Winning Work is a Team Sport
How often have you decided to go after something because you know how to do the work? Many firms assume winning work comes down to technical qualifications. But, after nearly two decades of leading, developing, and watching pursuits up close, I've come to believe the bigger factor is how well the technical and marketing sides work together, and that most of it is decided by a handful of everyday habits established long before the deadline.
That distinction matters, especially in qualifications-based selection. The firms competing for your work are qualified. Your competitors have the very same talented engineers and planners, relevant projects, and decades of experience. Being qualified gets you in the door, but qualifications alone don’t necessarily separate you from everyone else who can also do the job.
What can separate you is how clearly you demonstrate why your team, experience and approach are particularly relevant to this client and this project. And doing that well requires both technical and marketing expertise working in tandem.
It requires putting the process before the people.
We’re approaching the same pursuit from two very different places
There’s a reason proposal development can create friction between technical and marketing teams. We’re coming to the process with different responsibilities, different pressures and different definitions of what needs our attention most.
Technical staff are responsible for delivering projects. They’re thinking about accuracy, risk, constructability, schedule, client needs, and their utilization rate. Their days are already full and a proposal can feel like one more thing layered on top of the work they’re already responsible for.
For those of us in marketing, the proposal is the work. We’re thinking about differentiation, messaging, compliance, deadlines, and how an evaluator is going to experience the submittal. We’re looking across the whole pursuit and trying to figure out how dozens of pieces come together into one clear case for selecting our team.
And the trouble starts when we forget that the other person on our team is operating under a different set of rules.
When marketing asks a PM for project information while they’re dealing with a client deadline, it’s understandable that the response might be, “Don’t we already have something you can use?” And when marketing receives three generic paragraphs at 4:30 the afternoon before a draft is due, it’s equally understandable that we’re wondering how we’re supposed to turn them into something meaningful.
The answer isn’t to make engineers better marketers or marketers more technical. It’s to get better at giving each other what we actually need.
Make it easier to give good input
One of the simplest things marketing can do is stop handing technical staff a blank page. Asking someone who already has a full day of project work to "send me something about this project" is a terrible assignment, and you'll usually get a forgettable paragraph back. Better questions get better answers. Instead of "Can you send me something about this project?" try "What was the biggest constraint on this project, and how did our team solve it?" Instead of asking an engineer to write their own bio, hand them a draft and ask whether you've captured the right experience. And instead of firing off six emails over three days, batch the questions into one. Reviewing is almost always easier than creating, so give people something to react to instead of a blank page.
Technical staff can meet marketing halfway. Specifics are gold. Numbers, constraints, decisions, outcomes, client concerns, and lessons learned all give marketing something to work with, where adjectives give us nothing. Just as important, share those details early enough that we can actually do something with them. A 15-minute conversation at the start of a pursuit is worth far more than a beautifully written paragraph that lands the night before the deadline.
The evaluator doesn’t experience your proposal the way you do
This is one of the easiest things to lose sight of during a pursuit.
Your team may have spent weeks developing the submittal, debating project examples, refining the org chart, and getting every last form in place. The evaluator experiences it very differently. They may sit down with five, eight, or 10 similar packages and work through them in a relatively short period of time, scoring each one against published criteria.
They aren’t giving you points for how hard you worked on it. They’re looking for evidence.
That’s why relevance and specificity matter. “We successfully completed a highly complex utility project” doesn’t give an evaluator much to work with. “We relocated a 24-inch water main with no service interruption” does. Ther first example asks the evaluator to take your word for it. The second gives them something concrete they can understand and remember.
This is also where technical and marketing collaboration matters most. Marketing can recognize that a generic statement needs more substance and ask the questions that uncover it, but we can’t manufacture the technical details that make the story credible. Technical staff know what actually happened, why it was difficult, what decisions were made and why, and what the outcome was. Marketing knows how to connect those details to what the evaluator is being asked to score.
You need both perspectives.
Successful collaboration doesn’t have to mean more work
The solution is spending more time writing proposal content. In fact, good collaboration should result in exactly the opposite.
For marketing, that means resisting the temptation to send someone a blank page and ask, “Can you write something about this project?” A much better question is, “What was the biggest constraint on this project, and how did our team solve it?” Instead of asking someone to write a bio from scratch, give them a draft and ask whether you’ve captured their experience that matters.
Provide content that technical staff can throw darts at. Reviewing content is usually easier than creating, particularly for someone whose primary job revolves around math.
Technical staff can make the process easier, too, by giving marketing specifics instead of adjectives. Eliminate the words very, many, good, and efficient from your vocabulary. Numbers, constraints, decisions, outcomes, client concerns, and lessons learned are what’s valuable.
The best pursuit processes start before anyone starts writing
I’m in the lucky position where the decision to “Go” has usually been made before a client reaches out to me. By the time, we’ve connected, they have already decided it’s a worthwhile pursuit and they are ready to go the extra step by using me, a third party, and 9 times out of 10 that comes with the unspoken commitment that resources will be available (or made available) to get the work done because it is indeed that important.
Within firms, a good go/no-go process should be a shared conversation because each group brings a different perspective. Marketing and business development may have background insight into the client relationship, competitive landscape, and relevant positioning. Technical leadership better understands project fit, staff availability, delivery risk, and whether the proposed team can realistically support the work. Putting those perspectives together gives you a better picture of whether an opportunity deserves the firm’s time.
And that time matters. A meaningful pursuit can consume dozens or even hundreds of hours across marketing teams, technical staff, and firm leadership. Saying no to an opportunity where you have little chance of winning protects those hours for the opportunities where you’re more likely to succeed.
Once the answer is “go,” the next step should be a real kickoff. Not a 30-minute meeting where everyone reads through the RFP together, but a working session where decisions are made: Why are we a strong fit? What does this client care about? Who are we likely competing against? Which projects prove our case? Who belongs on the team? What do we still need to figure out?
By the time the meeting ends, everyone should understand the strategy, the team, the projects you’re featuring, the internal schedule, and what they personally owe to the pursuit. Anything that remains unanswered should leave the meeting with a name and a deadline attached to it.
Give the proposal room to get better
One of the biggest differences between a good proposal process and a painful one is simply time, so work backward from the deadline. Whenever the schedule allows, I strive for a complete first draft no less than one week before pencils down. This isn’t meant to be a skeleton outline with six yellow boxes that say "TECH INPUT HERE." Not to say there might still be one or two blanks to fill in, but by the first draft, you’ve got a substantial, mostly compliant document the entire team can actually review. From there, give people a defined review window and one place to comment. Whether it’s a Bluebeam session or a shared PDF, there is one source of truth. What you're trying to avoid is five marked-up PDFs, three email chains, and someone quietly editing a version they downloaded last Tuesday.
A predictable schedule also changes the quality of the review itself. When principals and technical leaders know in advance when their input is due, they have a much better chance of giving thoughtful feedback while there's still time to use it. The goal was never more reviewing. It's a better review at a point where it can still make a difference.
This isn't a ONe-sided problem
When proposal development turns chaotic, it's easy to call it a marketing problem. When technical input shows up late, it's easy to call it an engineering team problem. Neither label is useful. Pursuits are expensive. They consume marketing hours, technical hours, and attention that could be going somewhere else. So when the process makes it harder for good people to contribute their best thinking, that's a firm performance problem, not a departmental one.
The good news is that improving it doesn’t require a new org chart, a new software platform or a giant process overhaul. It can start with a few changes on the very next pursuit: run an honest go/no-go, hold the kickoff earlier, ask better questions, give specific technical input, build the schedule backward and keep everyone working from the same document.
Most importantly, you get the technical team and marketing staff talking sooner.
Technical expertise matters (of course it does!). But in a qualifications-based pursuit, expertise that stays trapped in someone’s head, buried in a project sheet, or reduced to the same generic claims every competitor is making won’t do much to differentiate you.
The firms that chase pursuits well make their qualifications easy to understand, easy to believe, and easy to remember.
That’s not marketing doing its job instead of technical. That’s technical and marketing doing their jobs together.
