Written by Perryn Olson, President & COO of Brand Constructors

Recently Brand Constructors lead a webinar discussion entitled the "9 Biggest Mistakes Construction Companies Make on Proposals." One of the most painful conversations came from our point of not having a process. When you're working on a proposal, you should not have to reinvest your process like you've never done a proposal before. Not having a process breeds chaos, last minute panics, and creates mistakes. 

When a bid comes public, your team should now what needs to happen from the Go/No Go decision through winning the bid. Besides having the actual steps established, you want to have these elements:

• Defined roles - Proposals do not happen automatically. A lot of hands go into created a winning proposal, and you need to establish what each role does and assign those roles. These roles include marketing, writing, pricing, legal documents, supporting accounting documents, and editing. You also need to include who is assembling the proposal and who is delivering it. 
• Databases - One of the hectic parts of doing a proposal is needing project descriptions of related work, team bios, and references. It is amazing how many times a proposal gets stopped because no one has a picture of a superintendent, even though he has been with the company for years. Between proposals, develop a database or at least a folder on the server for these resources. 
• Designed Proposal Template - Many contractors do not have a designer on staff, but you do not need one, you just need a template. (This is where my team regularly comes in.) This template will include your company's brand look-and-feel, established layouts for regular pages like projects and bios, and even prewritten text about your company that you can edit. Having a template ready-to-go prevents you from starting from scratch each time and accelerates the process. 

Each proposal takes significant time and resources; you need to have these three elements to speed up the process and to maintain your sanity. It will also free you up to focus on winning the bid because you will be customizing and tailoring the process and template to the bid instead of creating it. 

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Perryn Olson, president and COO of ABC member, Brand Constructors, holds the designation of Certified Construction Marketing Professional (CCMP) from the Construction Marketing Association and the Certified Professional Services Marketer (CPSM) from the Society of Marketing Professional Services). He currently serves on the board of SMPS Southeast Louisiana and is the past president of Executive Connections, a business networking organization in New Orleans.