Commercial painting work comes from two directions: property managers planning a repaint, and general contractors filling a bid list. These ten ChatGPT prompts help a painting company write to both, from the first call through the scope summary and the follow-up after a bid.
A property manager and a GC estimator want different things from a painter. The property manager wants to know what the repaint will cost, how long the building will be torn up, and whether the phone will ring all week with tenant complaints. The estimator wants a clean number by the bid date and a sub who shows up. One generic email cannot speak to both of them, so the prompts below are split by buyer.
Fill in the brackets with your own facts. ChatGPT writes faster than you do. It only knows what you tell it.
In short
- Prompt 4 is for getting on a GC bid list. The other nine work for property managers and facility managers.
- The scope summary in prompt 5 does more selling than any call, because it is the page that gets forwarded to ownership.
- One commercial painting appointment takes 115 dials on average. The last prompt shows what your goal needs from the phones.
Property managers planning a repaint
1. Choose the properties worth calling
2. Find out when the budget gets written
Why the timing matters so much is covered in how to find painting jobs to bid on.
3. Open the call
General contractors and the bid list
4. Ask to be added to a GC’s bid list
Estimators keep a short list of subs they trust. An email that answers their first three questions before they ask gets read, and often gets a reply the same day.
The walk, the scope and the occupied building
5. Turn the property walk into a scope summary
6. Explain how you will work around tenants
This one often decides the job. Given two similar numbers, a property manager will usually pick the painter whose plan can go straight to tenants without being rewritten first.
7. Answer “we already have a painter”
After the bid goes in
8. Follow up on a bid that went quiet
9. Turn a finished job into a reason to call the next property
What your goal asks of the phones
10. Count the property walks your goal takes
After that comes the calling itself. Across Abstrakt’s sales center, one commercial painting appointment takes 115 dials on average. Four property walks a month comes to about 460 dials, or 22 every working day, made by someone who would otherwise be estimating or running a crew.
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Where the calling time goes
Painting owners know the properties and the GCs they want to work with. Calling them every week is another matter. The same person is estimating, checking on crews and sorting out a color change on a job that started at seven this morning.
Abstrakt sets more than 100,000 appointments a year across the trades. We work with one commercial painting company per market, and we will tell you on the first call whether yours is open.
Painting contractors ask
Should I send a price before walking the property?
Send a range after the walk. A number sent sight unseen gets compared with the last painter’s number, and that comparison is usually the end of it.
Who do I ask for at a general contractor?
Start with the estimator or the preconstruction team. They manage the bid list, and they can tell you who handles subcontractor onboarding if it is someone else.
Can ChatGPT read photos of a building?
Many versions accept images, and it can help you describe what is in them. Your own notes from the walk are still the source of truth for the scope.
Will these prompts work for industrial coatings or parking structures?
Yes.
Keep going
- Commercial painting lead generation
- How to find painting jobs to bid on
- How to bid on painting jobs
- Cold calling for commercial painting leads
About this article
Jeff Winters is Chief Executive Officer at Abstrakt. Reviewed by Neil Erker, Chief Marketing Officer. Abstrakt sets appointments for commercial painting contractors and the wider trades, and the patterns here come from that calling.
Jeff Winters is the CEO of Abstrakt Marketing Group, a U.S.-based B2B lead generation and appointment-setting company that books qualified sales meetings for clients across the commercial trades, IT and managed services, manufacturing, and B2B services. He has spent his career building and running outbound sales programs at scale, and he breaks down what actually works in sales and lead generation on Abstrakt's podcast, The Grow Show.
