Case study · Zoho CRM
Quotes from emails, generated in seconds.
A specialist manufacturer takes every order as an email — often buried in a PDF or an RFQ, in more than one language. I built an automation that reads each email, prices it from the company's own Zoho price books, and drops a ready-to-review quote straight into Zoho CRM. Staff just check it and hit send.
Plugs into the tech stack you run
One email in — a Zoho quote out
A customer emails a request. The automation reads it and, moments later, a ready-to-send quote is waiting in Zoho CRM.
Sales inbox& prices it
CRM · Quotes| Quote | Subject | Stage | Amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| QT-2043 | Quote — 200 m | Draft | $3,021 |
| QT-2042 | Quote — 1,900 m | Sent | $28,671 |
| QT-2041 | Quote — 500 m | Sent | $7,450 |
| QT-2040 | Quote — 15,000 m | Accepted | $96,300 |
Illustrative — layouts recreated for clarity; no real client data shown.
Email arrives
A customer emails a quote request — in the subject, the body, or an attached PDF or RFQ. The automation reads all three.
AI reads & understands
It recognises a quote request, spots the language, and pulls out exactly which products and quantities the customer wants.
Priced from Zoho
It finds each product in Zoho CRM and reads the right price-book tier for that quantity — real prices, straight from Zoho.
Draft quote, ready to send
A draft quote and a ready-to-send email land in Zoho CRM. Staff give it a glance, then hit send — the automation never sends on its own.
Every sale started with a manual quote
For a technical manufacturer, every deal begins the same way: a customer emails to ask what a product costs for a given quantity. Answering means a person reading the request — sometimes a scanned PDF or an RFQ — finding the product, looking up the right price for that quantity, and writing a formal quote. By hand, one at a time.
It's accurate, but it's slow, and it ties up skilled people in repetitive work. The brief was clear: keep the simple "just email us" promise customers rely on — but do the heavy lifting automatically, inside the Zoho CRM the business already runs on.
How the automation works
From an inbound email to a reviewable quote — end to end, inside Zoho CRM.
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Read every incoming email
It watches the shared sales inbox and reads the whole request — the subject, the body, and any attachments, including PDFs, RFQs, spreadsheets and scanned documents. Quote details hide in all three, so all three are read.
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Understand & classify it
An AI model works out whether it's a quote request, detects the language it's written in, and extracts the exact products and quantities being asked for.
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Price it from Zoho's price books
It matches the sender to a Contact in Zoho CRM, then for each product reads Zoho's tiered Price Books and picks the correct per-unit price for the requested quantity. Pricing comes only from Zoho — never invented or estimated.
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Draft the quote in Zoho CRM
It generates a professional, on-brand quote in the customer's language and creates a real Draft Quote record in Zoho — with a structured line-item table — plus a ready-to-send draft email saved right under the quote.
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Review, send — and nothing slips
A person opens the draft in Zoho, checks it, and clicks send — the automation never sends anything itself. And if a product or customer can't be matched confidently, it opens a Manual Review task in Zoho instead of guessing, so every request is accounted for.
Built deep into Zoho CRM
This isn't a bolt-on that keeps its own copy of the data — it reads and writes Zoho's real modules through the Zoho CRM API.
Single source of truth
Contacts, Products, Price Books and Quotes all live in Zoho. The automation reads and writes them natively — Zoho stays the one system of record.
Tiered price-book logic
It reads per-product, per-quantity list prices from Zoho's Price Books and matches the right tier to the order size — the pricing rules the business already uses, applied automatically.
Native Quote records
It creates genuine Zoho Quote records at Draft stage with a structured line-item subform — not a PDF stapled on the side of the CRM.
Draft email under the quote
The customer-ready email is saved as a draft on the Quote itself, so staff send from Zoho exactly as they always have — no new tool to learn.
Accurate by design
A quote that goes to a customer has to be right — so the guardrails come first.
Accuracy & control
- Human-in-the-loop — every quote is reviewed before it's sent
- No auto-send, ever — the automation only drafts
- Prices come only from Zoho's price books
- The AI is forbidden from inventing or adjusting a number
Fits how they already work
- Bilingual — replies in the sender's language
- Keeps the "just email us" promise unchanged
- Staff keep sending from Zoho, as before
- Unmatched requests become review tasks — never wrong quotes
Still quoting by hand?
If your team turns inbound emails into quotes one at a time, that's a process an automation can take off their plate — inside the CRM you already use. Let's talk about what it would look like for your business.
Book a callOr email harshan@flowlamina.com