Study · our own book · 8,795 orders
What actually gets
a bid approved.
Everyone in this industry has a theory about why bids get rejected. Almost nobody has checked.
So we read every bid document on our own book — seventeen and a half thousand PDFs — matched each bid to whatever paperwork came back after it, and worked out which ones were approved and what those ones had in common.
It is not price. It is how the bid is written.
This data is based on the last 8,795 orders we processed.
Four things the data says
ALL-CAPS notes lose.
Sentence-case descriptive write-ups beat telegraphic capitals by six to twenty-seven percentage points, consistently, across nearly every work type on the biggest national in the book. It is the cheapest fix in the industry and it costs nothing but the habit.
BID TO REMOVE 19 CYDS INTERIOR DEBRIS
Debris totalling approximately 19 CYD across the interior per the attached photos. Work includes gathering, loading, hauling away and disposing at a licensed facility.
Wording beats price.
On the largest national, a well-written note is worth nearly eleven points of approval rate. On two others it is worth seven and nearly five. We measured this within the same processor and the same client, so it is the writing doing the work, not one person being better than another.
Price is the lever only sometimes.
For shrub trimming, approvals cluster well below the median rejected bid — so bid lower and win. For tree trimming, approval is flat across every price band, which means price is not the lever at all and anyone discounting is giving away margin for nothing. You cannot know which is which without measuring.
Some doors are shut at any price.
One national approves almost no interior or exterior debris bids, at any price and with any wording, across hundreds of attempts. That is policy, not persuasion. Knowing it does not stop us bidding — every damage has to be reported — but it stops anyone pretending a better paragraph will change the answer.
What this means for your book
Every damage has to be bid. The only question is how.
In property preservation you do not get to pick which damages to bid — reporting them is an obligation. So "bid less" is not a strategy. The lever you actually control is the quality of the write-up and the price band you choose, and both of those can be measured per national and per work type rather than guessed at.
That is what we do with the finding. Every bid we write goes out in the shape the data says wins for that national and that work type — measured quantity, composition, scope of work, purpose — instead of a line of capitals that gets glanced at and declined.
How it was measured
Approval rates are calculated only on bids whose outcome is knowable. Bids with no later paperwork are excluded rather than counted as losses — including them would manufacture a flattering-looking denominator and a false rate.
Rates are not comparable between nationals. One publishes what it refused, so its number is measured directly; for others approval is inferred from matching each bid to the invoice that followed it. We report the mechanism, not a league table.
Bids approved at a reduced amount count as wins — several hundred are — because a reduced approval is still work won. Matching is on the type of work, not on shared wording, so an interior debris line is never matched to an exterior one.
Client names and the nationals involved are withheld. The figures describe our own book of work, not any one client's business — the last 8,795 orders we processed.