The efficient utilization of a bid and submittal tool can often mean the difference between a business that survives and one that succeeds. Unfortunately, your issues with your bid and submittal tools likely don’t lie within your business. Plenty of inefficient and unsatisfactory tools can lead a business to be slow and unwieldy. In this post, we will describe some benefits and positive outcomes of utilizing the SpecBooks+ Submittal tool when bidding.
What Makes a Bid and Submittal Tool Useful?
When searching for the right tool to implement into your business, it’s essential to understand how you want that tool to serve your business. What qualities are you looking for in your bid and submittal tool? What purpose do you want it to serve? For example, do you value ease of use, or are you looking for something more technically capable? Either way, forming a concrete idea of the role you need your tools to serve is a great way to get started in your search for a new bid and submittal tool.
Once you’ve nailed down the role you’d like this software to play within your business, you should next nail down the valuable qualities necessary to complete this task. We’ve found the following qualities needed for any tool, regardless of the role:
- Versatility. This is a valuable bid and submittal tool’s first and arguably most crucial attribute. Even if you have an excellent idea of what role you need this software to play, the value of versatility can never be understated. Think of it this way: your ultimate goal is typically to grow your business. It doesn’t matter how you get there; most businesses always look for growth. Your business is bound to evolve, though: 92% of businesses “reinvented” themselves due to recent events. Therefore, you should want your bid and submittal tool to evolve with you.
- Accuracy. Regardless of your industry or the part you play, your business should always have access to accurate information. The inability to reliably access this information can affect your business and customers. SpecBooks, for example, populates all of our tools regularly with up-to-date information regarding products and their specifications straight from the manufacturer. It doesn’t matter which item, big or small, your business should have access to all relevant information to better plan for and bid on the job ahead of you.
- Usability. What good is a technically capable and efficient tool if you can’t easily use it? Unfortunately, tools for industry professionals, contractors, and the like have been ugly and unusable for far too long. It can be the best tool on the planet; it doesn’t matter if it’s a pain to use. SpecBooks offers a streamlined and usable model that is intuitive to use but still leads the industry in technical capability, customizability, and all other relevant factors. Complete with a beautiful UI and easy-to-use features, mastery of our tool will lead your business to vastly improved and more efficient processes.
- Customizability. You should be able to customize your experience and tailor it to what your business and customers alike need in the current moment. SpecBooks+ bid and submittal tool allow you to include or exclude various items in your bid. When piecing together your bid, check or uncheck the various items you would like to exclude or exclude in your report, and from there, you can edit or mark up the report as you please. Plus, SpecBooks saves custom documentation for recurring use to further streamline your process.
- Speed. Speed is essential when bidding on jobs and coupling your bid with product data. SpecBooks+ speed will allow you to create and provide submittals for every bid, not just the ones you win, which improves your overall bid win percentage.
Improve Your Bid Win Rate
How many bids do you win? Are you looking to win more? Often, it isn’t the price of your bid or the capabilities of your business, but everything counts when bidding on a job. With SpecBooks+, you can couple your bid with the product data our platform offers to increase your bid win ratio.
This is why having a good bid and submittal tool is so important. This aspect of your organization’s processes can often go overlooked, particularly for businesses with a legacy tool. Bidding is a massive part of your business. Why would you settle for a substandard tool to do this when it makes up 80% of your revenue?
The average bid-hit ratio for a general contractor on a public works project lies between 6:1 and 10:1. That’s a large range- it’s the difference between hitting 10% of these bids and 17%. Is your business currently at the lower end of that ratio, or even on the outside looking in? You’re in luck- there’s more to hitting bids than you may think. One thing your business can improve on is your bid and submittal tool. Improving on every portion of your business with SpecBooks will lead you to provide more informed and put-together bids, which will edge you out over companies with similar capabilities and price but poorly put-together bids.
That 7% can make a huge difference when bidding for larger projects- it could completely transform your business. Using our bid and submittal tool to create all of the necessary supporting documentation to coordinate with the bid can be the first stepping stone for your business on the path to a higher bid-hit ratio and eventual growth.
Save Time With SpecBooks
Time is money. We’ve all heard it before, and it’s cliché. It’s true, though. Your business may be wasting time wrestling with an obtuse, unusable, and out-of-date bid and submittal tool. It doesn’t have to be that way. When drilling a hole, you would never do it by hand. So why are you treating your bids the same way? SpecBooks equips our users with the technology and capabilities necessary to keep up with a constantly changing and evolving business landscape. We offer versatility, usability, a sleek design, and any other feature you may want from your business’s software. Contact us at +1 850-695-8377 or visit our website to learn more about how SpecBooks can help your business succeed.