Your closing rate is a rumor

A concrete contractor south of Fresno, five o'clock, heat still coming off the yard. Behind the toolbox in the bed of his truck sat a plastic milk crate full of bid sheets, the ones on top curled and bleached from the sun. He dug one out to show me a slab he had priced the year before. I asked how many were in there. He said he had no idea, then added the part that mattered without knowing it. Most of them came back as nothing.

Every price in that crate had a copy in a folder in the office. The man is not sloppy. He could not tell me how many bids he wrote last month, how many he won, or whether he wins driveways more often than commercial pads.

Prices go out and nobody hears from them again

He runs four crews. Driveways, patios and pool decks on the residential side, commercial pads for two general contractors, and a steady run of dairy and equipment slabs out in the county. Two men price work, him and an estimator named Danny. They price it differently enough that a builder who has bought from both can tell.

Nobody asks a caller much before the truck goes out to look. Budget, timeline, who else is pricing it, whether the drawings are final. He looks at all of it, because looking at it feels like working. Some weeks nine bids leave the building. Some weeks two. Nothing in the company notices the difference.

He wants to be up twenty percent over the next twelve months. He said it with conviction and no arithmetic underneath it. Ask anybody in that office how many bids a week twenty percent takes, and the room goes quiet.

The signs are ordinary:

You have a growth number for the year, and nobody could turn it into prices per week.

You could not say what share of your bids turn into work, or whether a patio closes better than a commercial pad.

The truck goes out to look at anything that calls, and nobody asked what the man intends to spend.

Your estimator learned the job by riding along with you. If he quit tomorrow, the method would leave in his truck.

Monday comes and nobody is asked what they sent out last week.

A builder once got two different prices from your company for the same pour.

Waiting on cash to fix a counting problem

Almost nobody brings this to me as a selling problem. It arrives as a money problem. We will hire a real salesman when cash frees up. We will buy the software after the tax bill clears. I cannot carry another estimator yet, so I quote what I can and hope.

Then a good stretch comes, cash loosens a little, and the money gets spent. Watch what it buys.

The salesman is hired because he knows concrete and people like him. Nobody asked him in the interview to walk through a bid he lost, or to say how he decides a caller is worth a site visit, because there was no standard to hold him against. He finds nothing written down and invents his own way. Now three men price work three ways.

The software goes in, and the uncounted bids become uncounted bids inside a database. Its reports come late, when they come at all, and the ones on time go unread.

The commission plan pays a percentage of booked revenue, which instructs a grown man to book revenue. He chases the biggest job at the thinnest margin, because a booked dollar counts the same as any other and nothing in the plan tells him different.

A closing rate nobody has counted is a rumor. Every decision you stack on top of it is a guess wearing a suit.

Measuring the end you cannot coach

Say a man sees through all of that and decides he will finally measure his selling. He measures the far end of it. Won and lost, one rate for the whole company.

That number moves for reasons nobody can act on. It buries the segment that is bleeding, because a healthy driveway business will carry a miserable commercial number and the average still looks survivable. And no man controls who signs. He controls how many he asks, how fast he calls back, how early he walks away.

Coaching is the other half, and it is usually gone. The owner has never sat in the truck while his estimator handed a price to a builder. He has never heard the words the man uses, or the moment he stops describing the work and starts apologizing for the number. You cannot coach what you have never watched.

What one segment costs before anybody notices

Take the commercial pads. Danny puts about five hours into one, counting the takeoff, the pricing, the site visit and the back and forth when the drawings change. Two go out in an average week. His wage is thirty-six dollars an hour, and payroll taxes and insurance put another twenty-seven percent on top of that before the hour has done anything. Run the hours through twice, once for the time and once for the work that never got done in it. That segment runs about forty-six thousand dollars a year to bid. He wins one in nine.

The residential work takes an hour and a half a bid and closes better than one in three.

Commercial pads are good work when they land. He is spending his most expensive hours on the segment least likely to pay for them, and he had never seen those two lines next to each other.

His crews were not the thing holding him back. They had open days on the calendar most weeks. The company could pour more than it could sell, and what rationed selling was estimating hours going into work that never came back. Add a crew in that condition and you have made payroll heavier and nothing else.

Sixty days of prices on one sheet

Carry the crate inside. Pull every price that left the building in the last sixty days: the crate, the office folders, any text you sent from a job site with a number in it. If Danny wrote it, it goes in the pile. You do not have to wait a month for this. You already ran the experiment. Nobody wrote down the result.

One line each, on a sheet of paper or a single spreadsheet tab. Seven columns:

The date it went out.

The customer.

The kind of work, in your own words: driveway, pool deck, commercial pad, dairy slab.

The dollar amount.

Who priced it, and roughly how many hours it took him.

Won, lost, or still out.

If lost, who got it and roughly by how much, or the word unknown.

Then sort by kind of work and nothing else. Count how many went out in each group and how many came back signed. That fraction is your closing rate by segment, and most owners have never once seen it. Add up the dollars the same way, because a segment can close beautifully and still be too small to feed anybody.

Two answers come off that sheet inside an hour: which kind of work is eating your pricing hours without paying for them, and how many bids it takes you to win one in each kind.

The second answer is worth more than it looks. Take the revenue you want to add over the next twelve months, divide it by your average won job in the segment that closes best, then multiply by the bids it takes to win one there. That is a weekly bid target. It is the first sales number in your business a man can be held to, because he controls it from his own truck.

Now count the times you wrote unknown. Every one is a job you lost and never asked about. Pick three and call those builders this week. Ask what the winning number was and whether price was the reason at all. Most will tell you, and some will say price had nothing to do with it, which alone pays for the call.

The jobs you lose have the same facts missing at the start: what the man means to spend, when it has to be poured, how many other prices he is holding. Ask those three on the phone before the truck rolls.

From Monday on, one line as each price goes out. Same columns, same sheet, twenty seconds. That is the only sales report your company needs this quarter.

The drives you stop making

Most of what changes is subtraction. The truck stops driving forty minutes to look at work you were never going to be given, because somebody asked what the man means to spend. Monday stops being a mood report. Your estimator stops guessing whether he had a decent week, because the count sits on the sheet in his own handwriting.

The Fresno contractor found his dairy and ag slabs closed at better than half, and earned more per yard than anything else on the list. He had been treating that work as filler between commercial jobs. He bids it first now and lets the rest fit around it. Same crews, same trucks, same valley.

An owner who knows his own numbers sells differently. He quotes without apologizing, he walks away earlier, and he stops taking a lost bid personally, because he knows what share he was ever going to win. Confidence in this trade is mostly arithmetic somebody sat down and did. Danny said something on my last visit that stayed with me. He knows what a good week looks like now.

Sales Process and Management holds twelve statements in the Business Check-in, and most owners mark more of them than they expect to. The check-in is free and runs about ten minutes.