Proposal recovery
The bid went out six weeks ago. Is the project dead, or just quiet?
Right now you have proposals out for more money than your shop bills in a quarter — and for most of them, nobody on your team can say whether the project is alive, parked, or awarded to someone else three weeks ago. In project work, that fog is the leak.
Is this you?
Five questions, yes or no
- You can't list your open proposals — number and total value — without asking every rep individually.
- At least one bid this year died of pure silence: no award notice, no rejection, just a project that evaporated.
- Follow-up style depends on the rep: one calls weekly, one 'doesn't want to pester the GC,' one is sure he followed up but can't find the email.
- A spec change or value-engineering round arrived weeks after it was decided — because nobody had touched the project since the bid.
- Your quarterly forecast is rep optimism averaged with owner skepticism.
Three or more yeses, and your proposal pipeline is carrying dead weight and live money — with no way to tell them apart.
The long-cycle problem
Months of silence is normal. Untracked silence isn't.
A commercial furniture or millwork deal runs two to six months through hands you don't control: the GC's buyout schedule, the designer's revisions, the dealer's client, the owner's financing. Long gaps with no news are the nature of the work — which is exactly why memory-based follow-up fails here worse than anywhere.
A rep can hold maybe a dozen live projects in mind. Each one is quiet for weeks at a time, on its own schedule. Multiply across three or four reps and dozens of proposals, and "I'll circle back when it feels right" guarantees that some projects get touched at the wrong moments and others never get touched again.
The shops that win the long cycle aren't pushier. They simply know, for every proposal, when the next milestone should hit — and they show up precisely then.
The sprint
Three steps, 10–14 days
- 01
Inventory every proposal
From your CRM, sent folders, and bid log: every outstanding proposal with value, date, stakeholders, and expected decision window — one board, often for the first time.
- 02
Score by pulse
Each project scored on signals: time past expected award, last contact, stakeholder activity. Live, parked, or probably dead — with the reasoning visible.
- 03
Touch on milestones
Follow-ups drafted per project, keyed to its actual stage and addressed to whoever controls the next step. Your reps approve and send under their own names.
Deliverables
What lands on your desk in 10–14 days
- A live proposal board: every open bid, its value, age, stage, and owner.
- A pulse score per project — live, parked, or dead — with the signals behind it.
- Milestone-keyed follow-up drafted and moving, approved by your reps.
- A forecast view the owner can defend: proposals weighted by signal, not optimism.
Scope — what the sprint covers
Up to 12 months of proposal data, up to ~200 open proposals, one data source (HubSpot/Pipedrive export, one structured spreadsheet, or one inbox export), one follow-up workflow, one board, human approval on every message. Not included: CRM migration, ERP or estimating-software integration, custom development, or deep historical cleanup — those get scoped on the demo call.
See it working
The proposal board, on sample millwork data
| Project | Value | Stage | Award window | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Harborview Hotel — casework pkg 3 | $182,000 | Owner review | Jun 15–30 | Alive |
| Birch & Vine — restaurant buildout | $54,300 | Quiet 9 wks | was Apr | Watch |
| Oakline Offices — phase 1 fixtures | $38,900 | Lost to rebid | — | Dead |
Pricing
$1,497
Proposal Recovery Sprint. Fixed price. 10–14 days. About two hours of your team's time.
If we can't show you a usable recovery board from your data, you don't pay.
Project businesses taught me more about pipeline discipline than any other kind — because when the cycle is six months long, every bad habit compounds. The fix isn't pestering GCs. It's knowing, for every proposal, what should happen next and when.
FAQ
Straight answers
Projects move on the GC's timeline. What can we possibly speed up?
Nothing — and the sprint doesn't try. What it changes is whether you *know* where each proposal stands. A touch keyed to the project's expected milestone ('award was expected the week of the 12th — where did it land?') gets answers generic check-ins don't. You can't move the GC's clock, but you can stop being surprised by it.
Our proposals live in PDFs, email threads, and three reps' heads.
That's the normal starting state, and it's exactly what the first sprint days are for: pulling every outstanding proposal into one inventory — value, date sent, last contact, expected decision window — before any follow-up goes out. Most owners see their full proposal pipeline in one place for the first time during this step.
Who actually sends the follow-ups — you or us?
Your reps, with their names on it. Each message is drafted from the project's real context — the bid, the dates, the stakeholders — and the rep approves or edits before it sends. Relationships stay with the people who built them.
Half our bids go through dealers or designers. Does follow-up even reach the decision?
The follow-up goes to whoever controls your next step — dealer, designer, or GC — and the inventory tracks which relationship that is per project. Multi-party deals are where proposals get lost most, because every party assumes someone else is driving. Being the shop that keeps the thread alive is a competitive position.
What if a project really is dead?
Then it gets marked dead, and that's a win too. Every confirmed-dead proposal is forecast honesty: capacity you can promise elsewhere and estimating hours you stop spending on rebids for ghosts. The sprint's output is truth plus recovered work — in that order.
Next step
Want to see it work before you spend a dollar?
Book a 30-minute live demo. No deck. You watch the system find money in a pipeline like yours — then we run your numbers.