Sample
What an Opportunity Brief looks like.
Below is a sample of what comes back when you answer the nine questions. The company is a fictional composite of patterns we see often — a real brief is about yours specifically, and says less about patterns and more about you.
OPPORTUNITY BRIEF · prepared from survey answers · fictional composite for illustration
The company, as you described it
Industrial parts distributor, roughly $40M revenue, 85 people. Epicor for ERP, HubSpot for CRM, quoting in Excel plus two senior estimators’ heads. The hours go to quoting and to answering “where’s my order” calls. The number you want to move: quote turnaround, currently two to four days.
Where AI plausibly pays
1. Same-day quotes, same senior judgment
Today every quote waits for one of two people to pull pricing from Epicor, check availability, apply margin rules they mostly carry in their heads, and assemble the document. A quoting assistant that drafts from those same rules turns your estimators into reviewers instead of assemblers — the judgment stays, the assembly doesn’t. Baseline to set on day one: median hours from RFQ to quote sent, and the share of quotes out the same day. Distributors who answer first win a disproportionate share; this is the revenue-side opportunity in your answers.
2. Order status that answers itself
Your team fields status inquiries all day by phone and email. Epicor already knows the answer; a status agent reading order state plus carrier tracking can answer most of these on arrival, with a human handoff for the exceptions. Baseline to set first: you likely don’t count these inquiries today — almost nobody does. Week one is simply measuring the volume. That number decides whether this is a project or a footnote.
3. Margin leaks in the quote file
With quoting in Excel, nobody sees the quotes that went out below guideline until the month closes — if then. Once quoting runs through a system (see #1), flagging below-guideline pricing before it ships is nearly free to add. Metric: realized margin against guideline, measured before and after.
Where we’d start, and why
#1. It has the clearest baseline, the shortest path to production, and it’s revenue-side — the first thirty days should earn the next thirty. #3 rides along nearly free once #1 exists. #2 waits for its own baseline.
Honest caveats
How deep the Epicor integration can go is unknowable until we look — the first week of a real engagement answers that. And if the pricing rules turn out to live entirely in your estimators’ heads, extracting them is the first two weeks, not a detour from it. If this brief were about your company, this section would be about your specifics.
A brief like this, about your operation, written from your answers — free, within two business days.
Answer the nine questions →