Vertex Manufacturing sells industrial components to buyers who expect fast, accurate pricing — but every quote request at Vertex went through a manual email exchange with a sales rep, often taking two to three business days to turn around a simple estimate.

The Challenge

Beyond the slow quoting process, Vertex's product catalog was essentially invisible to search engines and AI answer engines alike. Product pages consisted of a single PDF spec sheet with almost no crawlable text, meaning buyers searching for specific technical specifications never found Vertex in the results at all — they found competitors who had invested in structured, readable product content instead.

Sales leadership estimated they were losing a meaningful share of inbound interest simply because prospects couldn't self-serve even a rough estimate before deciding whether to engage.

The Solution

We built a self-serve quoting portal that let buyers configure a product and receive an instant estimate based on current pricing rules, with an option to request a formal quote from a rep once they were ready to move forward.

  • Instant estimate engine — a rules-based configurator that priced common product variations in real time, removing the multi-day wait for a first number.
  • Restructured product catalog — every product rebuilt as a proper web page with buyer-intent content, comparison tables, and the technical specifications search engines and AI engines could actually read.
  • AI-search optimization — schema markup and plain-language specification summaries designed specifically to be extracted correctly by AI answer engines fielding technical buyer questions.

The quoting portal was integrated directly with Vertex's existing CRM, so every self-serve estimate request created a qualified lead automatically instead of requiring manual data entry from the sales team.

The Results

B2B enquiries rose 540% following launch, and Vertex ranked #1 for 87 buyer-intent keywords across its core product lines within the first year. The self-serve estimate flow also shortened the overall sales cycle by 61%, since prospects arrived at the first sales call already informed on pricing.

"Our sales team finally has a tool they trust. Buyers get instant answers and we get qualified pipeline."