Why We Built Pursuit

In July of 2024 I moved out of project management and into sales. First thing on my plate was a strategic planning presentation for our president. What are our sales goals for next year? Who are we bidding? How is our estimating department actually performing?

Simple questions. I could not answer a single one.

Everything we knew lived in one Excel spreadsheet that one of our Excel gurus had built. Bids on one tab, comments on another, all of it tied together with formulas nobody wanted to touch. Getting answers out of it took our estimator roughly three days of collecting and compiling, then another full day of my own to organize it into something we could read. Four days of work to answer questions a sales leader should be able to answer in five minutes.

But once I could finally see the data, it told a story I did not expect.

Over six years we had sent out 942 bids and priced more than 750 million dollars of work. We won 99 of them. That is a 10 percent hit rate. The industry considers one win in every five bids successful. We were winning one in ten.

Digging into why, I found the first problem. I gave it a name in that presentation: squirrel mode. I literally put the dog from the movie Up on the slide. As contractors, we fall in love with a project the second we can picture ourselves building it. That excitement is part of why we do this work. It is also a real danger when you are the one deciding where your estimators spend their time. The data showed 38 percent of our bids went to contractors who had never given us a single job. Our takeoff guy averaged 155 takeoffs a year, which means roughly two of his six years were spent pricing work we had almost no chance of winning. One general contractor alone: we bid them 75 times, priced 94 million dollars of their work, and won 3 jobs.

Here is why that happens. Without data in front of you, you run on short term memory. A customer dangles you along, pulls the rug out from under you, and you are sour on them for a month. Then time passes, you forget how they treated you, and a project comes across your desk from that same customer that looks really good. So you bid them again. Nothing was keeping score.

The second problem was follow up. In my research for that presentation I found that 80 percent of sales take five follow ups after the first contact, but 45 percent of salespeople quit after one. Only 8 percent ever make five. We were in that 45 percent, and I was as guilty as anyone. The moment a bid goes out the door, you are neck deep in the next one, chasing the next set of plans, looking for your angles. The bids you already submitted stop existing.

So the jobs we won were the jobs where we were the low guy. We were cheap, so the phone rang. The jobs we actually wanted went to somebody else. Not because they beat us. Because they called back and we did not.

That is the hole we set out to dig ourselves out of, and it is why we built Pursuit. Open a customer in Pursuit and their full history is right there. Every past project, what you won, what you lost, and an AI summary of why. When that customer’s next "perfect" project shows up, you make the call with the record in front of you instead of a six week old memory.

And follow up is not a feature we bolted on. It is the core of the system. Every project gets follow up dates, the reminders come to you, and when you make the call you speak the conversation straight into your phone and it is documented.

Every note, call, and comment rolls up into what we call the company brain. It is the knowledge of your whole estimating department in one place, and you can ask it questions. Which estimator wins what type of work? Which customers actually award us jobs? Where are we losing, and why?

As a sales leader it changed how I run my department. My team knows the goal, they see their own numbers against it, and when someone falls behind we sit down with real data and figure out why instead of guessing.

But the honest measure is the bottom line. Sales carries fixed costs, and either you hit your number or you don’t. So did it work? We went from winning one job in ten to winning one in four.

If you are running your bids out of a spreadsheet like I was, ask yourself the questions I got asked: who are you bidding, what are you winning, and why? If it takes you four days to answer, I built this for you.