Lingemann — a two-way quoting desk

The challenge

A technical-products distributor lives in its inbox. Every deal is an email chain — a customer asks for a price, you ask your suppliers, quotes come back, you answer the customer — multiplied across dozens of salespeople, buyers, branches and key accounts. When all of that lives in scattered email inboxes, quotes are slow, threads get lost, and no one can see who is handling what.

What we built

We turned Podio into Lingemann’s email client and quoting platform at the same time. Around 50 workspaces — one per salesperson, per key customer, per branch (Brașov, Arad, Baia Mare) and per function (sales, purchasing, orders, tenders) — each wired to a real email address. Email arrives in Podio and is sent from Podio, and the inbox item is the quote: the whole request-for-quote process runs on top of the mailbox.

How it works

• Email, both ways, inside Podio. A custom email gateway syncs each shared mailbox into Podio — subject, body, attachments, CC — and replies, forwards and new messages are composed and sent straight from the item. Staff never leave Podio.
• Every email is a ticket. Each message carries a status (unread → in progress → waiting → closed), an owner — the first person to touch it owns it — a type, and the sender’s company and contact attached automatically.
• Inbound request → outbound inquiry, one thread. A customer’s request for a quote is linked to every supplier inquiry it spawns — sent from Podio with one click, including “ask every supplier in this category.”
• Nothing goes cold. Reminders nudge the rep at 24h if the offer hasn’t gone out, and chase suppliers directly — in Romanian, English, German or French — when they haven’t replied. Stale threads close on a schedule, and accidental mass-closes are automatically undone.
• Clean win/loss data. A quote can’t be closed without a value, or — if lost — a reason, so the numbers stay honest. First-reply and resolution times are measured against real office hours and bucketed into 24h / 48h / longer.
• Routing across the company. An entire conversation — every message and attachment — can be moved to another desk (sales ↔ purchasing ↔ a branch ↔ a customer inbox), with the original closed and cross-linked so the trail is never lost.

By the numbers

• 354,000+ emails and offers archived in the main sales inbox alone.
• ~50 email-integrated workspaces across people, key customers, branches and functions.
• ~50 custom automations powering the email sync, routing, follow-ups and RFQ lifecycle.
• 4 languages (RO / EN / DE / FR) for the automated supplier follow-ups.

The result

Lingemann’s entire commercial conversation — sales and purchasing alike — happens inside Podio. Every email is owned, every quote is tracked from the customer’s request to the supplier’s reply, follow-ups send themselves, and management can see how fast each desk responds. The inbox stopped being a black hole and became the system of record.