Same team. Same hours. More quotes out the door.
Today we’re introducing Sales Assist, the newest Stella Source module and the first patented AI trained specifically on metals data. Sales Assist turns emailed RFQs into ready-to-send quotes automatically, so your sales team spends less time building quotes and more time winning business.
The capacity problem nobody’s solved
Most metals sales teams don’t have a strategy problem. They have a capacity problem.
RFQs stack up in the inbox. Some get answered same-day, some next-day, and some get triaged into “we’ll get to it when we can.” And a chunk of those become deals you didn’t win, because someone else got back first.
The average rep is handling 34 price checks a week, by hand. Each one means reading the request, figuring out what the buyer actually meant, matching every line to your catalog, checking pricing in your ERP, and building the quote. Steps two through five are the time sink, and they’re exactly the work Sales Assist was built to absorb.
Why we built Sales Assist and how it fits with the rest of Stella
Sales Assist came out of conversations with our customers, backed up by our Ecommerce Trends Report survey last year. The pattern was hard to miss: no matter how much of the business runs through an online storefront, quoting speed is still the bottleneck. And there will always be buyers who’d rather stay in email than learn a portal.
So we asked ourselves: how do we help our customers handle that 34-a-week pile in a better way and ease the path for buyers who don’t want to self-service?
Sales Assist is the first piece of the answer. It handles the inbound emailed RFQ: reading the request, matching every line to your catalog, suggesting substitutions, and drafting a quote inside Stella Source in minutes.
But the Sales Assist module on its own is just the front door. The real story is what happens when it works alongside the rest of Stella’s quoting toolkit:
- Quote Builder allows your reps to pick up everything that didn’t come in over email (phone-ins, walk-ins, on-the-road requests) so every channel can be quoted digitally through one place.
- Quick Buy lets buyers accept and purchase right from the quote, no account or login required. The buyers who’d never set up a portal account still end up transacting digitally.
- Customer Portals give your existing and new customers, plus your strategic accounts, a place to order on their own time without touching your team’s queue.
- Automated Pricing applies account-specific rules in the background when you want to offer it.
- Sales Assist can also live in your storefront to power AI search for buyers who do want to self-serve, letting them paste a list or type the way they actually talk and get the right product, every time.
Together, the picture changes. Sales Assist gets the first quote out fast. Quick Buy closes it without forcing the buyer to learn anything new. Quote Builder and the portals pick up the rest. Every buyer ends up inside one digital workflow, even the ones who said they’d never use one.
Our patented AI technology trained on metals data
This is the part most “AI for sales” tools can’t do.
Most general-purpose LLMs don’t know that a 4' x 8' x 1/4" HR plate could be substituted with 3/16" HR plate at the same width and length, or that a buyer asking for 304 instead of 316 is asking for a grade swap. They don’t know which dimensions can flex, which can’t, or what shorthand looks like across hot-rolled, cold-rolled, plate, tube, and angles.
Sales Assist does. It’s trained on metals data: materials, sizes, grades, shapes, shorthand, and slang. That’s why it reads metal the way your team does. It’s an approach we’ve been granted a patent on.* And that training is what makes the rest of the workflow possible.
Sales Assist:
- Reads and understands any format. Like most tools, Sales Assist is multi-modal, meaning it can read PDFs, CSVs, plain text, or several files in a single email. Our difference: it actually understands what those files are saying in the metals world.
- Returns smart results. We take our AI to the next level, and Sales Assist provides exact matches against your catalog, smart substitutions where there’s no exact fit, and product gaps flagged so your rep knows where to follow up, all in one flow, working together.
- Substitutes on what matters. Sales Assist is smart enough to substitute where it matters most: shape, thickness, length, width, attribute, grade, or material, whichever dimension is most acceptable to flex.
Every result lands in front of a human reviewer before the quote goes out, so we’re doing the heavy lifting while your team keeps the judgment call.
What this looks like at scale
Take a service center handling 200 inbound RFQs a week. If each rep is spending 45 minutes per RFQ today, that’s 150 hours of manual work hitting the team every week. Almost four full FTEs of pure processing time.
When that 45-minute job becomes a five-minute review, you recover roughly 130 hours of selling time. That goes back into following up on stalled quotes, working strategic accounts, and the proposals that need actual human judgment.
You don’t have to take our word for it. An early service center adopter runs Stella Source across their operation and was one of the first teams to put Sales Assist to work. They are able to take an RFQ from received to sent quote in 2.5 minutes.
Central Steel Services, another early user, is putting Sales Assist to work on a different problem: bringing email-first buyers onto their new online storefront.
“We are using Sales Assist to help us introduce our ecommerce platform to customers who are accustomed to or prefer sending email requests for quotes. It is allowing us to automatically build a cart and quote based on their emails, which is saving us clicks and helping us get back to our customers quicker. It is also helping us train these customers to use our ecommerce more.”
Thomas Woods, Vice President of Central Steel Services
That’s the pattern we hoped for: the buyers who’d never touch a portal get their quotes faster and still get brought into the digital order flow. That’s two teams now getting more quotes out the door with no extra lift or hiring.
Get started
Every week your team spends buried in price checks is a week of quotes that could have gone out faster and orders that went to whoever answered first. Sales Assist makes sure that’s you, every time. So don’t wait to give your sales team every advantage.
Already on Stella? Reach out to your Stella Account Executive to get your branded Sales Assist email set up and ready to go. Most teams are running real RFQs through Sales Assist in a couple of days.
New to Stella? Book A Demo and we’ll walk you through Sales Assist and the rest of the quoting workflows it plugs into.
* Sales Assist’s metals-trained AI is covered by U.S. Patent No. 12,462,112 B1.
