The Pursuit Function Nobody Has Built Yet

By Mitchell Schuckman, PCC | Founder, The Schuckman Group

Denise, a Chief Commercial Officer at a global consulting firm, sat down last fall with twelve proposals her firm had submitted over the prior six months. She read the executive summaries back to back. By the fourth one, her eyes started to glaze over.

Same opening move. Same value language. Same promise to be a trusted partner who understood the client's business. Professionally produced. Not one of them would have made a buyer lean forward.

Built for a Different Problem

Most firms built their proposal teams to solve a volume problem. Partners pursuing work across multiple services and industries needed consistency, templates, a credentials library, a team that turned documents around quickly. The goal was throughput, not differentiation.

AI has solved the throughput problem. Used well, it generates first drafts in minutes, profiles clients in detail, maps the competition, and assembles supporting materials without a human touching it.

Which surfaces the real question. If AI handles all of that, what is the pursuit team's actual job?

The Journalist at the World Cup

A journalist covering the FIFA World Cup this summer does not need to know how to score a goal like Messi, but they need to know who Messi is. They need to understand what a particular match means in the context of a team's journey, what a goalkeeper is thinking seconds before facing a penalty kick, and what their readers need to feel to stay riveted to the story rather than just the score.

A journalist who only knows how to write, but not what they are writing about or who they are writing for, produces content that informs without landing.

Many pursuit professionals made the same mistake. They believed their job was to take content from subject matter experts and shape it into a polished document. That’s production work. AI does it now, and it does it faster.

What the function actually requires is someone who understands both sides of the table well enough to decide what the story is before a single word gets written.

What One CCO Recognized

After reading those uninspiring proposals, Denise ran the numbers on her firm's proposals. She analyzed volume, win rate, document quality, and the cost of her pursuit team.

She then set out to restructure the firm’s ‘Proposal and Pursuit’ function by building a smaller, more agile team. She hired a fractional pursuit leader who had spent years on both sides of the table. He brought two strong collaborators with him, and they had AI handle the research, competitive mapping, document production, and editorial polish.

What her new pursuit leader brought was something her current pursuit team never had. A point of view. Before any proposal was written he developed a strategic vision for how the firm should be positioned against this competitive field, for this buyer, at this moment. He profiled the client's decision makers. What mattered to them professionally. What they needed to show their own leadership. Where they were likely skeptical, and what it would take to move them.

From that foundation he built a creative narrative, with a specific point of view about the client's challenge and a clear argument for why their firm was the right choice. Every section of the proposal reinforced that argument. Nothing was boilerplate. Everything was written with purpose.

The first proposal under the new model targeted a financial services company looking for a strategic post-deal integration consultant. They won the work. Then they won the next two competitive proposals they entered.

A year later Denise is ecstatic. Her firm’s win rate has climbed significantly. A team of three part-timers is doing what ten full-timers used to do. The storyline frameworks and AI process guides they built are now in the hands of professionals across the firm, who handle standard proposals themselves. The most important proposals are left to the team who builds them best.

The Function Nobody Has Built Yet

One person who understands the game. Two strong collaborators. AI running everything else. A part-time pursuit team that outperforms what most firms are running at a fraction of the cost.

There is another dimension that raises the stakes further. AI is flooding professional services markets with capacity, and price is compressing as a result. In many professional services proposals, price does not win the engagement, but it can lose it. What separates the winner, after competitive pricing, is the story. As the cost of producing a proposal drops, a pursuit team that brings strategic thinking becomes worth more.

The firms that build this pursuit function first will win more work. They will keep raising the bar on what a proposal can be, while everyone else is still waiting for the next template.

Mitchell Schuckman is the Founder and CEO of The Schuckman Group LLC. He is a Professional Certified Coach credentialed by the International Coaching Federation and the author of I'll Tell You a Great Story. theschuckmangroup.com

Note on privacy: Names and identifying details have been changed. The experiences described are drawn from multiple client engagements and do not represent any single individual.