Business Development in Technical Services

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.

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.

Strategic planning includes analyzing past performance, reviewing market intelligence, and charting a course of growth for the coming year or years. It is essential to brand-building, evolution, and expanding a firm's reach with the client community. It goes beyond a SWOT analysis - real strategic planning covers your full inward and outward operational paradigm. These templates and exercises give you three possible methods of conducting this essential exercise.