Why Your Best BD People are Stuck in Proposal Production
There's a resource allocation problem hiding inside most GovCon growth functions, and it's costing firms more than they realize.
The BD lead who should be in front of customers — building the relationships, gathering the intelligence, shaping the requirement before the RFP drops — is instead sitting in proposal reviews. Writing the executive summary. Chasing SMEs for section drafts. Filling in the color team comments that didn't get addressed before the review.
This is a system problem. And it's one of the clearest signals that a firm's BD and proposal functions have never been properly separated — or that the proposal function has never been properly resourced.
How it happens
The sequence is almost always the same. A firm wins work early on through hustle. The BD lead is the one who drove it, knows the customer, knows the opportunity, and naturally gets pulled into the proposal. It works. The habit forms.
As the firm grows, the pipeline gets bigger, and the BD lead keeps getting pulled in at proposal time because they're the one with context. The institutional knowledge is in their head, not in a capture file. So every proposal kickoff starts with a download from one person, and that person is now running three pursuits simultaneously while also trying to build the relationships for the next three.
The result: every pursuit gets less than it needs. Capture gets shallow because the BD lead doesn't have time to go deep. Proposals get generic because the intel that would differentiate them never fully transferred. And the customer engagement work that should be happening in the 12 months before the RFP gets squeezed by whatever's due this Friday.
What the BD function is actually supposed to do
Business development, done right, is almost entirely a pre-RFP function. By the time a solicitation is public, the BD work on that pursuit should be substantially complete. The relationships should be built. The customer's priorities should be understood. The competitive picture should be mapped. The positioning should be set.
If that work happened, the proposal team has something real to work with — actual win themes grounded in customer intelligence, not generic capability statements dressed up with the agency's name. The BD lead can hand off a complete capture file and move to the next pursuit, rather than staying tethered to every proposal in flight.
When it didn't happen — when BD and proposals are effectively the same function, running on the same timeline — the whole system collapses into reactive mode. Every pursuit feels like a fire drill because it is one.
The SME problem that makes it worse
Layered on top of the BD bottleneck is the SME problem. The technical experts who should be writing proposal sections aren't available, aren't interested, or aren't skilled at translating what they know into evaluator-friendly prose. So the BD lead fills the gap — writing sections they're not positioned to write, based on conversations they had to schedule at the last minute, producing content that gets marked up in color team because it's not specific enough.
None of this is the SME's fault. Nobody gave them a framework for how their expertise translates into a compelling proposal argument. Nobody trained them on what an evaluator is actually looking for. Nobody explained that "we have deep experience in this area" is not a win theme — it's a sentence that appears in every competitor's proposal.
The BD lead ends up carrying the cognitive load for the entire pursuit because they're the only one who can hold the thread from capture to submission. That's not sustainable at scale. And it's not how the highest-performing growth functions are structured.
What the separation actually looks like
In firms that have solved this problem, the functions are genuinely distinct — not just on an org chart, but in practice.
BD owns the pre-RFP period. Customer engagement, opportunity shaping, competitive intelligence, go/no-go decisions, capture strategy. Their output is a capture file that a proposal team can actually use: documented customer hot buttons, differentiated positioning, competitor counter-strategies, past performance recommendations.
Proposals owns the RFP period. Kickoff, compliance matrix, outline, section assignments, writing, reviews, production. They work from the capture file, not from a download session with a BD lead who has 20 other things happening.
The handoff between those two functions is where most firms struggle. A clean handoff means the proposal team isn't starting from zero, and the BD lead isn't getting pulled back in to explain what they meant when they wrote "customer priority: mission continuity" with no further context.
Clean handoffs require documentation discipline — capture files that are actually maintained, win strategy documents that are actually written, opportunity briefs that are actually shared. None of that happens without someone owning it. And ownership requires that the BD function is resourced and structured to do the pre-RFP work rather than spending that time in proposal production.
The growth ceiling this creates
Firms that never solve this problem hit a ceiling. They can grow to a point — the point where the BD lead's bandwidth runs out. Adding headcount doesn't fix it if the new people get pulled into the same cycle. The system produces the same ratio of chaos to output regardless of how many people are in it, because the structure that creates the chaos hasn't changed.
The firms that break through that ceiling have usually done two things: invested in proposal infrastructure that can run without the BD lead holding it together, and created the expectation that BD's primary job happens before the RFP — not during it.
That shift doesn't happen overnight. But it starts with being honest about where BD time is actually going, and whether the people who should be building your next pipeline are instead editing this week's proposal.
Krystn Macomber, CP APMP Fellow, LEED AP
Founder + CEO | Summit Strategy
