It’s 7:42 p.m. on a Thursday. You’re on slide 18 of 36. The scope has changed twice in the last three hours. You’re stitching together fragments of old decks, refining value drivers, and trying to align timelines, budget, and team capacity… while still making it all feel tailored.

And you haven’t even pitched yet.

You know the odds: there’s a good chance this proposal won’t convert. The client might sit on it. Or change direction. Or go with the lowest bidder.

But you still put in the hours.

Because not responding feels worse than losing.

This is the quiet reality of consultancy business development.

Every proposal is a bet. And far too many are losing ones.

The cost is bigger than you think

Most market access firms underestimate the resource drain of speculative work. A typical proposal isn’t just a quote and a few paragraphs. It’s a crafted narrative. A mini-strategy. Often built from scratch. Always built under pressure.

It pulls in senior time, distracts delivery teams, and burns hours that can’t be billed.

Multiply that by five, ten, or twenty proposals a quarter, and suddenly you’re pouring a huge chunk of your team’s strategic capacity into work that doesn’t make it past procurement.

You’re not selling brochures. You’re selling confidence

Pharma doesn’t just want a price, they want to know you understand the brief, the brand, the pressure points. They want the reassurance that you’ve done this before, and that you’re not just good, you’re right for this.

Which means every proposal needs:

• An angle
• A structure
• A logic flow that proves value
• Evidence you can do what you say
• And enough tailoring to make it feel bespoke

That’s a lot of effort for something you might not win.

And that’s the point. It has to be good, but it can’t keep costing what it’s costing.

Proposals are strategy under pressure

Most good proposals are accelerated versions of the real work.

You’re pulling in past insights, identifying comparators, mapping deliverables to budget, shaping early narratives, all on partial information and in a 48-hour window.

But if your internal knowledge is scattered and your workflows are manual, you’ll spend more time rebuilding than responding.

You’ll miss nuance. Or miss the deadline.

And either way, your firm pays the price.

The firms pulling ahead are changing how they pitch

They’re not just chasing opportunities, they’re setting up systems to respond to them smarter.

That means:

• Reusing structured insights and frameworks from past projects
• Instantly surfacing relevant evidence and case studies
• Plugging pre-approved assets into customisable proposal templates
• Reducing the proposal build from days to hours, without sacrificing quality

We’re not here talking about the latest tool offering shiny automation for the sake of it. It’s all about winning faster, more often, at lower internal cost.

Win rate is only half the story

Yes, you want to win more proposals. But you also need to lose smarter.

That means knowing early when the cost to respond outweighs the upside.

It means reducing the internal drag of speculative work so that even lost bids don’t slow you down.

And it means making proposal development a strategic asset, not a silent drain.

Every proposal is a bet. The question is whether your system stacks the odds in your favour.

Because in the current age of tighter margins and faster timelines, the firms that can pitch with speed and substance will always beat the ones stuck starting from scratch.

Let’s stop burning time.. and start building proposals like we mean to win.