What an Engineer Checks on Your Website Before Sending an RFQ

Most RFQs are won or lost before anyone at your shop knows the buyer exists. An engineer with a new part, or a buyer told to find a second source, opens a browser, looks at five or six suppliers, and quietly narrows the list. By the time a drawing lands in your estimator’s inbox, you’ve already passed a test you never saw.

I spent 20 years on the sales and supply chain side of industrial companies, quoting complex work and qualifying suppliers. The pattern is consistent. Buyers don’t read your website for inspiration. They read it to answer a short list of questions, and they leave the moment the answers get vague. Here’s that list, in roughly the order they check it.

1. Can you actually make this part?

The first pass is capability, and it’s specific. An engineer wants to see processes, materials, size envelopes, tolerances, and the equipment behind them. “Full-service manufacturing” tells them nothing. “Welded steel and aluminum assemblies up to 12 feet, finished in house, in runs of 50 to 5,000” tells them whether to keep reading.

If your capabilities live in a PDF from 2019 or a bulleted list of adjectives, you’re asking the buyer to call and find out. Most won’t. They’ll move to the supplier who answered the question on the page.

What to fix first: one page per core process, each with materials, sizes, tolerances, secondary operations, and a photo of real parts (with customer names removed). An equipment list helps more than most shops expect.

2. Will you pass our supplier qualification?

Purchasing checks a different box than engineering. They want to know whether qualifying you will be painless or a six-month project. That means certifications (ISO 9001, AS9100, IATF 16949, ITAR registration where it applies), inspection capability, and whether you can support PPAP or first-article inspection without being walked through it.

Put certificates where they can be found and downloaded, with expiration dates current. Name your inspection equipment. If you routinely deliver FAI reports or PPAP packages, say so plainly. Those two lines save a buyer a phone call, and they signal that you’ve done this before.

3. Have you done this for companies like us?

Industries served is not filler. A medical device buyer and a heavy equipment buyer are looking for different signals, and both want to know you understand their world. You don’t have to name customers. You do have to show the kind of work.

Short case stories work well here: the part, the challenge (a tight tolerance, a material change, an impossible lead time), what you did, and the result. Three of those will do more than a wall of logos you’re not allowed to show anyway.

4. How long will it take, and can you scale?

Lead time and capacity questions come up early, especially for second-source searches, where the whole reason for the search is that the current supplier is late. Typical lead times for prototypes and production, whether you run lights-out or multiple shifts, and your comfortable volume range all belong on the site. Ranges are fine. Silence reads as risk.

5. How easy is it to ask for a quote?

This is where many good shops lose the RFQ they already earned. The buyer is convinced, clicks “Request a Quote,” and finds a general contact form with no way to attach a drawing. Or a form that asks for fifteen fields before it will accept a STEP file.

A good quote request page asks for what your estimators actually need: drawing and model upload, material, quantity, and target date. Everything else can wait for the follow-up. Tell buyers when they’ll hear back, and then keep that promise. A fast, specific reply is the first proof of how you’ll run their job.

6. Is anyone home?

Buyers notice the small signs of a company that has gone quiet: a news page last updated three years ago, a copyright date that never changed, a LinkedIn page with no posts. None of it proves you’re a bad supplier. All of it adds doubt at the exact moment they’re deciding who to trust with a part.

You don’t need to become a publisher. A steady rhythm of useful posts, like a new capability, a solved problem, or an answer to a question your estimators hear every week, shows the lights are on and gives search engines and AI tools something current to point to.

The AI shortlist is now part of this test

More buyers now start with a question typed into ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overview, something like “who makes custom steel assemblies near Atlanta.” Those tools build their answers from pages that state capabilities clearly and specifically. The same pages that help an engineer decide are the pages an AI tool can quote. Vague sites don’t get cited, which means they don’t make the shortlist at all.

Frequently Asked Questions

Should we publish tolerances if every job is different?

Yes, as typical capability ranges rather than guarantees. Buyers understand that tolerances depend on the part. What they need is enough detail to decide whether your shop belongs on the list.

We can’t name customers. How do we show experience?

Describe the work instead of the customer: the industry, the part type, the problem, and the outcome. Anonymized case stories and part photos with markings removed are standard, and buyers trust them.

Does this replace Thomasnet or our rep network?

No. Keep any channel that produces real quotes. Buyers who find you on a directory or through a rep still check your website before they send anything, so a strong site makes those channels work better too.

Where to start

Open your own website and pretend you’re an engineer with a drawing and a deadline. Can you tell within a minute what you make, how precisely, for which industries, under which certifications, and how to send a drawing? If any answer takes a phone call, that’s the page to fix first. If you’d like a second set of eyes, a free Engine Teardown walks through exactly this, including what AI tools say when a buyer asks for a supplier like you. It’s the same checklist we start with in our industrial marketing work.