Bid follow-up automation for subcontractors
Follow-up is the highest-return, lowest-effort work on a bid desk, and it is the first thing to fall over in a busy month — because nothing breaks when it is skipped. It just quietly costs you jobs in a way that never appears on a report.
Aging surfaces itself
Submitted bids past your threshold with no reply appear on their own. No one has to remember to look.
Grouped by contractor
All the overdue bids for one GC in one place, so a whole account gets cleared in one sitting.
Drafts, not sends
The email arrives written, with project name, scope, and bid date already in it. You read it and press send.
Replies close the loop
Awards and regrets are read from responses and recorded against the specific GC.
The two clocks
There are two follow-up questions on a bid desk and they run at completely different speeds. Has this package been awarded? runs in days, tied to a bid date. Are we still on this GC's list? runs in months, tied to the account.
The second one is the expensive failure, because it has no event attached — a general contractor quietly ceasing to invite you produces no notification, no bounce, nothing. By the time somebody says "we haven't heard from them in a while," three bid cycles have gone by.
What the tool actually does
- Watches submitted bids for silenceA bid moves to submitted and starts aging. Past your threshold with no response, it surfaces — no rule to configure per job, no reminder to set.
- Groups the queue by general contractorSix overdue bids with one GC is one phone call or one email thread, not six separate acts of remembering.
- Drafts with the details already inThe GC's exact project name, your scope, the bid date, and the ask. Estimators search their inbox by project name — a follow-up that gets it wrong is worse than none.
- Reads the repliesResponses are scanned for awards and regrets and recorded against the specific contractor. A regret from one GC on a project several are bidding retires that bid, not the whole job.
The cadence worth automating
Three touches over roughly three weeks covers most commercial award timelines: a receipt confirmation within a day, a value-adding check-in at five to seven days, and a direct "has this been awarded?" at two to three weeks. The full reasoning, with wording for each, is in the bid follow-up playbook.
Does it send follow-up emails automatically?
It drafts them and surfaces them; a person reviews and sends. Fully automated sending is the fastest route to a follow-up with the wrong project name on it, which damages the relationship the follow-up exists to protect.
How does it know a bid has gone quiet?
Submitted bids age from their submission date, and replies are read from the connected mailbox. A bid past your threshold with no response surfaces in the follow-up queue on its own.
What happens when a regret letter comes in?
It is recorded against the specific general contractor that sent it. On a project bid to several GCs, that retires your bid with that contractor while leaving the project open with the others — recording it as a total loss would corrupt both the pipeline and the win rate.
Stop losing bids to silence
See the follow-up queue with a sample project loaded, before connecting your inbox.
Start your free trialMore on IntelBid
- Flooring contractor CRM and bid management softwareOne pipeline for every flooring job — commercial bid invitations from your inbox, website forms, and inbound calls answered by an AI phone agent. Proposals, follow-up, and project management included.
- Bid management software for commercial subcontractorsOne pipeline for every bid invitation, no matter which platform it came through. Proposals, follow-up, outcome tracking, and project management for specialty trades.
- Moving from residential to commercial flooring workWhat changes when you take your first invitation to bid: prequalification packets, how GC bid lists actually work, retainage and pay applications, and the systems that break on the way.
- Automated bid intake from Gmail and OutlookTurn a shared inbox full of invitations to bid into a reviewed pipeline. Automatic extraction, GC resolution, and de-duplication — with a confidence score on every record.