AI Solutions

An AI Sales Assistant That Qualifies B2B Leads and Drafts Follow-Ups

Grounded in CRM and product data, it helps a small sales team respond faster without losing the personal touch.

Overview

Kestrel Industrial Supplies sells fasteners, tooling and safety equipment to manufacturers and contractors. Its eight-person sales team received hundreds of inbound enquiries a week through web forms and email, and response times had slipped to more than a day for many leads.

The brief

The company wanted an AI assistant that would help, not replace, its sales staff:

  • classify and score inbound enquiries against clear qualification rules
  • draft a tailored first reply using real product and pricing data
  • summarise an account's history before a call
  • keep every AI-generated message under human review before sending

What we built

The assistant reads each new enquiry, extracts company, product interest, quantities and urgency, and scores it against rules agreed with the sales director. Qualified leads are created or updated in the CRM with a suggested owner.

For each lead it drafts a reply that references matching products, stock availability and standard lead times, pulled from the product catalogue rather than invented. Sales reps review, edit and send from their normal inbox. Before calls, reps can ask for a one-page account brief covering recent orders, open quotes and past issues.

Technical approach

We built this as an AI agent with a small set of tools: CRM lookup, catalogue search, stock check and quote history. Retrieval runs over a PostgreSQL vector index of product data. The model layer uses Anthropic Claude for drafting and summaries, with OpenAI models used for embeddings, behind an abstraction that allows either provider to be swapped.

Guardrails include strict grounding (no prices unless returned by a tool), a human approval step for every outbound message, and an evaluation set of 300 real enquiries used to test each prompt change. The CRM integration builds on the client's existing CRM software rather than replacing it.

    • Project facts

      • Client

      • Industry

      • Category

      • Duration

      • Completed

      • Services

      • Technologies

        • Anthropic Claude

          We build AI assistants, agents and document workflows on Anthropic's Claude models, known for long-context reasoning, careful instruction following and strong writing.

        • OpenAI

          We integrate OpenAI models into business software for assistants, document processing, search and content workflows, with grounding, evaluation and cost controls.

        • AI & Machine Learning

          Applied AI and machine learning for forecasting, classification, recommendations and document understanding, alongside large language models where they add value.

        • PostgreSQL

          PostgreSQL is our open-source database of choice for SaaS platforms and cost-sensitive systems, with strong reliability, JSON support and vector search for AI features.

        • React

          We build responsive, accessible React front ends for dashboards, portals and SaaS products, backed by clean APIs and a component library you can maintain.

      Gallery

      Screenshots & walkthrough

      • Draft reply review panel

      • Lead qualification queue

      • Response time analytics

      Features

      Key features we delivered

      • Lead extraction and scoring

        Pulls company, product interest, quantities and urgency from free-text enquiries and scores them against agreed rules.

      • Grounded reply drafts

        Drafts first replies using live catalogue, stock and lead-time data, never invented prices.

      • Account briefs on demand

        Summarises recent orders, open quotes and past issues before a sales call.

      • CRM sync

        Creates or updates leads and activities in the existing CRM with a suggested owner.

      • Human-in-the-loop approval

        Every AI-generated message is reviewed and edited by a sales rep before it is sent.

      • Evaluation and monitoring

        A test set of real enquiries and usage dashboards track accuracy and adoption after each change.

      Case study

      Read the full story

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      • School Group Digital Transformation

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      What our clients say

      • We used to lose half a day's takings every time a store's broadband went down. Since the new tills went in, outages barely register, and head office can change a price at lunchtime and see it on every shelf-edge promotion by the afternoon.

      Solutions

      Built on our solutions

      • Lead Management Software

        Lead management software that captures enquiries from every channel, scores and routes them instantly and tracks follow-up, so no lead goes cold and marketing sees what converts.

      • CRM Software

        CRM software for B2B and service businesses: pipeline management, contact history, quotes, tasks and forecasting, configured around your sales process with optional AI assistance.

      • AI Business Automation

        AI business automation platform that reads documents, classifies requests and runs multi-step workflows across your systems, with human approval where it matters.

      Services

      Services behind this project

      • AI Agent Development

        AI agent development for multi-step business tasks: agents that use your APIs and tools to research, update records and resolve requests, with approvals, audit logs and clear limits.

      • AI Application Development

        AI application development for document processing, classification, summarisation, semantic search and forecasting — embedded into new or existing business software with measurable accuracy.

      • CRM Development

        Custom CRM development for sales, account management and service teams — pipelines, customer records, automation and reporting tailored to your sales process and integrated with your systems.

      FAQ

      Frequently asked questions

      • Will an AI sales assistant send emails without human review?

        Not in this project. Every drafted message goes to a sales rep to review and edit first. Fully automatic sending is possible for low-risk messages, but we recommend starting with human approval and measuring quality before relaxing it.

      • How do you stop the AI from inventing prices or stock levels?

        The assistant can only quote prices, stock and lead times returned by tool calls to the catalogue and ERP. Prompts forbid unsupported figures, and an evaluation set checks for hallucinated values after every change.

      More work

      Other projects

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        A custom ERP for a mid-sized metal fabrication manufacturer, connecting sales orders, production planning, inventory, purchasing and finance in one system.

      • Fleet Logistics Tracking App

        A driver app and dispatch dashboard for a regional delivery company, with live vehicle tracking, digital proof of delivery and optimised route sequencing.

      • Clinic Appointment Mobile App

        A patient booking app and clinic scheduling back office for a group of private outpatient clinics, with online booking, reminders and secure pre-visit forms.

      Insights

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