Guides / For Shops

Judging a Lead Before You Pay for It: The Preview Test

April 9, 2026

If you are paying per request rather than per order, the preview is the product. It has to tell you whether the part fits your wheels, your envelope and your schedule, without telling you who the buyer is.

Here is what a preview should contain, and what a thin one is hiding.

The nine fields that matter

1. Part type and a one line description. “Insulator ring, one lapped face” tells you more than “custom ceramic component”.
2. Grade, with purity or designation. Alumina 99.5%, not ceramic.
3. Size envelope. Enough to check it fits your machines and your fixtures.
4. Quantity, and whether it repeats. A 40 piece order that repeats twice a year is a different decision from a one off.
5. Tightest tolerance and any flatness or finish callout. The single best predictor of whether the part is yours.
6. Route. Ground from a sintered blank, green machined and fired, or undecided. If the sender does not know, they have not read the part.
7. Region preference. Buyers often have one, and quoting into a region you cannot serve is wasted effort.
8. Date needed. A date tells you whether your queue is even relevant.
9. Price of the lead, before you decide. Not after.

If those nine are present you can make a real decision in under a minute. That is the test.

Warning signs in a preview

• No tolerance information. The most common gap, and the one that turns a promising part into an unquotable one
• “Various” or “TBC” in the grade field. It means nobody qualified the request
• No quantity or no date. Usually an exploratory enquiry dressed as an RFQ
• A preview that is really an advert. Long on industry, short on the part
• No stated limit on how many shops receive it. If it goes to ten, your quote is a lottery ticket
• The price appears only after you commit. That is a subscription, not a lead

What the sender should have done before you see it

A request that reaches you should already have been read by someone who knows the material. That means the obvious questions were asked of the buyer first: which features are ground, what the part does, what the annual volume is, whether the grade is fixed. The nine problems that make an RFQ unquotable are listed in what buyers get wrong in ceramic RFQs.

If those answers are missing from the preview, the qualification did not happen and you are paying for a forwarded email.

What we do, stated plainly

Our previews carry all nine fields, the buyer identity is hidden until you take the request, the price is on the preview, and no RFQ goes to more than three shops. When a lead turns out not to match its preview, we credit it.

We are not neutral about our own product, so treat that paragraph as a claim to test rather than a fact to accept. Take one request, check it against the nine fields above and decide from the result. That is the same standard we ask buyers to apply to the shops we match them with, described in how to qualify a ceramic machining shop.

Register your shop and see a real preview. We reply within 24 business hours.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

• Six Channels That Bring Ceramic Grinding Work, Ranked by Effort
• The Four Lines Shops Underestimate When They Quote Ceramic