Business Development in Technical Services

This article explores the critical skill of saying “no” to consulting projects—a challenge many firms face as they mature. While instinct and experience often guide senior leaders, newer consultants benefit from a more structured approach. The article presents a four-part evaluation framework: two “go” considerations (risk assessment and client quality) and two “get” considerations (internal capacity and probability of winning).

Many firms rely on Red Team reviews to improve proposals, but by the time these reviews occur—often just before submission—it's too late for strategic changes. This article challenges the assumption that Red Teams alone can meaningfully enhance a proposal. It introduces the full review process: Blue Teams (for win themes), Pink Teams (for storyboarding), and Gold Teams (for risk and alignment), showing how each stage contributes to stronger, more client-focused proposals.

If you want to change your project win rate, you’ll have to change your team’s habits. Changing doesn’t happen easily. Plus, we can still win the odd project by simply responding to RFPs, so the temptation is always there. The trouble is that waiting for RFPs has us working in a hazier arena. In the “waiting game,” our results are never as reliable as we need them to be if we want to grow. This series provides resources for teams hoping to change their approach to BD so they can have earlier awareness of projects and set themselves up for the win.

This video is the second in a series on creating a lead generating engine for your team. We’ve created a prompt set called Pre-RFP Business Development Culture – What Does Your Team Believe About BD?, which goes along with this series, and a template to analyze the results. They're designed to reveal how your team thinks about early-stage business development a week or day at a time, where they feel confident, where they hesitate, and where old habits or misconceptions might be holding them back.

This video will help you get to the finish line on this series. I will walk you through the exercise, The Tasks that Power your Lead Generation Engine, during which you will make use of the two templates, The Tasks that Power Your Lead Generation Engine, and the Pre-RFP Business Development Planning Task Cards. Then we will wrap up by looking at the prompt set, Pre-RFP Business Development Habits – Sources for Leads Other than Purchasing Sites, which helps you establish the habits that drive your lead generation engine.

Forms can fail especially in a go/no go decision because they become one more administrative step, another thing to do at a juncture when you’re stretched for time, and you will notice that they rarely surface insights that matter. That’s because they take you out of the instinctive centers of the brain and into the process centers. Process is important, but at this moment in a pursuit, not as important as good instincts. This video describes an alternative to forms and scoring.

Proposal writers usually learn by doing. This prompt set allows you to do just that, but lets you practice the skills here on Twennie without submitting any lack-lustre proposals to a real competition. If your team writes proposals now or in the future, assign this prompt set. This is a rapid-learning tool for a skill that relies a lot on trial and error. Learners get 20 chances to build and test skill, and it only takes minutes out of a day.

This set of 20 prompts is designed to help technical professionals and their leaders understand how their team currently approaches business development, especially the early, pre-RFP stage. While the team may believe they are doing “some BD,” these prompts reveal the gaps in awareness, ownership, and process that often prevent a strong lead-generating engine from forming. By encouraging open-ended reflections, this set helps leaders pinpoint individual and team-wide misconceptions, cultural norms, and internal excuses that contribute to reactive rather than proactive business development behavior.

Most technical professionals are trained to respond to RFPs, but not to recognize opportunities upstream, before formal requests are issued. This prompt set is designed to shift that mindset. It teaches consultants and business developers how to hunt for leads in unexpected places: capital plans, blog posts, competitor websites, public engagement events, old colleagues, and casual conversations. The goal isn’t to find a guaranteed project with every prompt, but to build the "muscle memory" that make opportunity recognition second nature.

Opportunities to develop business pop up every day, all around you. The opportunities might not always be in the form of new projects. They might be changes in legislation. They might be the names of new people working in client organizations. They might be climate change or the advent of new technology. The challenge is to pay attention and think creatively about what the future might bring, and more importantly, how to be in the right place at the right time.

A structured, interactive session designed to help teams establish a repeatable approach to business development efforts before a formal RFP is released. Facilitators guide teams through nine core steps, including choosing BD tasks, identifying learning goals, selecting key terminology and tools, planning pull marketing activities, assigning accountability, budgeting time, and incorporating fun.

Many consultants try to bring discipline to business development with forms, in this case, Go/No Go checklists and scoring systems for quantifying go and get factors like the ones you read about in the article, When to Say No to a Project. Here’s the reality: most get abandoned. They’re filled out once or twice, then quietly ignored and forgotten. This exercise provides an alternative. It guides a discussion during which the team develops hypothetical go and realistic get scenarios that establish stronger go/no go instincts.

This template is designed to support the Pre-RFP BD Planning Exercise, a structured, interactive session designed to help teams establish a repeatable approach to business development efforts before a formal RFP is released. The exercise can be facilitated in-person or online using tools like Mural or a printed template. Facilitators guide teams through nine core steps, including choosing BD tasks, identifying learning goals, selecting key terminology and tools, planning pull marketing activities, assigning accountability, budgeting time, and incorporating fun.

This template is designed to support the Twennie exercise, The Tasks that Power your Lead Generation Engine. The exercise helps you create a plan for formalizing and adding further best practices to your pre-RFP business development efforts. The final step of the exercise invites you to use the second section of this template to create a Pre-RFP Business Development and Lead Generation Plan for your team.