Qualify every request that arrives by email
before it enters your CRM, Odoo for instance.

01The task, as it is done today

Take an installation company between Bastogne and Wiltz, twelve people, its clients and quotes in Odoo for the past two years. On Monday morning, the manager opens his inbox: some forty messages since Friday. Suppliers, two job applications, a follow-up from an unhappy client, a sales pitch, and somewhere in the middle, a request for a price on three sites, with the details in an attached spreadsheet.

The request is not lost. It is buried.

When he finds it, on Wednesday, he forwards it to his assistant. She creates a record in Odoo, copies the name and address, sums up the request without opening the spreadsheet, and does not see that the same company already has an open deal with a colleague. The prospect, meanwhile, has received two other replies. Odoo’s dedicated address does not settle this on its own. You can forward the manager’s whole inbox to it, but it will make a lead of every supplier, every applicant and every sales pitch: the address itself does not sort.

02Can AI sort and qualify my prospects’ requests?

AI reads each request, attachments included, compares it with your criteria and prepares the record and the reply, but it does not decide who is a good client, and it never writes to the prospect.

Your CRM already does part of this, and I would rather say so. Odoo creates a lead, or an opportunity depending on your settings, for every email sent to your sales team’s address, with the subject as its title and the message in its history, and it flags similar leads. Its version 20, unveiled this week, announces agents that can create and complete records, triggered by an automation; its price list places them in the Custom plan and, like all its features of this kind, they are now paid for in credits. I have not yet tried them on a real inbox. If all your requests already arrive at that address, part of the circuit below could run inside Odoo, and I will not sell it back to you.

What the circuit adds comes down to four things: sorting what arrives before turning it into records, recognising a client already followed or in dispute before answering them cheerfully, preparing a reply in your voice, and letting nothing go out until a person has reviewed it. The full circuit has twenty-four stations. Five places hand control back to a person, and a model is involved in six of the twenty-four.

03From the inbox to an approved record

Eight zones, and a last node where no reply goes out until someone has reviewed it. Click a zone to open its stations; without a click, the sequence plays on its own.

04The twenty-four stations, and who does what

The circuit unfolded, station by station, with those who hold each one. Qualifying takes up only one zone, the sixth, and everything before it is there so that it bears on the right request and the right client.

05What the AI does, and what it never does

Six stations out of twenty-four. The model sorts each message into a category, extracts the request in a fixed form, reads the attachments, drafts the questions, proposes a verdict with its reason, and prepares the record and the reply. That is the reading and writing, and here it weighs more than elsewhere: an inbox is text.

Three rules it never breaks, whatever the message. It invents nothing that is not in the message: a quantity it has not read becomes a question, not a value. It promises neither price nor lead time: qualifying stops where the quote begins. It writes to nobody: the record waits as a lead to qualify, and the reply goes out under the assigned person’s name.

What it sees is limited too. Only the inboxes you chose are read, and a filter sets aside internal messages, known suppliers and notifications before they reach it. Make, for its part, sees every message from those inboxes go by, and is set to keep none of them in its execution history; working copies are deleted at the agreed time. A client’s history is never sent to it: the circuit reads it in your CRM, and the model only receives the conclusion, “existing client, followed by Paul, dispute open”.

For the rest, the circuit connects to what you use: your email, Microsoft 365 or another, your form, your CRM, Odoo, HubSpot, Pipedrive or Zoho, and those I do not name in the same way. I prefer to work with Claude, which Odoo’s built-in AI does not offer among its models, but if your company has already chosen another model, the circuit adapts, and Zapier or n8n can take Make’s place. Before you start, two limits. With an Odoo subscription, the circuit needs the Custom plan: it is the only one that opens the external API, the door through which an outside tool reads and writes your data, and without it the circuit can neither search Odoo nor create the record there. Odoo Community, self-hosted, does not have this limit. And a badly scanned attachment reads badly: what cannot be read is flagged, never guessed.

Installing and configuring Odoo itself is a job for an integrator, and it is not mine. In Luxembourg, I recommend Optitoo.

06What cannot be bought, and what holds everything together

Three pieces that describe your business, and that no subscription delivers. Your qualification criteria: what you sell, to whom, from what size, in which area, and what you turn down. The assignment: which request goes to whom, by area, product or language, and what goes to the manager in person. And your standard replies, with their voice: the acknowledgement, the request for details, the polite redirection of a request that is not for you.

This is where sorting and qualifying part ways. “A company of more than ten people, in the Belgian province of Luxembourg or the Grand Duchy, for a new installation” is a criterion: you know who it applies to, you know how to correct it. “An interesting prospect” is not: nobody can say what it means, and the model will fill it with whatever seems plausible.

One piece remains that no tool will give you: the request you do not answer cheerfully. The client in dispute, the invoice unpaid for six months, the prospect a colleague already follows. It shows up on no dashboard, and it is what prevents the reply that does more harm than silence. Qualifying starts with knowing who is writing.

07What can go wrong

Four failures. One comes from the sorting, one from the recognition, one from the person reviewing, one from time passing.

A real request filed as a sales pitch. The message opens like an advertisement, the real need is in the third sentence, and the sorting gets it wrong. That is why what is not a request stays in its inbox, labelled, instead of disappearing, and why doubt goes to a person rather than to the bin.

An existing client taken for a stranger. They write from a personal address, or from a subsidiary with a different name, and the search does not find them. The record is created twice, and two people call them back. Searching by domain and by VAT number catches some of it, the duplicate check some more, and the review the rest.

Approval becomes a reflex. After three weeks of correct records, people approve without reading, and one day a reply goes out with a question that had no reason to be there. That one is about people, and no check erases it. What limits it: the record arrives with the doubtful items first, the missing items, the “to review” verdict and the reason for the sorting.

The criteria age. The offer changes, an area opens, a product is dropped, and the circuit keeps qualifying with last year’s rules. That is maintenance, not an accident: the gap between what the circuit proposes and what is approved shows it, and the criteria are reread when the offer changes.

08How long it takes, and what it costs

No timings here, and that is deliberate. What drives the work is not the scenario but the state of your inbox and your CRM: one general address or ten personal inboxes, tidy contacts or duplicates everywhere, an Odoo plan that opens the API or not. Your inbox would tell me, and I have not seen it. The audit gives the time, and the price that goes with it: it costs nothing, because without it I would be quoting blind.

We begin with one inbox and your three or four categories, and add nothing until it holds. Your questions on data, cost and timing are answered in the frequently asked questions, and my background is on my page. The circuit has its own running costs too, Make operations and model calls, and the audit prices them with the rest.