Among tight margins, competitive timelines, and high-volume opportunities, managing the bid process can feel like a full-time job (or several!). But in commercial construction, success comes down to the bids you win. Or, more accurately, the systems and strategy behind your bidding that help you increase your bid rate.
Continue reading “How TopBuilder Helped Hatzel & Buehler Increase Their Bid Rate by 28%”
Speed and accuracy in quoting can make the difference between winning a construction project or losing it to the competition. Manual processes are slow and error-prone, increasing your odds of letting opportunities slip away.
If your team is still spending hours copying numbers from spreadsheets, double-checking prices, or conducting ad hoc follow-up on proposals, the reality is that you’re wasting valuable time that could be better spent elsewhere. Like on winning more bids.
And even when quotes go out the door, they may not look as professional as you hoped which can hurt your credibility with potential clients. Worse yet, they may lack the critical details project owners expect, like scope of work, job photos, specs, and standard agreements.
So, how do you close deals faster and make a stronger impression? With construction quoting software that automates the process, supports complete documentation, and produces polished, professional proposals every time.
Contractors historically relied on spreadsheets, email chains, and even pad-and-paper-level manual processes to create quotes. In fact, many contractors still do.
And while these methods may have worked in the past, they come with a number of downsides.
Quoting often involves pulling information from multiple sources including spreadsheets, emails, and even handwritten notes. And it can take hours (or days!) to gather all supply costs, estimate labor, and format proposals manually.
Compare that to using TopBuilder’s Construction CRM, that helps contractors quote five times faster!
A single pricing mistake, whether due to outdated data or a simple typo, can result in lost revenue, reduced profit margins, or even disputes down the line. And with manual quoting, there is added room for error compared to a system that automatically syncs with your estimating and accounting tools.
Even if the numbers are right, proposals can often fall short in presentation. Generic formats, missing details, or clunky attachments can give the impression of disorganization. Without the ability to include specs, photos, scope of work, or standard documents, quotes can feel incomplete and less compelling to potential clients. With TopBuilder, your team can send professional, branded proposals with all the relevant materials in one polished package.
Once a proposal is sent, tracking its status can be difficult. Did the client receive it? Have they reviewed it? When should you follow up?
Without a structured workflow, opportunities can slip through the cracks – and that means you may be missing out on deals simply because there wasn’t follow-up at the right time.
For many contractors, their quoting process exists in isolation from other business functions because there’s no way to integrate it. That means they’re manually re-entering data into their estimating software and accounting systems – wasting time and increasing the risk of misalignment. And that creates inefficiencies that can ripple across the business.
TopBuilder’s quoting capabilities are designed to eliminate all these challenges and more by automating, organizing, and integrating every step of the process. Here’s how.
Rather than building every quote from scratch, TopBuilder’s quoting software integrates with Excel and estimating tools to pull in pricing, materials, and labor costs instantly. This means you can:
Instead of spending hours formatting and compiling numbers, you can generate accurate, professional proposals with just a few clicks.
Automated quoting tools like TopBuilder help eliminate the risk of errors from outdated cost data or manual miscalculations by ensuring that:
A slow approval process can mean lost opportunities. Instead of waiting for clients to print, sign, and scan documents, TopBuilder provides:
Keeping track of quotes, revisions, and project details isn’t easy – especially when the information is all stored in different locations. TopBuilder centralizes everything so your team can:
Organizing all your proposal-related data in one place saves you time, reduces the risk of miscommunication, and makes team-wide collaboration easier.
Speed and accuracy in quoting are only part of the equation. To truly optimize your sales process, you need data and instant insights to understand which bids are working – and why.
That’s where ContractorBI™, TopBuilder’s suite of business intelligence dashboards, comes in. By integrating your quoting data with real-time bid performance tracking, you can:
With TopBuilder and ContractorBI™, you’re not just sending out quotes faster. You’re making smarter decisions that improve win rates, profitability, and long-term growth.
Speed and accuracy matter. Taking too long to create and send a quote means the client may move forward with a competitor before they even have the chance to review your proposal.
Contractors who use TopBuilder see immediate returns, including generating proposals 75% faster and seeing a 10% increase in deal closures – simply by optimizing how they create, send, and track proposals.
As one plumbing contractor who uses TopBuilder said, “We used to spend two weeks preparing a single bid. Now it takes two hours.”
See how TopBuilder can transform your quoting process and win more bids, faster. Connect with us today for a short demo!
Tracking construction sales performance isn’t just about closing more deals – it’s about winning the right projects and improving overall profitability. But without clear insights, specialty contractors risk chasing bad bids, misallocating resources, or failing to identify revenue leaks.
Without the right tools, those insights don’t come easily. Manually tracking bid performance, sales activity, and forecasting future work can be overwhelming – especially when that data is scattered across spreadsheets, emails, and other disconnected sources.
That’s where ContractorBI comes in. Designed specifically for construction sales and bid management, ContractorBI allows contractors to visualize sales and bid performance in real-time. Instead of relying on gut instinct or outdated information, contractors can make data-driven decisions that improve win rates and profitability.
Let’s explore the key sales metrics that every specialty contractor should be tracking – and how ContractorBI makes it easy to do so.
Winning projects is the goal – but how often are you landing the jobs you bid on? Your bid win rate tells you how successful you are at securing work and is an indicator of your business’ health. A low win rate can signal pricing issues, poor bid targeting, or an ineffective sales strategy. Likewise, a sudden drop in your win rate warrants further investigation.
With ContractorBI, you can track won/lost bids by job type, customer, estimator, industry, division/territory, bid source, project size, and sales rep, helping you refine your bidding strategy. Past performance isn’t a guarantee for future success, but it does give you important data that can be used to identify opportunities and make adjustments to improve success rates.
In a similar vein, your bid conversion rate measures the percentage of bids that turn into awarded jobs. A high conversion rate means that you’re focusing on the right winnable bids instead of wasting time on long shots.
ContractorBI allows you to monitor bid volume, awarded jobs, and lost opportunities all in one place so you can better pinpoint trends and better understand why some bids convert while others don’t.
If you notice that one general contractor consistently awards you projects at a 20% higher rate, for instance, that’s a strong indicator to prioritize working with them in the future.
Keeping your pipeline full is key to maintaining steady revenue. Track new leads, bids submitted, and awarded jobs to better anticipate future workload and prevent gaps in your schedule.
ContractorBI provides real-time visibility into your sales pipeline, so you can identify slow periods ahead of time and take proactive steps. If your revenue forecast shows a drop-off in the coming quarters, for example, you can start ramping up bidding efforts now to fill the gap.
Understanding why you lost a bid is just as important as knowing why you won one. Lost bid analysis helps you identify patterns and uncover the most significant factors that impact your success rate.
With ContractorBI, you can track the top reasons for lost bids – whether it’s due to pricing, competition, scope mismatch, or lack of follow-up. If you lost 30% of bids because of pricing, for instance, it may be time to re-evaluate your pricing strategy and identify any areas where costs can be reduced.
Not all projects are equal. Some will simply be more profitable than others for a range of reasons. Track profitability by job type and customer to focus your efforts on the most lucrative opportunities.
ContractorBI allows you to compare markup, profits, and revenue trends across different job types, customers, geographic areas, and markets. This insight can help you allocate your resources more effectively and guide your bidding decisions. If one type of customer consistently provides higher-margin projects, it may be worth investing more into that relationship instead of taking on lower-margin work elsewhere.
These five construction sales metrics matter, no matter how you track them. But when you rely on spreadsheets or manual tracking, you face having outdated and incomplete data to make decisions. Without real-time visibility, it’s much harder and more time-consuming to accurately predict future work, identify weak spots in your bidding process, or adjust your sales strategy to fluctuating market trends.
Success in construction sales isn’t just about bidding more—it’s about bidding smarter and tracking what actually works. With ContractorBI, you get the insights you need to make your data actionable.
Learn more about how ContractorBI can help your business grow by scheduling a conversation with us today.
Let’s face it: the process for contractor bidding can be overwhelming. It’s complex, time-consuming, and full of opportunities for things to go awry. From juggling deadlines to estimating costs, even the most experienced contractor can make mistakes. And in a competitive market, even a single misstep – like missing a deadline or submitting incomplete documentation – can mean losing out on a lucrative contract, saying nothing of sustaining long-term growth, securing steady work for you and your crews, and maintaining your reputation in the field.
Fortunately, many of these mistakes are avoidable. Here are the five most frequent bidding pitfalls, how they hurt your business, and – most importantly – how you can avoid them. Turn the bidding process from a stressor into a growth driver by recognizing and addressing potential bidding blunders early, transforming them into opportunities.
Chaos has casualties on all fronts. In searching for bids, you’ll waste time skimming different websites and disconnected systems, which usually means lost leads. Using multiple platforms also requires more manual data entry, which leads to an increased chance of data entry errors.
Nothing stifles a successful bid more than telling your potential client the price is $12,000 instead of the $1,200 that was on the bid you sent them. Mistakes like this can seriously damage your reputation. The lack of a centralized location to track bid invitations and submissions can have a significant impact on both the bidding process and your chances of success.
Incomplete documentation leads to a host of problems.
At the start of the process, submitting bids without the necessary supporting documents, like scope details or certifications, can lead to disqualification out of the gate. And, if you do make it through the start of the process, without proper documentation, you may be left guessing about some aspects of the project – leading to costly change orders, legal disputes, or safety risks.
For example, if you’re bidding on a project that involves electrical upgrades but don’t confirm the building’s current wiring capacity when submitting the bid, you might underestimate the complexity and cost of the work. This oversight could lead to unexpected delays or budget overruns.
With multiple bids and tight timelines, staying organized is a constant challenge. Poor tracking of submission dates or failing to complete a step in the bidding process can result in missed opportunities. The best-prepared and most competitive bid won’t matter if it’s late to the table.
A bid doesn’t always fail because of a typo or minor mistake – sometimes, the bid doesn’t fully address the bid requirements. Misinterpreting specifications or overlooking key details often results in inaccurate estimates or disqualified bids.
Take time to thoroughly review and address the project scope.
Bidding without evaluating past performance is like playing darts blindfolded. Without tracking what worked and what didn’t, you’re missing opportunities to improve. And this is where manual reports can be a problem.
Relying on spreadsheets or hand-written notes makes tracking a daunting task – time-consuming, error-prone, and lacking the real-time insights needed to refine your approach and drive better results.
These and other mistakes can have a major impact on your business and far-reaching consequences.
So, what can you do to avoid these problems? Let’s look at several strategies to help you manage bids more effectively and accurately:
Invest in a comprehensive system that consolidates bid opportunities, submissions, and statuses in one place. TopBuilder is construction software that gives you a 360-degree view of your business and integrates with your other tools, including Procore, Acumatica, Sage, and more.
Use automated workflows to track deadlines, assign tasks, and send follow-up reminders. With TopBuilder’s CRM, you’ll never miss a submission date.
Analyze bid data to refine estimates and avoid over-or under- bidding. ContractorBI’s benchmarking capabilities help you measure performance, analyze past trends and forecast more accurately.
Evaluate opportunities based on criteria like profitability and project fit. TopBuilder helps contractors focus on the bids most likely to succeed.
Track won/lost trends by job type, industry, estimator, and lead source to refine your strategy. ContractorBI offers in-depth bid performance dashboards for insights that allow you to refine your bidding strategy and improve outcomes.
The best business decisions don’t happen in a vacuum. They’re powered by accurate, actionable data and tools that empower smarter choices. That’s why contractors using advanced analytics are five times more likely to make faster decisions than their competitors and two times more likely to have top-quartile financial performance. Integrated dashboards eliminate the tedium of manually consolidating data, freeing up resources to focus on strategic efforts.
The right tech also means improved communication. TopBuilder ensures everyone on your team – from sales to project managers – aligns on bids and priorities. Leverage accurate revenue forecasting to combine bid data with historical job performance to predict workload and ensure a more balanced pipeline.
Bidding mistakes cost time and money, as well as opportunities to grow your business. By implementing best practices and leveraging tools like ContractorBI™, you can streamline your bid management, improve accuracy, and focus on winning the right projects.
Take control of your bidding process and secure more profitable contracts with the right tools for the job.
Most of us get dozens, if not hundreds of emails per day — and, if we’re honest, most of them are left unread. But if you are the one sending out marketing emails, the last place you want to be is in your recipient’s spam folder. So, how do you avoid that and improve email marketing for construction companies? Continue reading “Email Marketing for Construction Companies: Tips and Tricks of the Trade”
Whether you’re a small specialty construction business or a growing enterprise, developing an effective construction marketing strategy can feel overwhelming when you’re spending so much of your time managing bids and doing the work.
Fortunately, building a steady stream of clients within the construction industry is easier than you think.
Here are ten marketing strategies you can implement this quarter and continue to build upon. Continue reading “Level Up Your Construction Marketing Strategy: 10 Tips for Specialty Contractors”
Every specialty contractor (SC) wants to be the first choice on a general contractor’s (GC) bid list. It’s like an athlete aiming to be a top pick in a sports draft. Being a go-to subcontractor not only means you get more work, but it also puts your business in the spotlight. Continue reading “The Best Strategies for Securing the #1 Spot on a General Contractor’s Bid List”
Managing expectations is a huge part of construction business development.
If you’re a specialty contractor, the general contractors you’re working for might have unrealistic expectations about pricing or timing. Construction software can be hugely helpful in communicating and managing expectations, helping your team avoid issues like scope creep that can erode your profit margins. Continue reading “Construction Business Development: Managing Client Expectations with Technology”
