Total Control Pro is a UK manufacturing business operating under the DynamxMFG brand. Like most manufacturers of their size, they had a sales process that was almost entirely manual - a member of the team would spend hours each week researching prospects, checking whether they were the right fit, and then writing personalised outreach emails from scratch. It was slow, inconsistent, and nobody particularly enjoyed doing it.
When we first spoke, the owner was not looking for AI in the abstract. He had a very specific problem: the pipeline was not being worked consistently because the research and writing work was too time-consuming to do properly. The team would do a burst of outreach, get busy with delivery, and then the pipeline would go quiet for weeks.
"The pipeline was not being worked consistently because the research and writing work was too time-consuming to do properly."
What we built
We built what I call a sales agent skill - a structured AI workflow that handles the research, qualification, and outreach writing for a list of target prospects. The team feeds in a list of company names or LinkedIn URLs, and the system does the rest.
Stage 01
Research and qualification
The first part of the workflow pulls publicly available information about each prospect - what they make, how large they are, what their recent news looks like, whether they have any obvious pain points that map to what Total Control Pro offers. It then scores each prospect against a qualification framework we built together: the right size, the right sector, the right signals. Anything that does not meet the threshold gets filtered out before anyone wastes time on it.
Stage 02
Personalised outreach drafting
For each qualified prospect, the system drafts a personalised outreach email. Not a template with a name swapped in - an actual email that references something specific about the company, connects it to a relevant capability, and sounds like it was written by a human who had done their homework. The team reviews each draft, makes any adjustments, and sends. The review takes a fraction of the time the original writing did.
Stage 03
Follow-up sequencing
The system also drafts follow-up messages for prospects who have not responded, varying the angle and the ask each time. This was the part of the process that had almost never happened before - the team simply did not have time to write thoughtful follow-ups on top of everything else. Now it happens automatically as part of the workflow.
The result
What previously took the best part of a working week - researching a batch of prospects, qualifying them, and writing personalised outreach - now takes a couple of hours. The team runs the workflow, reviews the output, makes any tweaks, and sends. The pipeline is being worked consistently for the first time, because the barrier to doing it has dropped from a day of grinding work to an afternoon of reviewing and approving.
The quality of the outreach has also improved. When you are writing twenty emails from scratch, the later ones are never as good as the first few. When you are reviewing and refining twenty AI-drafted emails, the standard is consistent throughout.
What this tells us about AI in manufacturing sales
The Total Control Pro project is a good illustration of something I see across manufacturing businesses of this size. The constraint is rarely capability - the team knows how to sell, they know their product, they know their market. The constraint is time. The research and writing work is not the highest-value thing a sales person can do, but it has to happen before the high-value conversations can take place.
AI does not replace the sales person. It removes the part of the job that was slowing them down. The human is still in the loop at every stage - reviewing the research, refining the drafts, making the final call on who to approach and how. The 10-80-10 rule applies here exactly as it does everywhere else: the first 10% is the human setting the context and the qualification criteria, the 80% is the AI doing the research and drafting, and the final 10% is the human reviewing and sending.
If your business has a sales process that involves significant research or writing work, there is almost certainly a version of this workflow that would work for you. The Discovery Workshop is a good place to start - ninety minutes to map your operation and identify where the highest-leverage opportunities are.
Damian
Founder, Rethinking Business · AI implementation for Northampton SMBs