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You can backfill a role. You can't backfill ten years of customer relationships and hard-won instincts. The revolving door of BD talent is gutting win rates across the industry. The time to build resilience is before the next departure, not after.

Agencies are under pressure to accelerate. Shorter windows. Faster awards. Less patience for contractors who need time to spin up. The teams pulling ahead aren't faster—they're ready before the clock starts. Readiness is now a competitive advantage.

Leaner RFPs. Mission-focused evaluation. Compressed timelines. The federal acquisition environment is shifting faster than most BD teams are adapting. If your capture strategy looks the same as it did two years ago, you're already behind.

Your competitors aren't waiting for the RFP to validate their strategy. They're running Pre-RFP Pink Teams now—testing discriminators, stress-testing win themes, finding gaps while there's still time to fix them. Why aren't you?

Federal contracting is at an inflection point. AI is reshaping proposal development while agencies are emphasizing orals in evaluation criteria. The promise is real. So are the pitfalls. A disciplined approach to AI adoption separates the winners from the casualties.

Proposal heroics aren't a strategy. Industry leaders run Pink Team reviews before the RFP drops—validating win themes, stress-testing compliance, and turning capture intelligence into draft content. The payoff: 20-30% fewer rewrite hours and smoother reviews when the clock starts.

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Forward-looking business development leaders and Swiss-army-knife proposal professionals know that generative AI is the new gamechanger like Cloud collaboration was and even word processing software before that. If you want to not only become your proposal center’s AI wizard but also know how to lead your organization to realize the astounding advantages of AI adoption, then the BD.ai 1-day online workshop is for you.

Bidding on large contract vehicles, including multiple-award IDIQs (for instance Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts [GWACs]) can be challenging and time-consuming for any organization...

Are you ready for another deep dive into AI to take your business to the next level?We at Shipley believe that AI can streamline business development processes. You can learn more about the benefits of AI in business development in the Shipley BD.ai...

Selecting and implementing the right software solution is a key strategic step towards leveraging AI’s power to enhance BD.

Throughout 2023, we saw remarkable advancements in generative AI tools and their underlying language models. Some proposal professionals took to these like ducks to water and developed amazing techniques to do their jobs better and faster.

Pricing to Win (PTW) is a process for achieving a combination of capability and price that produces the desired win probability.Some people believe that “pricing to win” equates to being low price. In today’s marketplace, lowest cost is not necessarily the winning price. Lowest price only works in Lowest Price Technically Acceptable (LPTA) competitions.

When some people hear “price to win” they immediately think “lowest cost.” Would you be surprised to hear that the lowest offered price can still lose? Calculating an accurate price to win influences your solution or offering and can affect many aspects of your proposal—helping you increase your chances of winning...

Most of us understand that hope is not a good strategy, but don’t know how to put good practices in place...

Most of us think of a blueprint as a technical drawing or detailed plan necessary to help us build something—often according to codes or regulations. Another way of thinking about a blueprint is in the sports world – a game plan, a strategy, an approach to winning based on the competition.So, what is a blueprint to winning in business development?

Our fast-moving, deadline-driven profession values good managers, but needs great leaders. Often, we rise through the ranks by being great at our jobs. Because we’ve succeeded so far by doing great work, it can feel easier and more natural to focus on managing how the work gets done than on inspiring, guiding, and lifting up our teams.

What single meeting sets the stage for an entire proposal? The kickoff meeting. This meeting is quintessential for proposal managers to give their team the information and tools they need to write a winning proposal. It is also the perfect opportunity to set expectations for the entire proposal development stage...

Readability is a measure of how easy it is for your reader (customer) to both follow and understand your solutions, ideas, arguments, and recommendations...

Customers assume a proposal represents your best effort. If they find errors, they may doubt the accuracy of the rest of the proposal.Proposals go through several iterations and reviews before final submission to the customer. Each iteration ensures your document is clear, concise, and correct. Don’t underestimate the editing process. Build time into your schedule to ensure all reviews can be performed, that proofreading and revising are given enough space to be thorough.

Can I learn something worthwhile through on-demand, self-paced training?Yep – You can, with certain conditions:

• The content is current and instructionally sound with clear learning objectives and outcomes.
• You commit to learning and not just “finishing” the course.
• There are follow-up opportunities—refresher modules, documents, guidebooks to support your continuous learning

Everyone undergoes some form of training in their career. Most often, people receive training when they first start a new job. At the beginning of your career, you likely had weeks of training to help you learn the ropes. Once this grueling training period is over, you probably breathed a sigh of relief and closed the door on that chapter. But training is not just for beginners.

Capture managers do a lot of work before an RFP date is even thought about. Why? To better position their company to win the contract. When an archer is aiming at a stationary target, they must also do a lot of work before taking the shot...

Most sales and marketing veterans agree that 40-60 percent of the time, customers decide whom they would prefer to buy from before proposals are submitted...

As a writer, I often get the urge to sit at my keyboard and get to the good stuff—the writing. Most of the time, I’d like to just dive in and forget about all that tedious planning that always seems to take so much precious time when I could actually just do the writing...