Three Signals an Inquiry Is Worth Your Time
Earlier this month I went back through one week's worth of inquiries — eleven of them, arriving over five days — and traced where each one ended up three months later. Two became real conversations. One became a sample order. The other eight went nowhere, and reading them again, I could see it in the first four lines.
That is not hindsight being clever. It is that most low-value inquiries announce themselves immediately, and most sales teams spend equal time on all of them anyway. Since there is no way to answer eleven properly in one afternoon, the useful skill is not persuasion. It is triage.
Here is what separated the three that went somewhere from the eight that did not.
Signal one: they said what it is for
The eight that died all asked some version of the same question: please send your catalogue and best price. Nothing about the buyer, nothing about the application.
The three that survived all mentioned a specific use. One was specifying for a project with a fixed completion date. One was replacing an existing supplier after a quality problem and said so plainly. One was comparing options for a product line they were still designing.
That distinction matters because it changes what you send. A price list costs you nothing and gets read by nobody. A reply built around you are replacing a supplier mid-project, here is what usually goes wrong in that handover gets an answer, because it is about them.
If an inquiry does not say what the product is for, the first reply should be a question, not a price.
Signal two: there was a number and a date in it
Vague on purpose is vague about everything. The inquiries that went nowhere avoided quantities — we are interested in your products for the European market — and avoided timeframes entirely.
The three that worked contained both, even roughly. Around 2,000 units for a spring rollout. One container to start, we would look at more if the first shipment is clean. Rough numbers are fine. Rough numbers mean somebody has actually been thinking about this.
A number and a date tell you three things at once: there is a real requirement, there is a decision somewhere in the future you can plan around, and the person writing is close enough to the project to know both. Buyers who are only exploring do not have those numbers, because they have not needed them yet.
Signal three: they told you who they are
Not the company name so much as the position. I am the purchasing manager and I handle sourcing for our production team are different sentences from a question that arrives with no signature at all.
The three that went somewhere all gave me enough to know how to talk to them. That sounds trivial and it is not. It changes whether the reply talks about certification and lead times or about total cost over a season. It also predicts the single most useful thing: will this person be able to answer a technical question without disappearing for a week?
A buyer who will not say what their role is will usually not be able to move anything internally either.
The three-line card
If you want something you can apply in thirty seconds, it is this. For each inquiry, note three things:
- Application — do they say what the product is for?
- Numbers — is there a quantity and a date, even approximate?
- Role — can you tell who you are replying to?
Three out of three, reply first and reply properly. Two, reply today. One, reply with a short question and see whether anything comes back. Zero, send the catalogue and move on.
The point is not to judge the buyer. Plenty of good customers write terrible first emails, and a terse inquiry from a serious engineer is worth more than a beautifully written one from a student doing a project. The point is that you cannot tell the difference without asking, and asking costs a sentence.
Triage is not rejection. It is deciding which four of eleven deserve a properly written reply on the same afternoon.
If an inquiry does clear the bar, the next question is what a good reply actually looks like — that is the subject of Why Your Quotation Makes Buyers Go Quiet.
I write about cross-border B2B from inside a Chinese manufacturer — get in touch if you would like to compare notes.