[wlesieutre]

Very loose relationship, don't repeatedly contact the same groups of external people over time. We manufacture and sell physical products, and customers ask us questions about them. Sometimes directly, sometimes via their contact at one of fifty-ish local rep agencies depending on where they're located.

Frequently email threads have an assortment of people from 3-4 different companies on them, the specific set of which I will never talk to again outside of that inquiry.

On the rep agency side, they might each represent 50-100 different manufacturers and I'm sure are not eager to have a different ticketing system or chat app channel for contacting each one of them.