Where your RFQs land — and how to keep them organised

The whole point of a Nodipe node is that inquiries are yours — but “yours” only helps if you can actually work the list. This guide explains where RFQs land, how to keep them organised as they grow, and what to do about the noise that comes with being findable.

Where inquiries land

A buyer who submits an RFQ on your site triggers two deliveries, by design:

• Your node dashboard — a running list of every inquiry, newest first, with the buyer’s message, contact details and the product page they were looking at.
• Your private mailbox — a copy sent to the address you designate at onboarding, so inquiries reach you even when you’re not looking at the dashboard.

The dashboard is your archive of record; the mailbox is your always-on notification. Nothing about either route routes through Nodipe’s revenue — there is no lead-scoring queue, no pay-to-reveal step sitting between a buyer’s address and your reply, and no party between the buyer’s question and your answer.

Reading and tagging inquiries

As the list grows, three habits keep it usable:

• Read the product context, not just the text. An RFQ that names a specific product page tells you what the buyer saw, which is often more informative than the message itself. The dashboard keeps the page attached so you can judge fit fast.
• Tag by stage and source. Mark an RFQ as new, quoted, won or lost — and, if useful, by channel (website, referral, directory) — so a list of a few hundred stays filterable instead of becoming a wall.
• Close the loop on dead ends. An RFQ you never reply to is worse than none — it tells the buyer you don’t read your own channel. A fast “not a fit, but thank you” preserves the relationship and keeps your reply rate honest.

None of this requires discipline imposed from outside; the value is that a clean list is yours to use. When a marketplace gives you leads, it has a reason to keep them opaque. Here, the reason to keep them organised is your own follow-up.

Exporting and archiving

Your inquiry history is part of your node’s data, and it leaves the same way everything else does:

• Inquiries are included in the one-click export in list form — one row per RFQ with message, contact and page context.
• If your accounting or CRM needs a spreadsheet, the list-style export is available as CSV; tell us at onboarding which system you’ll feed, and we’ll shape the columns to match.
• Archive a copy at least quarterly. An RFQ from eighteen months ago is occasionally the exact record you need for a repeat order, a warranty question or a dispute — and it only exists if you kept it.

Spam hygiene for an open channel

Being findable means being findable — some of what arrives will be noise, and that’s the price of a channel buyers can actually use. Keep it tolerable with defaults rather than vigilance:

• Prefer structure over volume. A short inquiry form with a product page attached filters more noise than a bare “email us” link, because casual spam rarely bothers to pick a product.
• Never publish a raw address as your main contact. Your designated mailbox is for Nodipe-sent copies; keeping the address itself off the public page keeps it out of address harvesters.
• Reply fast or mark clearly. For genuine RFQs, no single action moves an opportunity forward like a fast first reply. For obvious noise, a one-line “not a fit” closes it without a debate.
• When in doubt, archive rather than delete. Storage is cheap and a mislabelled RFQ is expensive. A quarterly archive is a better default than a weekly purge.

Connecting to your CRM or sales process

This is where honesty matters. Nodipe’s dashboard is designed to be your working list, and the CSV export gets your inquiries into a spreadsheet or import tool today. For deeper integrations — pushing inquiries live into a specific CRM, or syncing reply status both ways — the mechanism can vary by your stack and by where Nodipe’s integration surface is at the moment.

The right move is to ask the founding team what the current integration options are before you design a workflow around one. If a live CRM sync is available for your setup, we’ll tell you exactly how to wire it. If it isn’t, we’ll tell you that too — and the CSV path still gets every inquiry into your process in a couple of steps.

The guarantee that never changes is the data itself. However you choose to work the list, every inquiry is exportable, yours, and free of a middleman’s claim on the relationship.