Cut inbox sorting from 90 minutes a day to 15 for a B2B industrial supplies distributor
Client snapshot
A distributor of industrial supplies selling to contractors and facilities teams. Eight people: the owner, three account reps, two people in purchasing and two in the warehouse. The whole business ran out of Gmail, with Streak boxes for each account and each open quote.
The problem
Every rep started the day by reading everything. Quote requests, reorders, delivery questions, supplier invoices, newsletters and complaints all landed in the same shared inbox. Someone had to read each one, decide what it was, and drag it into the right Streak box. Most mornings that took an hour and a half, and anything that came in after lunch waited until the next morning.
Quote requests were the costly part. Contractors send the same request to three suppliers and buy from whoever answers first. About half got a same-day answer.
What we built
A sorting layer between the inbox and the pipeline.
n8n reads every new message in the shared inbox. Claude puts each one into one of six categories agreed in discovery: quote request, reorder, delivery question, supplier, complaint, and everything else. Each category gets a Gmail label and a route. Quote requests open or update a Streak box in the quotes pipeline with the customer, the items and quantities pulled from the email. Reorders go to the account's box with the line items. Complaints go to the owner.
For quote requests and delivery questions, Claude writes a first reply in the rep's voice, using the account's history in Streak. The draft sits in the rep's Drafts folder. Nothing sends until a person reads it and clicks send.
We also wrote down the rules. Each category has a one-page standard operating procedure that says who owns it, how fast it should be answered and what a good reply looks like. New hires read those instead of shadowing someone for a week.
Results, 60 days in
- Daily inbox sorting: about 90 minutes → about 15, mostly reviewing drafts.
- Quote requests answered the same day: around half → over 90%.
- Emails that never made it into Streak: dozens a month → a handful.
- A weekly email shows response times by category and any thread left untouched for more than three days.
Quote
"The quotes used to sit until someone got to them. Now the draft is waiting when I open my inbox." Account rep
Build snapshot
- Timeline: 5 business days
- Stack: Gmail, Streak, n8n, Claude
- Investment: $1,800
- Who owned it: the owner signed off on the categories and the SOPs; the senior rep tunes the draft tone.
The pattern
This is the pattern we ship in the Inbox Triage & Draft engagement. If your pipeline depends on someone reading every email first, the build is the same, with your categories and CRM swapped in.
This is an illustrative composite drawn from operator engagements. Names, identifying details, and exact metrics are anonymised. The workflow, stack, and approach are real.
Looks like your situation?
A 30-minute call tells us whether the same pattern fits your operation, and what it would cost to ship it.