The Proposal Follow-Up Process That Stops Bids Dying

Go through last year's bids and count the ones where nobody ever told you the answer. Not the ones you lost — the ones that just stopped. Sent in March, acknowledged, then nothing. The row still says "submitted" and always will.

That's the biggest category in most consultancies, and it's the only one that's genuinely your own fault.

This is for MDs and partners at small technical consultancies — structural, civil, M&E, geotech, environmental — whose proposals go out well and then drift. It covers how long to actually wait before chasing, what each chase should say, and the bit almost everyone skips: when to close the file and record the outcome.

How long should you wait before following up on a proposal?

The advice you'll find is confident and contradictory. NetHunt puts it at three to five days. Bonsai says a week, or two for a lengthy proposal, up to three follow-ups. Ignition suggests two to three days between chases and no longer than a week before the first.

They're not wrong. They're just written for a different job.

Those cadences assume a decision one person can make on their own in a fortnight — a freelance design package, a bookkeeping engagement, a software subscription. Chase on Tuesday, get an answer by Friday.

A structural inspection package doesn't work like that. Your proposal goes to a project manager who needs the architect to confirm scope, the QS to check it against a cost plan, and a client who may not sit down together for three weeks. The decision genuinely isn't ready on day five, and a chase on day three makes you look like you don't understand how their job works.

So the answer isn't a shorter cadence or a longer one. It's a cadence with a different shape: patient in the middle, and unlike almost all the advice above, hard-stopped at the end. The failure mode in consultancy bidding isn't chasing too little in week one. It's still having no answer in week ten and never deciding that's an answer in itself.

What does a silent bid actually cost you?

Take a firm sending 40 proposals a year, and price a bid the way you'd price anything else — senior days times day cost. Two and a half days at a £600 blended day cost is £1,500 a bid, spent whether you win or not.

Now split the year by what you actually learned:

Outcome	Bids	Senior time
Won	12	£18,000
Lost — the client told you	18	£27,000
No decision ever recorded	10	£15,000
Total	40	£60,000

The figures are illustrative — put your own bid count and day cost through it. The middle row is fine. £27,000 is what it costs to find out you weren't the right firm for eighteen jobs, and every one of those came back with something: a price you were beaten on, a sector you don't land, a client type that never converts.

The bottom row bought nothing. Fifteen thousand pounds of senior time that produced neither revenue nor information. Those ten bids can't tell you whether your pricing was wrong, because you never found out. They can't sharpen your qualification bar, because they have no result to learn from. They sit in the pipeline as permanent maybes, quietly inflating how healthy it looks.

Here's one of them, in detail. A £34,000 structural inspection and remediation package. Priced over two and a half senior days, sent on 14 March. The project manager acknowledged it the same afternoon and said they'd revert.

Nobody set a date to chase. The associate who wrote it moved onto a live job. In August, the MD heard at a CPD event that another practice had done the work.

That job carried a 22% margin — £7,480. The firm didn't lose it in a competitive process; it never entered one. And the £1,500 of senior time it cost to write bought no revenue and no lesson, because "we don't know" isn't a lesson.

One of those a year is a bad month. Four is a hire you didn't make.

What does a follow-up cadence for consultancy bids look like?

Before any of the touches below matter, one thing has to be true on the day the proposal goes out: the bid has a named owner and a date.

Not "we'll keep an eye on it." A person, and a day in the diary. Almost every silently dead bid is dead because both were missing — the associate assumed the director was on it, the director assumed the associate was, and neither wrote down when.

With that in place, three touches over six weeks:

Six weeks isn't arbitrary. It's roughly one full cycle of the client's own approvals — enough for the architect, the QS and the budget holder to have met at least once. If there's still no answer after that, it's rarely still under consideration.

What should each follow-up actually say?

The reason people don't chase isn't discipline. It's that "just checking in" feels like begging, so the email never gets written.

Fix the sentence and the reluctance goes with it. Every touch should carry something the client can use, and end with a question that's easier to answer than to ignore.

Day 7 — confirm and clarify. You're not asking for a decision seven days in. You're checking it landed and resolving something you had to assume:

Hi James — checking our fee proposal of 14 March reached you. One thing I assumed and should confirm: we priced for a single mobilisation to site. If the survey needs splitting across two visits it changes the number, so worth flagging now rather than later. Any idea of your timescale for a decision?

That last question is doing the real work. It asks for their timeline, not their answer — a question a project manager can reply to honestly in one line, even when the decision is nowhere near made. Their answer sets your next date.

Day 21 — bring something. Two or three weeks on, a status chase adds nothing. Send information instead:

Hi James — no update needed. Worth flagging that specialist access lead times have moved out to about six weeks. If this is still targeting a September start, that's worth building into the programme whoever ends up doing it.

Note the last clause. It's genuinely useful whether or not you win, which is what makes it land as expertise rather than pressure.

Day 45 — close or kill. The most productive email in the sequence, and the one nobody sends:

Hi James — I'm assuming the remediation package hasn't gone ahead, or has gone elsewhere. Happy to be wrong. If it's the latter, I'd genuinely value knowing whether it came down to price or scope — it helps us pitch better next time. Either way, good luck with the scheme.

Assuming the negative is what gets a reply. "Any update?" is easy to leave for another week. "I'm assuming this is dead" gets corrected, because people don't like being wrongly written off — and either answer closes the file.

Ask about price versus scope every time. Do it across twenty bids and you'll know whether you're losing on number or on fit, which is a different problem with a different fix.

When should you close the file on a bid?

At day 45, whatever happened. Silence included.

This is where most processes fall apart. Chasing is uncomfortable but at least it's visible. Writing "no decision — assumed lost" against a bid you spent £1,500 on feels like admitting failure, so the row keeps its optimistic status instead. That's how a firm ends up with a pipeline holding £400,000 of live opportunities, half of which have been dead since spring.

Two things break as a result.

Your win rate is unknowable. Twelve won and eighteen lost is a 40% win rate. Twelve won out of forty sent is 30%. The difference is entirely the ten you never closed out, and until they're resolved you can't say which number is real — so the arithmetic of bidding more selectively has nothing solid to run on.

Your qualification bar stops improving. A bid/no-bid score is only as good as the outcomes feeding it. If the jobs that go quiet are systematically the ones from a particular client type or sector, that's exactly the pattern a consistent scoring process should catch — and it can't, because those bids never got a result.

Closing the file isn't giving up on the client. Log it, and put a note in the diary to call them in six months. The job is dead; the relationship usually isn't.

What should you do before your next proposal goes out?

Four things, none of which need new software this week:

1. Open your pipeline and find every bid over 60 days old with no outcome. Send the day-45 email to all of them today. Some will come back live. The rest give you your real win rate for the first time.
2. Add two columns: owner, and next contact date. Fill them in as the proposal goes out, not later. Most silent deaths are a missing name and a missing date, nothing more sophisticated.
3. Write the three emails once and keep them. Not as a template you send blind — as a starting point, so the day-21 touch takes four minutes instead of being postponed indefinitely.
4. Ask price-or-scope on every loss. Twenty answers tells you more about your pricing than any amount of internal debate.

The reason this slips isn't that anyone thinks follow-up doesn't matter. It's that a spreadsheet has no opinion about a date that's passed — it never tells you a bid has gone quiet, it just holds the row. Whether you fix that with a column and a calendar reminder or with a bid pipeline that tracks owners, dates and outcomes, the requirement is identical: every live bid has a person's name against it and a date when someone will do something.

If that gap is the one costing you jobs, the use cases page is blunt about the firms Bidro is built for — and the ones it is not.

A proposal without an owner and a next date isn't pending. It's dying, quietly, at £1,500 a time.

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Sources: NetHunt, Bonsai and Ignition on follow-up timing, all verified August 2026. Worked figures are illustrative examples, not market benchmarks.