A dealership that bids construction work loses most of what it bids. That is normal for the trade. A close rate between twenty and thirty percent is normal for the trade.
What is not normal, in any other part of the business, is spending that much effort on something and keeping no record of how it turned out.
The information usually exists
After an award, a lot of general contractors will tell you where you landed if you ask. Sometimes it is precise: you were third, about four percent high. Sometimes it is a shrug and a hint. Either way it is the single most useful piece of pricing feedback a dealer ever gets, and it is free.
Then it goes nowhere. It is a phone call the salesperson took, or a line in an email the estimator read once. Nobody writes it down, because there is nowhere to write it that anyone will look at again.
What a year of nothing looks like
Twelve months later the dealership knows its win count and not much else. It cannot say:
- whether it tends to lose by two percent or by fifteen,
- whether it loses more often with particular GCs,
- whether the school bids and the restaurant bids lose for the same reasons,
- or how many bids went out and simply never heard back.
Every one of those answers changes a decision. Losing by two percent is a sharpening problem. Losing by fifteen means bidding the wrong jobs. Losing repeatedly with one GC might mean the relationship is not what the dealership thinks it is. Without the record, all of it gets filed under the same heading: we did not get that one.
Why it never gets captured
It is not laziness. It is timing. The feedback arrives weeks after bid day, when the estimator is deep in three other jobs and the bid folder is already archived. The spreadsheet that built the bid has no column for how it ended. The quoting software knows the quote, not the outcome.
So the knowledge stays in the heads of whoever happened to take the call, and it fades at about the same rate the next deadline approaches.
The record belongs with the bid
The habit that fixes this is small: when a bid is decided, the outcome goes on the bid. Won or lost, what it was awarded at if you know, what the GC said about where you landed. It takes a minute. It only happens if the bid is still somewhere easy to reach after bid day.
That is why SmartTakeoffs keeps the bid after it is submitted. The outcome goes on the submission, along with the award amount if you know it and where the GC said you ranked. It is the last step of bid management for foodservice equipment dealers, and it is the step that makes next year's bidding smarter than this year's.
