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Aplora
Case available

Close more deals with the same sales team, and see in advance which of them will not reach shipment.

Manufacturers with their own sales team: a deal runs for weeks, a buyer, an engineer and a finance lead all weigh in, and line utilisation follows what got sold.

A factory worker folds finished goods beside the line, surrounded by machines and rolls of material.

Key constraints

  • the deal cycle runs for weeks or months: a mistake surfaces late, and a quarter cannot be replayed

  • more than one person decides, and the rep never reaches some of them

  • specifications and quotes are prepared by hand, from scratch every time

Industry economics

  • In a long cycle the gap between the best and the average reps costs more than in a short one: one lost deal is months of work and idle line time.

  • An engineer's hour spent quoting a deal that will not close is a direct loss: that hour cannot be resold.

  • A deal stuck without a next step still looks alive in the funnel and skews the forecast that raw-material purchasing runs on.

Typical processes and pains

  • Symptom

    The team's result rests on one or two reps.

    Economic consequence

    New hires take months to reach quota, and a strong rep leaving shows up in revenue immediately.

    Can you describe what your best rep does differently in actions rather than in personal qualities?

  • Symptom

    The rep talks to the buyer and never reaches the person who decides.

    Economic consequence

    The deal turns into a price argument, because there is nobody to hear the case about lead time and quality.

  • Symptom

    Quotes and specifications are assembled by hand from previous documents.

    Economic consequence

    Preparation consumes engineering hours, and terms from an old project slip into the document.

  • Symptom

    The shipment forecast runs on the reps' gut feel.

    Economic consequence

    Raw-material purchasing and the loading plan rest on numbers the funnel data does not support.

Priority AI scenarios

Understand how a leader's conversation differs from the rest

  1. 1Transcription
  2. 2review against your criteria
  3. 3decision-maker reached and next step
  4. 4CRM update
Inputs
Call recordings, the sales book, qualification criteria.
Output
A conversation review with the supporting excerpt, plus a team summary.
Where the human stays
The head of sales calibrates the criteria; contested conversations are reviewed by hand.
Integrations
Telephony, CRM, e-mail
Metrics
Share of conversations reaching the decision-maker, share of deals with an agreed next step, stage conversion.
Limitations
Enough conversations are needed to draw conclusions: in a two-person team with rare deals the review shows less.

Produce quotes and specifications without assembling them by hand

  1. 1Parse the request
  2. 2fill in items and terms
  3. 3check the rules
  4. 4produce a draft for approval
Inputs
The client request, the product catalogue, pricing and discount rules, document templates.
Output
A draft quote with the source of every value stated.
Where the human stays
The engineer confirms applicability and edits non-standard items; nothing reaches the client unapproved.
Integrations
ERP, CRM, document storage
Metrics
Time to produce a document, share of quotes with errors, engineering hours per request.
Limitations
If the catalogue and discount rules are written down nowhere, they have to be fixed first — and that is the client's work.

Where teams usually start

This is an observation across similar companies, not a universal recommendation: the order follows where your bottleneck actually is.
  1. 1Conversations are the usual starting point: they carry the most data and test the hypothesis fastest.
  2. 2Quotes and specifications come next, if that is where engineering hours actually go.
  3. 3Forecasting and stalled-deal work come last — they need a populated CRM.
  4. 4That is an observation from our projects rather than a prescription: in a long cycle the order usually follows which stage can change within a quarter.

Industry systems and data

  • CRM
  • ERP
  • telephony
  • e-mail and calendar
  • document storage
  • costing systems

Risks and constraints

  • Deal records are patchy: where the CRM was filled in for form's sake, the first weeks go into putting it in order.

  • Specifications and contracts carry prices and supply terms: which fields are shared is agreed before work begins, not along the way.

  • Adoption: if reps read conversation review as surveillance rather than support, they won't use what it produces.

  • A long cycle means the effect shows over quarters rather than weeks: the measurement horizon is fixed in advance.

Cases

  • A production floor: two workers at a bench going through a batch of goods.
    Manufacturing
    Aplora Sales

    Client under NDA

    The best salesperson's playbook rolled out across a manufacturer's whole sales team

    The team's result rested on two people; the rest closed several times less on the same workload. Nobody knew what exactly the leaders did differently: conversations were not reviewed, and the gap was explained away as “experience”.

    Conversion to a sale three months after rollout
    +25%
    Conversion to a sale after six months
    +72%
    Read the case

Which solutions apply

Frequently asked questions

Our deal cycle is six months. When will we see a result?

Leading indicators — the share of conversations reaching the decision-maker, the share of deals with an agreed next step, qualification quality — move within the first weeks and show whether the hypothesis holds. Conversion to shipment is measured over the length of the cycle, and we fix that horizon before the work starts so early numbers are not passed off as the result.

Our ERP is homegrown. Does that stop the work?

We work with systems that expose an API or another workable exchange route — exports, direct database access, file drops. Homegrown systems are often easier than off-the-shelf ones: they can be extended for the task. We check yours during the assessment: what matters is not only that an interface exists, but which fields are writable.

Let's work through one workflow in manufacturing

Thirty to forty-five minutes on your specific case. If it isn't a fit, we'll say so on the call.