Building your business means becoming an expert at pricing, and competition is fierce. It can be a complicated endeavour because sometimes being the “lowest bidder” might mean winning the job but compromising your profit at the same time. Getting good at finding a balance and mastering the bidding process can improve your results and help your company grow.
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In a recent edition of ISSA’s Straight Talk! with Jeff Cross, Troy Harrison, the Sales Navigator, provides strategies to help cleaning companies increase their success when bidding becomes part of the process.
Bidding is often a necessary part of the commercial cleaning and janitorial space, but Harrison describes it as “Playing chicken with other vendors to see who’s going to take the least amount of profit on a job.”
He explains that understanding the process is an important place to start. Often, when you receive an RFQ to bid on a job, that package has been put together by the client, along with an advisor. If your company wasn’t consulted on the bid, your chances of winning that job have significantly decreased. He advises that companies try and have a conversation with the decision-maker before the bid closes to try and avoid bidding altogether.
Harrison recommends removing the word “bid” from your company’s vocabulary completely, because it implies that there is an auction with multiple participants and that the final decision will be made based solely on price. Based on his opinion that the word “bid” devalues your company, he advises cleaners to switch to using the word “proposal” both internally and externally.
Often, companies say that they are looking for the lowest price during the bidding process, but a good salesperson will try to get in front of the decision-maker to ask important questions like ‘what is your definition of success for this purchase?’
Going into every sale expecting not to be the lowest price and finding other ways to offer the best value is the way that cleaning companies will find success. Harrison maintains that every hour cleaners spend on submitting a futile bid not likely to result in business for their company is a wasted hour they could have spent on someone who could bring them business.
Rather than participating in the bidding process, the best strategy for maintaining a high price in your business is a full sales funnel, where your salespeople can maximize their prospects, giving you the option to choose what makes the most sense for your company.
According to Harrison, “Business that starts good, stays good.” There are companies out there that will pay for what they need and not focus on price, so cleaning companies need to focus on value and building relationships with their customers to grow the business.
