Winning new work is as much a craft as delivering it. Usually your proposal is your firm's first chance to demonstrate expertise, build trust, and set the tone for the client relationship. Getting it right sets the project up for success before it even begins. These guides cover the full arc of the business development process. From advice on scoping and pricing a project to structuring a compelling proposal and responding to RFPs, helping your services firm to win more of the right work, more often.
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Most professional services firms have more good content than they realise. The problem isn't that it doesn't exist, it’s that it lives in different, unconnected places and no one has full visibility over it. When a new RFP lands, you feel the pain immediately. Someone opens the last similar proposal and starts copying from it. Someone else messages a colleague for the right case study. By the time the first draft is circulating, the team has spent their most focused hours on logistics that should have been solved before the bid started.
Problem: “I want my team’s proposals to look polished enough to win bigger clients, but we can't decide when or if design and detailed content moves the needle or just adds noise. Every time we sit down to approach one, we get pulled between making it visually compelling, and keeping it clean and direct. Does presentation and robustness really matter, or should the work speak for itself?”
Winning work is getting harder for a simple reason: the shape of demand has changed. In the episode, we unpack what we’re seeing in Projectworks data, and what it means for proposals, margins, and your delivery team’s sanity.
AEC firms win around half of the bids they submit, according to the Inspire Report. Competing in this environment is tough. You need to pitch more often just to maintain the same pipeline, and those pitches need to be sharper than ever.
Most professional services firms have more good content than they realise. The problem isn't that it doesn't exist, it’s that it lives in different, unconnected places and no one has full visibility over it. When a new RFP lands, you feel the pain immediately. Someone opens the last similar proposal and starts copying from it. Someone else messages a colleague for the right case study. By the time the first draft is circulating, the team has spent their most focused hours on logistics that should have been solved before the bid started.
Problem: “I want my team’s proposals to look polished enough to win bigger clients, but we can't decide when or if design and detailed content moves the needle or just adds noise. Every time we sit down to approach one, we get pulled between making it visually compelling, and keeping it clean and direct. Does presentation and robustness really matter, or should the work speak for itself?”
Winning work is getting harder for a simple reason: the shape of demand has changed. In the episode, we unpack what we’re seeing in Projectworks data, and what it means for proposals, margins, and your delivery team’s sanity.