When many cleaning companies sit down to write a proposal, the instinct is to add. Add more detail. Add more pages. Add more technical language, more explanations, more line items. The thinking is straightforward enough: more information signals more value.
Jeff Carmon, a coach and consultant with Elite BSC, said that instinct often backfires. Too much detail can overwhelm prospects, create confusion, and bury the actual value a cleaning contractor provides. In a recent conversation, Carmon laid out why clarity tends to beat complexity in cleaning proposals, where contractors most often go wrong, and a simple five-question framework that helps proposals close work instead of merely describing it.
The information dump problem
Carmon was candid that he has made this mistake himself, and he sees it across the industry.
“What we do is not overly complex. I mean, we’re cleaning buildings, and there’s certainly some processes and things that need to go on,” Carmon said. “So I think we get a little bit of this syndrome that says, hey, we need to provide more information so that it makes it sound more than what it is.”
The second driver, he said, is what he calls the Toby Keith syndrome—a reference to the country song “I Wanna Talk About Me.” Contractors instinctively want to talk about themselves. Their history. Their equipment. Their certifications. Their leadership team.
Put those two tendencies together, Carmon said, and most proposals turn into an information dump. The customer’s actual questions get lost in the pile.
Too much, or not enough
The fix is not simply to write shorter proposals. Carmon said there is a balance, and contractors can err in either direction.
On the too-much side, he pointed to material that buyers rarely need up front. A certificate of insurance is a common example. Carmon said that document only needs to be in the proposal if the customer specifically asks for it. For larger bids, prospects generally assume the contractor carries adequate coverage. Detailed equipment specifications often fall into the same category.
On the too-little side, the risk is leaving the decision maker without the answers they need to defend the choice internally.
“Not providing enough information is not helping that decision maker when they carry that proposal into their team,” Carmon said. “We want to think about all of the questions that that person is going to have to carry to their team, and build our proposal around that.”
That reframe—writing for the person who must sell the decision inside their own organization—is the foundation for everything else.
Five questions every proposal should answer
Carmon offered a framework built around the questions prospective customers most often want answered. Length of each section can scale with deal size, but the questions themselves stay constant.
- How much is this going to cost, and what is included? State the monthly figure, what is in scope, what is not, and the payment terms.
- If I have an issue or a request, how and to whom do I communicate it? Customers know mistakes will happen. They want a clear path to getting issues off their plate.
- How does your company ensure people actually show up and do the work? Cover staffing reliability and how workers are trained so they know what to do once they arrive.
- What does it look like if I move forward with you? Walk through the startup plan over the first 30, 60, and 90 days.
- Have you worked with a business or facility like ours, and can I talk to a few references?
Carmon added a bonus sixth question that he said often gets misplaced: Who is this company I am working with? Mission, vision, and values belong in the proposal, he said, but they belong toward the end, not the top.
“So often, we want to put that first. We want to say, hey, this is who we are, but there’s a place for it, but maybe it’s toward the end,” Carmon said.
Why price belongs near the top
Putting cost near the front of a proposal is not universal practice in the industry, and Carmon acknowledged contractors have strong opinions in both directions. His view is that price up front respects the buyer’s time.
At his previous company he was with, the team sometimes included a line that essentially said: “We understand your budget matters, so here is the number. If this is not in range, we will save you the trouble of reading the rest.”
Carmon also noted what happens in live meetings when price is buried. The prospect stops listening to the presentation and starts flipping pages looking for the figure.
“It’s like I’m Charlie Brown’s teacher, because they’re flipping through my proposal to find the price,” Carmon said.
Transparency scales with deal size
For smaller accounts—Carmon used $2,500 a month as an example—a clean price is usually enough. As deal size grows, he said, transparency about how that price was built becomes a competitive tool.
Larger buyers, particularly those evaluating contracts in the $20,000 to $50,000 per month range and above, often want to understand the math. How many hours were calculated? What wage assumptions are built in? Are workers being paid at market, above market, or below?
Carmon said that level of transparency can justify a higher number against a lower bid.
“If your competitor is $3,000 a month off, but you can show that, hey, the number of hours that I calculated is what it’s going to take to really clean your building, and I’m paying my people just a little bit above market, that can justify to a larger customer that they might take a price that’s a little bit higher,” Carmon said.
A final test before sending
Carmon suggested two checks before any proposal goes out. Run it against the five questions and confirm each one is answered. Then run a word audit.
Count the number of times the proposal uses I, we, and ours. Count the number of times it uses you and yours. If the first group dominates, the proposal is talking about the contractor instead of the customer. AI tools, Carmon noted, make that audit easier than ever.
The takeaway is simple. A winning proposal is not the longest one in the stack. It is the one that answers the buyer’s questions clearly, equips the internal champion to defend the choice, and respects the prospect’s time enough to lead with what matters most.
Or, as Carmon put it, the goal is to stop talking about us and start talking to them.
