Janitorial proposal follow-up: run the proposals folder as a record, not an inbox

Ask the follow-up questions at the walkthrough

The best time to plan the follow-up is the walkthrough, while the buyer is standing in the building and willing to talk. Jen Blakely, of Pinnacle Plus Services, gave one reason bids are lost in the same 2017 thread: “they didn’t actually find out the customers needs.” [sic] The questions below find out the needs and the calendar together.

• Who signs the contract, and who else has to approve it: the owner, an asset manager, a board, a tenant committee
• When the current contract ends, and how much notice it requires
• What prompted the bid: a complaint, a budget cut, a new building, a scheduled rebid
• When the decision will be made, and how the buyer wants to receive the proposal: by email, in a meeting, through a portal
• When the building’s budget for next year is set
• What “clean” means here: the areas the buyer checks first, the complaints that reach them, the standard the tenants expect

None of these is a sales trick. They are the facts a proposal needs to be priced and timed well, and the answers go straight into the proposal log.

The proposal log: six fields per bid

A folder of sent proposals is a list of documents. A proposal log is a list of decisions waiting to happen. It can live in a CRM, in the scheduling software’s sales module or in a spreadsheet; the format matters less than the fields being filled for every bid, not only for the large ones.

• Building, buyer and decision-maker: the person who signs, not only the person who walked the building
• Walkthrough date and proposal-sent date, so the days between them can be counted
• Decision date, from the walkthrough answers; if the buyer would not give one, write that down too
• Incumbent contract end date and notice terms, where known
• Next-touch date, with a name next to it
• Outcome: won, lost on price, lost on scope, incumbent kept, no decision, or rebid on a set date

The last field is the one that gets skipped. A proposal with no recorded outcome cannot be learned from, and it quietly drops out of everyone’s attention. Counting those proposals is the first number to take from the log.

Janitorial proposal follow-up that gives the buyer something

Each touch should carry one useful thing, tied to the buyer’s calendar rather than to a fixed count of days. For a general view of follow-up timing and why a second touch matters, see the separate guide linked at the end; the touches below are specific to janitorial bids.

• Within a day or two of sending: confirm the right person has it, and offer to walk through the proposal in person or on a call, so it is presented rather than read cold.
• Before the decision date: one specific item, such as an answer to a question raised at the walkthrough, the periodic schedule for floors and carpets, or how the transition from the incumbent would run in the first two weeks.
• Before the incumbent’s notice deadline, where it is known: a short note that a decision by that date keeps the switch on schedule.
• After the decision date: ask for the outcome and the reason, whatever it was. A lost bid with a reason is worth more than a won bid with none.
• For a “not this year”: ask when the building is next reviewed, put that date in the log, and add the building to the calendar a few months ahead of it.

Formal bids follow their own rules. A public or institutional solicitation may name a single contact and limit communication during the bid period; read the solicitation and follow it. Where the buyer publishes the results of a public bid, read them: the winning price and the number of bidders are information no email follow-up will produce.

The quarterly lost-bid review

Once a quarter, read every proposal that was lost, went quiet or ended in no decision. It takes an hour with the log open, and the questions are always the same: did price, scope or speed decide it, and was the outcome recorded at all.

Illustrative example: a company sent 40 proposals in six months. The log shows 9 won and 7 lost with a reason. The other 24 have no outcome. Reading them shows that 10 buildings had an incumbent contract end date that has already passed, 6 never had a decision-maker named, and 8 went out more than a week after the walkthrough. That is three different problems — the follow-up calendar, the walkthrough questions and the time to send — and none of them is about price. The numbers are invented for the example; the company’s own log is the only benchmark that matters.

Patterns in the lost-on-price column deserve a second look rather than an automatic discount. If the company loses on price on buildings where its bid hours were realistic, the next question is how a competitor covered the same hours for less. A bid that leaves out payroll taxes or workers’ comp will come in lower than one that carries them, and a building that can only be won at that price is not one to chase.

When the follow-up gap is really an owner-capacity gap

In a cleaning company where the owner walks every building, writes every proposal and also covers routes when a cleaner calls off, the follow-up date in the log is the first thing to slip in a heavy week. The log makes that visible: the next-touch dates pile up in the weeks the owner spent covering.

The fix is not more reminders. It is moving the follow-up, or the whole proposal log, to someone who is not also covering the night shift, with the walkthrough answers written down so that person can make a useful touch without having been in the building.

When not to hire anyone for this

A company that sends a few proposals a month, already records an outcome for each one and reviews its losses does not need outside help with follow-up. The six fields above and a quarterly hour are the whole method, and they cost nothing but discipline.

An outside review earns its fee when proposals are one leak among several: bids that go out late because the owner is covering routes, buildings won at prices that do not cover their hours, extras done and never billed, contracts that pass their anniversary with no review. Our Revenue Review takes two weeks. It reads the company’s proposal records, bid sheets, payroll hours and invoices, read-only, and prices each leak as a monthly dollar figure where the records support one. It sells no leads or appointments, writes no proposals and contacts no buyer. We do not run a cleaning company, and there are no client case studies on this site yet.

If it is unclear whether any of this is worth a fee, start with a free 20-minute call, where a company too small for the arithmetic is told so.