Proposal Strategy

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).

A good win theme facilitates a decision-making process in the client’s mind. That decision might be to entrust you with a project that could define someone’s career. It might involve working side-by-side with your project manager for two years, or inviting your team into their office space for six months. Whatever the case, the client is making a high-stakes choice—and your job is to help them feel confident in it. This 10 step process helps you do it comprehensively and persuasively.

In a detailed conversation, John Velick shares how he uses ChatGPT to streamline proposal development. By creating dedicated project spaces, training the AI on their brand and projects, and uploading documents like CVs, RFPs, and technical reports, they’re able to generate strong first drafts for everything from project understanding sections to risk management frameworks. AI also helps with rewriting, email drafting, summarizing massive background reports, and spotting gaps in compliance with RFP requirements.

A good win theme facilitates a decision-making process in the client’s mind. That decision might be to entrust you with a project that could define their career. It might involve working side-by-side with your project manager for two years or inviting your team into their office space for six months. Whatever the case, the client is making a high-stakes choice and your job is to help them feel confident in it. This 10 step process helps you do it comprehensively and persuasively.

Rapid Fire Methodology Storyboarding brings proposal contributors together for a focused session in which, in just 2 to 3 hours, you’ll generate all the content needed to build a strong work plan — content that normally takes days or weeks to collect. You can also extend this exercise to storyboard your entire proposal. This video focuses on the work plan portion and uses recognized best practices for proposal strategy, while throwing in some helpful hints for running an effective storyboarding session. Look for related units on this exercise under the topic, Proposal Management.

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.

After completing this prompt set, your team will be more familiar with the terms associated with win themes and Blue Team Reviews (impartial reviews for evaluating the strength of your win themes before committing them to writing in the proposal.) They will be more comfortable talking about client expectations and in particular, their emotions. They’ll be quicker with answers during win theme strategy sessions and will know what’s expected of them during a proposal development process.

A good win theme facilitates a decision-making process in the client’s mind. That decision might be to entrust you with a project that could define their career. It might involve working side-by-side with your project manager for two years or inviting your team into their office space for six months. Whatever the case, the client is making a high-stakes choice and your job is to help them feel confident in it. This 10 step process helps you do it comprehensively and persuasively.

Rapid Fire Methodology Storyboarding brings proposal contributors together for a focused session in which, in less than 2 hours, you’ll generate all the content needed to build a strong work plan — content that normally takes days or weeks to collect. If you want, you can also extend this exercise to storyboard your entire proposal.

A Red Team Review Exercise is a structured session that helps technical and consulting teams perform a focused, impartial evaluation of a near-final proposal. The reviewers—called the Red Team—are individuals who did not contribute to the proposal and can assess it from the client’s perspective. The exercise includes six clear steps: recruiting reviewers, choosing a collaboration platform, distributing materials, preparing the proposal team, leading the review, and implementing the feedback.

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.

Mural is a visual collaboration platform designed for quick idea capture. You can add sticky notes and comments, but Mural does not offer a way to export all your text automatically. To save your input outside the board, you will need to manually copy and paste. We recommend using Mural for brainstorming, and relying on Twennie's downloadable templates when you need structured, exportable files.