The situation
A management consultancy serving mid-market clients — typically 8-12 week engagements priced between $80K and $240K. Their pipeline was healthy at the top but lossy in the middle: BD was sourcing 40+ qualified opportunities per quarter and converting only the first 12 into proposals. The rest aged out.
Partners were the bottleneck. Every proposal needed partner review for pricing and approach, and partners weren't going to scale. Adding BD staff would just push more proposals into the same review queue.
What we built
- Proposal drafting workspace — converts a short brief (problem, scope hypothesis, stakeholders) into a structured first draft using the firm's positioning library and past proposals.
- Pricing engine — a configurable model that calculates fees, blends rates, and surfaces margin in real time. Partners review the inputs, not the math.
- Section library — modular "why us," methodology, team-bio, and case-study blocks that snap into proposals based on the engagement type.
How the work ran
An Intelligence sprint came first — a two-day partner workshop where we mapped the actual decisions partners make on each proposal. Most pricing reviews were happening for the same three reasons; once those were codified, the pricing engine could handle 80% of the work and surface only the 20% that genuinely needed a partner.
The Systems build took three weeks. We shipped on a Friday. The next Monday, BD produced four proposals in a single day — and a partner reviewed all four in 40 minutes. The team called it "the moment."
I was the bottleneck. I still am, on the hardest deals. But I'm not the bottleneck on the work I should never have been reviewing. — Managing Partner
Outcomes after one quarter
- Proposal output rose from 4/week to 13/week.
- Close rate rose 11 points — likely because they were now pursuing the long tail of opportunities they previously skipped.
- Partner time on proposals dropped 70%; reinvested in delivery and client work.
What we'd say to a similar firm
The unlock here wasn't drafting speed — drafts had never been the slow part. The unlock was making pricing and approach decisions reviewable in minutes instead of hours. If you're a partner-led firm, find the decision your seniors make repeatedly and automate around that, not the words.