A 100-year-old steel manufacturer now runs one of the most advanced revenue operations in industrial materials: every RFQ quoted in hours, every account worked every week, and a commercial motion that scales without headcount and never walks out the door.

Challenge

The problem every industrial materials company knows: the revenue motion doesn't scale, and it lives in reps' heads

PTC was living the reality of nearly every manufacturer, distributor, and service center in industrial materials: there is more revenue work than any team of reps can physically get to, and the gap doesn't close by working harder. It's structural. One rep can only parse so many specs, pull so much history, write so many quotes, and remember so many accounts in a day. Everything beyond that ceiling is revenue lost, silently, every single day.

Every rep's day was a triage exercise. Inbound RFQs from service centers, OEMs, and equipment manufacturers landed across individual inboxes, shared mailboxes, and web forms. No single queue, no ownership logic, no way for leadership to see what came in versus what actually got quoted. Reps worked what was in front of them and what was loudest, and the rest quietly died. At PTC, that meant roughly a third of every inquiry (real, purchase-ready demand from buyers who came to them) falling through the cracks. RFQ coverage sat around 65%, and nobody could say precisely which 35% was being lost, or to whom.

The work that did get done was slow, because selling industrial materials is manual at every step, and it's manual for a reason. These are deeply complex products: technical specs, grades, tolerances, processing requirements, and genuine mathematical decisions in how material is priced, processed, and gets into a customer's hands. This is exactly why the industry was never able to automate its revenue motion before. Generic software can't read a spec, and generic AI can't reason about grades, tolerances, and processing. Quoting a single inquiry meant parsing specs from unstructured emails and attachments, cross-referencing the ERP for historical pricing and shipment records, checking inventory and production availability, and drafting from scratch: 30 to 60 minutes per RFQ under ideal conditions. A missing dimension, a non-standard alloy, or a spec buried in a PDF pushed turnaround from hours into days. In a market where the first credible quote sets the anchor, PTC was routinely responding after a competitor had already priced the business. Speed wasn't a nice-to-have. It was the difference between winning and never being in the conversation.

And because reps couldn't do everything, the motions that actually grow a book — winning back dormant accounts, prospecting net new logos, mining the active base for cross-sell — got whatever bandwidth was left over, which was none. Win-back outreach went out a few times a quarter, if that. Net new prospecting spiked after a slow month and vanished when inbound picked up. Whitespace analysis meant weeks of manual ERP exports nobody had time to run. Growth was capped not by demand, but by rep hours. And the only lever anyone had was hiring more reps into the same broken workflow, at six figures a seat and six months to ramp.

Then there's the risk every commercial leader in this industry carries: attrition. The entire motion lived in reps' heads. Which accounts to call, what a customer paid last time, which specs they run, which relationships were warming up. When a rep left, the pipeline they were carrying, the dormant accounts only they remembered, and years of pricing instinct walked out the door with them. Every departure meant lost revenue, a cold-start ramp for the replacement, and customers who suddenly felt forgotten. In an industry where the average rep tenure keeps shrinking and the most experienced sellers are retiring out, this isn't an edge case. It's a countdown.

Leadership, meanwhile, was flying on instinct: pipeline visibility depended on rep memory and pulled reports, with no real-time view of what was coming in, converting, or slipping away.

PTC needed to unify all of it into one system, one that scales without headcount and doesn't walk out the door:

1.  An inbound agent that captures and converts 100% of demand. Every RFQ, from every channel, parsed and quoted fast enough to be first, without hiring a second inside sales team.

2. Autonomous outbound that runs regardless of inbound volume. Dormant accounts nurtured on a reliable cadence and a steady daily supply of qualified net new prospects sequenced into personalized outreach, independent of rep bandwidth.

3. One data foundation behind every commercial decision. Quotes and expansion plays grounded in real ERP shipment history — institutional knowledge that belongs to the company, not to whoever happens to be in the seat — with leadership seeing the full revenue picture in real time.

"We knew we were leaving revenue on the table on the inbound side. And on top of that, nothing out there gave us an autonomous way to find, sequence, and close net new revenue at scale."

Reggie Delk, PhD
Chief Information Officer, PTC

Solution

One revenue engine, grounded in a century of PTC's actual shipment data

PTC deployed Emanate to unify its inbound and outbound motions into a single system: an inbound agent working every RFQ, autonomous outbound working every account, and one shared data foundation underneath both.

What makes this possible, and what no generic tool has been able to do, is that Emanate's agents actually execute inside the full complexity of the domain. Steel is not a SaaS sale. The products are deeply complex: technical specs, grades, processing requirements, and genuine mathematical decisions in how materials are priced, processed, and delivered into a customer's hands. Emanate's agents were built to operate at that level — reading the spec the way a veteran inside seller would, grounding every draft in real shipment history, reasoning about processing and availability — and then doing it on every RFQ and every account, every day. For the first time, PTC's revenue capacity is not a function of how many reps are in seats. The manual ceiling is gone.

Emanate's forward-deployed team integrated directly with PTC's Oracle environment during onboarding, so from day one every quote, every outreach, and every signal tied back to real shipment and order history. Decades of institutional knowledge, activated instead of archived. Not generic AI guesses. PTC's own data, working PTC's own book.

Convert. Inbound RFQs are parsed automatically across every channel. Specs are extracted, matched against PTC's catalog and historical orders, and surfaced to reps with a draft quote grounded in real shipment and pricing history. What used to take 30–60 minutes of digging now takes a few minutes of review, and RFQ coverage climbed from ~65% to 95%+ in the first quarter.

Convert: the inbound agent that never misses purchase-ready demand

Inbound RFQs are parsed automatically across every channel (individual inboxes, shared mailboxes, web submissions) the moment they arrive. Emanate extracts the specs — grades, dimensions, quantities, tolerances, delivery requirements, including the highly technical specifications PTC's tube and bar products are known for — then matches them against PTC's catalog and historical orders, checks inventory and production availability, and surfaces a draft quote grounded in what PTC has actually shipped to that customer, or similar customers, before.

This is agent-level execution, not workflow automation: the same technical and mathematical work a veteran seller does, from interpreting the spec and matching the grade to reasoning through processing requirements and pulling the relevant history, performed on every single inquiry at machine speed. What used to take 30–60 minutes of digging per RFQ now takes a few minutes of review and judgment. Non-standard specs that used to stall for days get flagged with the closest historical matches attached, so reps start from context instead of a blank page. Quote turnaround dropped from 2–3 days to under 2 hours, and RFQ coverage climbed from ~65% to 95%+ within the first quarter.

Think about what that coverage jump alone means: a third of PTC's inbound demand, buyers with a spec in hand and ready to purchase, went from silently dying in inboxes to getting a fast, historically grounded quote. That's not incremental efficiency. That's an entire tranche of revenue that existed all along, switched back on. And because PTC is now usually first to respond instead of second or third, it's competing for every deal from the anchor position.

Cultivate: the growth motions that never used to happen, now happen every day

Before Emanate, win-back was a quarterly scramble. Now every dormant account in PTC's book is enrolled in an automated nurture motion: 100% coverage, on a weekly cadence, with zero rep effort. Outreach is personalized from each account's actual purchase history, from what they used to buy to when they went quiet to what PTC can offer them now. When a dormant account re-engages, it's routed straight to a rep with full historical context attached. Customers PTC hadn't spoken to in years now hear from PTC every week, without a single rep hour spent.

The same engine powers the net new motion. Emanate identifies ICP-matched prospects — the service centers, OEMs, and equipment manufacturers across automotive, agriculture, construction, and energy that look like PTC's best customers — then enriches them and delivers 50+ qualified leads to reps every day, pre-sequenced into personalized multi-touch outreach. Prospecting went from an ad hoc scramble to a steady, reliable input at the top of the funnel, running at full volume even in the weeks when inbound is heaviest.

This is the part that changes the growth math. Win-back and net new used to be the first things sacrificed when reps got busy, meaning they ran least when the pipeline needed them most. Now they're decoupled from rep bandwidth entirely. Net new revenue stopped being hostage to whoever had a free afternoon.

Expand: whitespace surfaced account-by-account

Emanate continuously analyzes shipment patterns against PTC's full product line and surfaces cross-sell and upsell opportunities for every active account: the account buying tubing but not bar, the customer whose volumes suggest a product line they're sourcing elsewhere. Whitespace that previously took weeks of manual ERP exports to find is now surfaced automatically and turned into concrete expansion plays reps can act on. The cheapest revenue in the book, customers who already buy from PTC buying more, went from an occasional analysis project to a systematic motion.

Power: institutional knowledge that compounds instead of evaporating

Because inbound and outbound now run through one system, win/loss patterns, account health, and shipment history are no longer trapped in spreadsheets and rep memory. Leadership sees the full revenue picture in real time, with inbound volume, coverage, conversion, nurture activity, and expansion signals in one place. Reps walk into every conversation with historical intelligence behind them: what this customer has ordered before, which specs they run, where PTC has won and lost. Decisions that used to run on instinct now run on data.

And critically, every quote, every interaction, and every signal now makes the system smarter. The knowledge that used to leave with a departing rep is captured, structured, and working for whoever sits in the seat next. PTC's commercial intelligence compounds now. It used to depreciate.

Outcome

Revenue capacity decoupled from headcount, for the first time in 100 years

Within the first quarter, PTC consolidated what had been fragmented, bandwidth-dependent workflows into a single revenue engine. RFQ coverage rose from ~65% to 95%+, quote turnaround fell from 2–3 days to under 2 hours, and the team reclaimed roughly 400 hours per month — the equivalent of adding multiple full-time commercial hires, without adding one — now spent on customer relationships and the complex deals that genuinely need a human.

The motions that grow the book stopped depending on spare bandwidth. Every dormant account is nurtured weekly. Fifty-plus qualified net new prospects flow to reps daily, sequenced and personalized. Expansion whitespace is surfaced systematically across the active book. The combined effect: a meaningfully larger and more predictable pipeline across win-back, net new, and expansion, visible to leadership in real time for the first time, and no longer dependent on who happens to be in the seat.

That last point is the game-changer. PTC's revenue motion used to be constrained by two things every industrial materials company knows intimately: rep hours and rep memory. Emanate removed both constraints at once. The result isn't a faster version of the old workflow. It's a commercial operation with a structurally higher ceiling, running on a data asset that compounds instead of walking out the door.

Looking forward

With inbound fully covered and outbound running autonomously, PTC is extending Emanate deeper into the commercial workflow, from sequenced outreach into new verticals to expansion plays across more of the active book. A company that has manufactured to unmatched technical specifications for a century now sells with the same precision it builds with. Emanate's forward-deployed team continues to work directly with PTC's reps and leadership, turning frontline feedback into new plays.

About PTC Alliance

PTC is a leading manufacturer and marketer of steel tubing, pipe, and bar products for the agriculture, automotive, construction, recreation, and energy industries. Founded in 1924, PTC has established itself as a prominent competitor in the steel industry, manufacturing to highly technical specifications that are unmatched in the steel tube and plated bar industries. The Company's products are critical components in many high-end industrial applications, serving major markets including steel service centers, automotive, truck, construction and agricultural equipment, machinery, and appliances. PTC is headquartered in Wexford, Pennsylvania and employs approximately 1,000 people across eight manufacturing facilities in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, and Indiana.

Founded: 1924
Headquarters: Wexford, Pennsylvania