Your Proposals May Not Be the Problem
You invest significant time and resources into every bid. Your team works long hours. The submissions go out on time. And yet, the wins don’t come as often as they should.
Here’s what most firms get wrong: they assume the proposal is the problem. So they rewrite their executive summary, redesign their templates, or hire a better editor. But low win rates are rarely a writing problem. They are a process problem.
The real question isn’t whether your proposals are good enough. It’s whether your entire pursuit process – from how you find opportunities to how you learn from outcomes – is working the way it should.
That’s precisely what the Pursuit Excellence Diagnostic addresses.
Most Organizations Don’t Know Where They’re Losing
Think about the last proposal your firm lost. Do you know why? Not the generic feedback from the debrief. The real reason. Was it the writing? The team selection? A go/no-go decision that should have gone the other way? A competitor who started positioning six months before the RFP dropped?
The truth is, most firms can’t pinpoint where their pursuit process breaks down. They don’t have a benchmark for what “good” looks like across the full bid life cycle. They improve one thing, maybe their proposal design or their compliance process, without realizing the bigger gaps are upstream or downstream of the proposal itself.
We built the Pursuit Excellence Diagnostic to solve that problem. It is a comprehensive, structured diagnostic of your organization’s entire bid process – not just the document you submit, but everything that happens before and after it.
A Diagnostic Built on 15 Years of Experience
Over the past 15 years, we have worked on more than 750 engagements with 250+ clients. We have seen what high-performing pursuit organizations do differently. And we have seen, over and over, the same patterns that hold back good firms.
We’ve distilled that experience into the Pursuit Excellence Diagnostic – a structured assessment across five dimensions of the complete bid lifecycle:
Opportunity Identification and Qualification
How you find, filter, and decide which opportunities to pursue. This is where most firms first leave money on the table: chasing everything instead of pursuing the right work strategically.
Pursuit Strategy and Positioning
What happens before the RFP drops. Early client engagement, capture planning, competitive intelligence, and teaming decisions. The best pursuits start long before the solicitation is issued.
Proposal Development and Production
From kickoff to submission. Content workflows, review cycles, compliance management, and version control. This is the part most firms focus on, and where we often find the issues are symptomatic of problems that started earlier.
Post-Submission and Continuous Improvement
Interview preparation, client debriefs, internal lessons learned, and keeping your project profiles and resumes current. The most underinvested phase of the bid lifecycle, and the one with the highest return when done well.
Tools, Technology, and AI
The systems that determine whether your process scales or stalls. The firms that win most consistently aren't just better at writing. They're better equipped. They use CRM platforms, proposal management tools, structured content libraries, and AI to work faster, more consistently, and with fewer resources. With experienced proposal professionals increasingly difficult to recruit and retain, productivity per person matters more than ever. This category evaluates whether your technology is a competitive advantage or an unrecognized liability.
The Pursuit Excellence Diagnostic is not a checklist. It is a guided assessment conducted by our team, built around document review, stakeholder interviews, and honest evaluation against observable, measurable, and actionable best practices. It’s built for organizations of any size.
Each best practice across the five dimensions is scored on a four-point scale, from ‘Not Implemented’ through ‘Fully Implemented.’ But the scores are not the point. The value is in the observations, the patterns we identify across dimensions, and the specific, prioritized recommendations we deliver.
Your diagnostic includes:
- A detailed assessment of each best practice across the five dimensions – what we observed, how it compares to what leading proposal organizations do consistently, and where the gaps exist.
- A prioritized action plan that distinguishes between significant improvements that will have an immediate impact on win rates and minor refinements that build long-term maturity.
- Concrete, implementable recommendations. Not theory, not generic consulting advice. Specific steps your organization can take, tailored to your size, sector, and current capabilities.
This Is Not a Proposal Evaluation
We also offer a separate service, our 21-Point Proposal Evaluation, that assesses the quality of a specific proposal against best practices in strategy, content, and design. It answers the question: “How good is this document?”
The Pursuit Excellence Diagnostic answers a different question entirely: “How good is our process for producing winning submissions?”
The two services complement each other. The Proposal Evaluation tells you where your proposals stand today. The Pursuit Excellence Diagnostic explains why they stand there, and what to change so every future submission is stronger.
Many clients start with a Proposal Evaluation and then move to the Pursuit Excellence Diagnostic when they realize the issues they’re seeing in their proposals are rooted in upstream and downstream process gaps. Others start here, at the system level, and use the recommendations to transform their entire organization’s approach to competitive bidding.
Built for Organizations That Compete for Work
We designed the Pursuit Excellence Diagnostic for professional services firms that win work through competitive procurement – RFQs, RFPs, and formal solicitations where the quality of your pursuit process directly determines your success.
Whether you’re in architecture, engineering, construction, healthcare, technology, or any other sector where competitive bidding drives growth, this diagnostic evaluates the capabilities that determine whether you win consistently or leave it to chance. The best practices are grounded in what we’ve observed across 250+ clients and every major professional services sector, and they are designed to be pragmatic and implementable for organizations of any size.
Stop Guessing. Start Winning. Systematically.
If you’re tired of investing significant time and resources into proposals without understanding why some win and others don’t, the Pursuit Excellence Diagnostic will give you clarity.
Not opinions. Not vague recommendations. A structured, evidence-based assessment of your entire pursuit process. And a clear road map to winning more often.
Let’s Get Started
If you are serious about transforming how your organization pursues and wins work, we should talk.
We work with firms that know they can deliver exceptional value to their client, and are ready to build the pursuit capabilities to prove it, every time.
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