The inside-sales labour shortage: what distributors can do now

What does the vacancy data actually say?

The Institut de la statistique du Québec (ISQ) counted about 123,800 vacant positions in Québec in the second quarter of 2025, with a vacancy rate of 3.1%, down from 3.5% a year earlier. Manufacturing alone had about 13,300 vacant positions.

The trend is easing, which is good news. But easing is not the same as easy. Vacancies fell by a little over 15,600 year over year, about 11%, and the remaining openings are often for roles that take months to fill and longer to train. An inside sales rep who knows your catalog, your customers and your ERP is not someone you replace in a week.

Source: Institut de la statistique du Québec, job vacancies, second quarter 2025.

Why is inside sales hit so hard?

Inside sales in industrial distribution is a skilled job disguised as an administrative one. A good rep reads a vague RFQ, knows which part the customer really means, remembers that account's special pricing and spots when a lead time will not work. That knowledge takes years to build.

At the same time, a large share of the day goes to work that does not need that knowledge: copying part numbers from an email into the ERP, looking up an order to answer ‘has it shipped?’, attaching the same SDS for the tenth time this month, and remembering to chase open quotes. When a rep leaves, the team absorbs all of it, and response times slip.

The cost shows up in places that are easy to miss. Quotes go out the next morning instead of the same afternoon, follow-ups stop happening, and senior reps spend their evenings catching up instead of training the newer ones. Customers rarely complain about any of this. They simply send the next RFQ to the supplier who answered first, and you only notice months later when an account has gone quiet.

Where does inside-sales time actually go?

Before you hire or buy anything, measure. For two weeks, ask each rep to tally the requests they handle by type. Most teams find that a handful of repetitive categories eat most of the day.

• RFQ drafting: reading the request, matching each line to the price sheet, applying quantity breaks and customer pricing, building the PDF.
• Order status: finding the order, checking the carrier, replying with tracking.
• Document requests: spec sheets, SDS, certificates of analysis, RoHS, REACH and ISO certificates.
• Quote follow-up: remembering which quotes are open and writing a polite note.
• Exceptions: unclear specs, substitutions, credit holds, urgent orders. This is where your reps are irreplaceable.

Worked example: how much capacity is hiding in drafting?

This is an illustrative example with round numbers. Picture a team of 4 inside sales reps working 8-hour days, for 32 rep-hours a day. Together they draft 60 quotes a day, and each one takes about 20 minutes to build from scratch.

That is 60 × 20 = 1,200 minutes, or 20 hours a day, spent drafting: well over half the team's time. If a draft were prepared automatically and a rep only needed about 5 minutes to review and approve it, drafting would take 60 × 5 = 300 minutes, or 5 hours.

The difference is 15 hours a day, close to two full-time reps' worth of capacity (15 ÷ 8 = 1.875), without hiring anyone. Your figures will be different, which is why measuring first matters. You can test your own numbers with the ROI calculator.

What can distributors do now?

None of these steps requires a big project. Most of them make your team better whether or not you ever automate anything.

1. Measure for two weeks: count requests by type and estimate minutes per request.
2. Clean up your price sheet: one current file with part numbers, descriptions, quantity breaks, customer-specific pricing and lead times. Excel or CSV is fine.
3. Standardize replies: a quote template, a follow-up cadence and a short library of approved answers.
4. Automate the repetitive drafting with a person approving every reply, starting with one workflow such as RFQs.
5. Cross-train a second person on each key account so one departure does not stall a customer.
6. Hire for judgment: when you do recruit, look for product knowledge and customer sense rather than typing speed.

Does automation replace inside sales reps?

It should not, and with Merlin it cannot. Merlin drafts quotes, order status replies, document sends and follow-ups, and a human rep approves every one before it goes out. Prices and totals are calculated in code from your own price sheet, and anything unclear is flagged for a rep rather than guessed.

Think of it as giving your existing reps an assistant that does the first draft, so they can spend their day on the exceptions and the relationships. For a side-by-side view, see Merlin vs. hiring an inside sales rep. The Order Status desk covers the ‘where's my order?’ emails, and Québec SMEs adopting AI may be eligible for programs described in our Québec AI funding guide.