How to Increase Your Response Rates with Your Bid Invitations

How to increase your response rates with your invitations to bid.

1) Eliminate any obstacles for your subs to get your plans and specs. How many usernames and passwords do you think your subs have to remember? 20-30? More? Some subs have a different login, username, and password for every GC that sends an invitation to bid. With PreconSuite, your subs never have to login to access your plan room, give you a response, and submit their bid.

2) Personalize your invitations. If you have seen a cookie-cutter invitation to bid that comes from an @noreply.com email address, it’s likely your subs think they are 1 of hundreds of subs receiving the same invite and they may not think it worth their time to provide you with a quote. With PreconSuite, all of your emails come from your email address and are personalized to each sub and their trades.

3) Make sure that your invites get to your subs’ inbox. More subs are working from home, and as such many companies have installed firewalls on their email servers to avoid phishing scams. While sending invitations to bid from your own email address is a great start, there are other tricks to help improve your email deliverability like adding a CNAME record or SPF record to your DNS. With PreconSuite, you can see if a sub accidentally marked your email as spam, and we will work with your subs to make sure 100% of your emails are getting delivered to their inbox.

4) Set automatic email reminders for subs that haven’t responded. It’s easy to forget about an invitation to bid on a project if you’ve been sent one email 3 weeks before the bid due date. You should send at least a few reminders in the weeks leading up to the bid date so your project stays top-of-mind. With PreconSuite you can set the frequency of your automatic reminders, and train your subs to respond so they receive the appropriate followup, addenda, or calls.

Subs preach how easy PreconSuite makes accessing the project documents, give you a response, and submit their bids. If you’re interested in giving PreconSuite a try, sign up for a free trial so you can increase your sub response rates today.