Background

The customer trades industrial raw materials, including steel, non-ferrous metals and engineering plastics. All of its customers are factories that use these materials as inputs. The sales team is divided by product line and region.

Problems in customer development

  • The downstream industries of a single material are dispersed. Cold-rolled steel sheet, for example, is used in home appliances, automotive parts, steel furniture and electrical enclosures, and a salesperson usually knows only one or two of these industries well.
  • Lists exported under a broad industry such as "metal products" contain many competing traders and companies that do not use the material, so screening is costly.
  • New customers come mainly through referrals from existing ones; there is no systematic way to find factories similar to current customers.

The approach

From material to downstream industries. A salesperson describes the material and specification to the AI agent, which returns groups of downstream industries that use it, with a factory list for each group.

Excluding irrelevant companies. Product summaries and the full registered business scope are indexed, and category matching relies mainly on product terms. Exclusion terms remove any company whose name or main products contain the specified words.

Finding similar companies from existing customers. Supply-chain relationship data records customer and supplier relationships between factories. Starting from one existing customer, a salesperson can follow the network to find similar factories.

Assigning by size and region. Lists are split by insured headcount, registered-capital range and province, city and county, then assigned to the salesperson for each region. Factories with direct decision-maker contacts are followed up first.

How it is used

Before a first conversation, a salesperson runs an AI deep dive on the target factory to understand its main products and processes and judge which grades and specifications it may need. Filters persist across turns of the conversation, so the range can be narrowed step by step without refilling a form.

Where it applies

The same approach suits suppliers of raw materials, components and industrial consumables whose customers are manufacturing factories.

The company name is withheld and no customer operating data is disclosed.