Suppliers answer the customers who follow up. But following up is exactly the work that slips: the quote you requested last Tuesday sits unanswered because chasing it feels like nagging.
Your Squad teammate keeps the waiting list. It reads the sent mail in the inbox you shared and finds every unanswered request: quotes, purchase orders, ship dates, confirmations. Each gets a polite follow-up from the teammate's own address on a steady cadence, and the tone stays professional on the fifth ask.
Answers get captured into the squad's Contacts file and the open-items doc. Silence past your cadence escalates to you with the full thread, and if you asked for alternatives, the teammate researches other suppliers before it knocks.
From sent mail: every request that never got its answer. You confirm the list once; new requests join it automatically.
One polite chase per item per cadence, from the teammate's own inbox so replies thread back to it. The daily cap bounds total volume.
A quoted price or ship date is logged in the open-items doc, the Contacts file learns the supplier's real response time, and the thread closes.
Past your cadence, the item lands with you: full history, the supplier's pattern, a suggested next step.
Ask for options and the teammate uses its search tools and browser to shortlist other suppliers, with prices and lead times where public.
From: Ray <ray@yourcompany.squad.so> To: sales@meridianparts.com Subject: Re: Quote request — bracket assembly (4th follow-up) Hi Tomas, Still hoping for the bracket-assembly quote from Aug 12. If the answer is 'we cannot take this on', that is genuinely useful too — I just need to know whether to plan around you. If someone else owns this now, point me at them and I will stop cluttering your inbox. Ray
Your teammate connects through the integrations you approve, works on its own computer with its own browser, and asks you before anything irreversible.
The teammate reads sent mail and shows you the waiting list: 11 items you thought were 4.
First chases go out at 11:00. Three answers arrive by evening — two quotes and one 'sorry, we missed this'.
The open-items doc is the truth now. Escalations arrive with the supplier's response pattern from the Contacts file.
Nothing waits silently anymore. You know within a week which suppliers answer and which need routing around.
An AI teammate sorts the overnight inbox each morning, answers the routine messages, and flags the few that need you.
An AI teammate tracks every vendor contract date and flags what auto-renews before the charge lands, with time to cancel or renegotiate..
An AI teammate deduplicates records, fills the gaps, and closes stale deals every Sunday night.