Finding Projects Before they Become RFPs

If you want to improve your win rate, stop waiting for RFPs. While RFPs feel safe and familiar, they come too late to position your firm effectively. This article breaks down why technical professionals are drawn to reactive business development and what it costs them over time. You'll learn how to calculate your lead funnel, why early pursuit matters, and how to create a lead-generating engine that delivers predictable, measurable results.

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.

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.

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.

This spreadsheet template is designed to support the Pre-RFP Business Development Culture – What Does Your Team Believe About BD? prompt set. It allows team leaders to collect and review responses from up to 10 participants, viewing each prompt alongside its corresponding answer. Built-in space is provided to interpret team responses using insights developed specifically for this set. The goal is to make it easier for leaders to identify common BD misconceptions, track patterns in mindset or behavior, and build a plan that reflects the team’s true starting point.

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.