The pitch is always structured the same way. Something impressive happens on a screen, and then a number is attached to it that has no connection to your business. Ten times faster. Eighty per cent reduction. The figure is real, in the sense that it happened once, somewhere, under conditions nobody will describe.
You are not equipped to assess the technology, and you do not need to be. You are extremely well equipped to assess whether something changes your week.
One: does it make money?
Not "could it". Does it put you in front of more people who might buy, get more of them answered, get more quotes out, or get more of those quotes accepted?
The honest version of this answer names a specific step. "Enquiries that arrive after six in the evening currently get a reply the next morning, and this would reply in four minutes." That is checkable. "Increases conversion" is not an answer, it is a category.
Two: does it save time?
The test is the same output with fewer of your hours inside it. Watch for the version where the hours move rather than disappear — a tool that saves two hours of typing and adds ninety minutes of checking its work has saved you thirty minutes, and you should price it accordingly.
Ask what happens when it is unsure. Anything that handles volume will eventually meet a case it cannot resolve. A system that flags those and sets them aside is saving you time. A system that guesses is creating a slower, worse kind of work: the kind where you have to check everything, because you cannot tell which ones it invented.
Three: does it make the work better?
Better as judged by a customer, not by you. Fewer things falling through. Faster answers. A quote that arrives while they still care. If the only person who would notice the improvement is the person who bought the software, the improvement is internal comfort, which is worth something but rarely worth a monthly fee.
If a tool improves none of those three, it is a toy, and the email can go in the bin.
What the filter does not answer
Those three questions are yours, and they work without anybody's help. They will clear most of your inbox.
The part they do not settle is the ordering. Most businesses have four or five jobs that would pass all three tests, and they are not equally worth doing — one of them is quietly capping how much work you can take on, and the others are merely annoying. Picking correctly between them is worth more than the build itself, and it is the reason the first step we offer is a measurement rather than a proposal.