1. Be Mindful of your Current Bidding Opportunities
To keep it manageable, review your government cleaning opportunities often. A cleaning business contractor’s pipeline is its contract opportunity tracking system. Most contractors don’t have a problem with too few cleaning contract opportunities. Their problem is that they have too many. For every contract opportunity that they add to the pipeline, it is a good practice to delete another. It is better to have fewer opportunities closely tracked than to have too many opportunities loosely monitored. The most successful contractors have strict cleaning contract selection criteria and they stick to them. No exceptions.
2. Have A Targeted Approach for Locating your Government Cleaning Contracts
Be really focused with your approach Even with a manageable pipeline, cleaning business contractors still need to have a focused approach. A lot of new or less successful cleaning business government contractors want to be all things to all people in order to hedge their bets. It rarely works. Instead, they would be better served to select targets conservatively and cautiously. It is better to have three cleaning bids out in your expertise and delivery sweet spot than 12 bids that are all over the place.
3. Don’t Go It Alone
Starting out, consider teaming with another cleaning business to increase your bandwidth and the range of acceptable opportunities. Small or new contractors should find team mates or alliance partners with whom they have a business and cultural compatibility. Doing so spreads their risk, extends their experience and gives them a much deeper bench of talent. In the past, government agencies were known to frown up teaming with other companies but not anymore Now, the paradigm has reversed itself – even the largest primes are teaming. Contractors are now pursuing more of a “best athlete” approach to form winning teams.
4. Avoid A lot of Cleaning Contract Pop-Up Opportunities
Then Ask: “Can I Win?” Not “Can I Perform.” When an RFP is published, most cleaning business contractors say to themselves, “yeah, we could do that work.” But they are not giving much thought to if they can actually win that work. It happens all the time, with contractors big and small. The President or CEO comes in on Monday morning and logs on to SAM.gov sees a new cleaning RFP or RFQ and the next thing you know, everybody is chasing after that opportunity. What they haven’t done is really think through their chances of actually winning. Have they ever met the customer? Does the customer know anything about the contractor? Does the cleaning contractor understand the cleaning customer’s problems and real issues (not just what is in the RFP)? Do they know anything about the incumbent, their performance and when the contract was last awarded? If a contractor sees a published RFP and they’ve never met the customer and this is the first they’ve heard about the contract, they will have to WORK really hard to get their foot in the door.
5. Listen to Your Cleaning Customer
Try something different during customer walk-through visits. Instead of listening to your own voice, try listening to your cleaning customers theirs. They are they one's with the problem, so listen and learn before speaking too much. Some companies place too much emphasis on hiring persuasive, smooth-talking business development people who make great presentations. While that doesn’t hurt, the really successful contractors focus first on hiring good listeners. If you can stop talking about your company and instead listen for the customer’s real problems, your winning percentage will increase. A good listener is worth their weight in gold.
6. Understand Your Cleaning Customer
The best win strategy ever developed is to uncover a customer’s wants and needs. Then meet them. This is the easiest to explain, but the most difficult for cleaning business contractors to do. When preparing proposals, focus on the customer’s problems first, then your solution. Winning contractors tend to deliver proposals that focus on solving the problems that are keeping the customer up at night. Very often, the customer will convey that the winning contractor “really understood us and what we needed.”
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