where the margin is. A contractor who needs one hard-to-find breaker for a service upgrade is not shopping price. They are shopping whoever can find it.
The email quote desk
Many electrical quotes will always come by email: a bill of material from an estimator, a list from a plant engineer, a forwarded spec. The email quote desk prices those requests and answers them. Your team can check every decision the AI made, and the PO inbox handles the purchase orders that follow, with a person approving each one.
Here is how the pieces fit:
- Simple, repeat items: the customer uses AI Quick Quote and accepts the price when ready.
- Hard-to-find parts: Get this for me sends it to purchasing and returns a quote.
- Emailed lists and RFQs: the email quote desk prices them so your team reviews instead of retyping.
- Big packages: switchgear and lighting packages still get your people's full attention, because they have time now.
Faster quotes, better hit rate
Quote speed matters more in electrical than in a lot of trades because contractors are often bidding against the clock themselves. When the quick, simple quotes take care of themselves, your experienced inside salespeople can spend their day on the gear packages and lighting jobs where their knowledge actually earns margin.
Customers can also see all their quotes in one place and accept one when they are ready, which turns more quotes into orders without another phone call.
See how it works with your own electrical catalog.