In the world of AEC business development, saying “yes” feels like a default setting.
Yes to every RFP that comes in.
Yes to last-minute proposals.
Yes to chasing long shots in hopes they’ll turn into wins.
It’s a cycle most BD and marketing teams know all too well. But beneath all that activity lies a simple truth: volume doesn’t equal value.
The real cost of saying yes too often
When teams chase every opportunity, they stretch their time, resources, and attention across too many directions. The result? Lower hit rates, rushed proposals, and rising frustration across business development, marketing, and project delivery teams.
BD leaders see their teams spinning wheels on pursuits that were never a strong fit. Executives notice resource allocation skewing toward low-margin work. And proposal teams? They’re often scrambling to find past project data and staff resumes just hours before a deadline.
At some point, the firm has to ask: are we investing in the right work? Or are we just going after the next available work?
Every moment spent chasing a poor-fit pursuit is time not spent building client relationships, refining strategies, or preparing higher-quality proposals. Over time, this reactive cycle takes a toll on firm morale, team capacity, and long-term profitability.
Reclaiming control with smarter pursuit decisions
The answer isn’t to stop pursuing. It’s to start qualifying.
Imagine if, before every go/no-go meeting – even at the early stages – your team had instant access to:
- Past projects and personnel that closely matched the pursuit
- Performance data showing which types of work you’ve historically won—or lost
- Insight into client history, internal capacity, and likely competition
With this level of clarity, your team wouldn’t need to guess. You’d know which pursuits were worth the effort and which to walk away from, confidently and early.
This is especially important for firms with limited bandwidth or lean BD teams. In those environments, every pursuit decision carries weight. A poor choice can do much more than cost you a proposal. It can impact delivery, staff allocation, and profitability downstream.
How smarter tools lead to better decisions
Solving the pursuit problem isn’t a matter of hiring more people or working more hours. It involves empowering your existing team with the right intelligence at the right time.
What if your CRM could automatically surface relevant past projects and experts when an opportunity arises? What if it could suggest the best-fit pursuits based on your firm’s strengths, past performance, and strategic goals?
What if your proposal team could prep faster, pulling relevant bios and past project writeups in minutes rather than hours? What if BD leaders could finally answer, “Is this pursuit aligned with our goals?” with hard data instead of gut instinct?
The lack of visibility is a real challenge. And without clear insight into what’s worked before, BD teams often reinvent the wheel for each new pursuit. They spend hours combing through spreadsheets, email threads, and legacy systems trying to connect the dots.
But when the right information is at their fingertips – from win/loss history to client relationships to team availability to competition – they’re empowered to act strategically. Instead of saying yes out of habit, they can say yes with intention.
Even better: what if your BD, marketing, and project teams could access all of this without leaving the tools they already use?
That’s how you shift from reactive to strategic. From scattershot to selective. From overloaded to optimized.
And it’s how you build a business development engine that drives not just growth, but sustainable success.
Interested in learning more about how you can tap into the power of AI-empowered pursuit guidance? Reach out to speak with a Unanet representative today.
