Workforce Pressures and Talent Gaps

Your Best Proposal Manager Just Left. Now What?

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Building teams that survive turnover and thrive under pressure.

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You've seen it happen. A senior capture manager leaves. A proposal director retires. A key writer takes an offer across town.

And suddenly, the institutional knowledge that held your BD operation together walks out the door.

This is happening constantly across our industry. The revolving door of BD talent is one of the most underestimated threats to sustained win rates. Most organizations don't realize how dependent they are on specific individuals until those individuals are gone.

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The problem isn't just hiring though.

You can backfill a role. You can't backfill ten years of customer relationships, lessons learned from past pursuits, and the instincts that come from knowing what works and what doesn't.

Teams that rely on tribal knowledge are one resignation away from starting over.

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What do resilient BD organizations do differently?

They treat training as a hedge against turnover. They build capture processes that are documented, repeatable, and transferable. They invest in developing bench strength before they need it, not after someone gives notice.

They also build proposal teams designed to thrive under pressure. That means cross-training. Clear role definition. Processes that don't collapse when one person is unavailable.

If your top three BD contributors left tomorrow, how long would it take to recover? Weeks? Months? Would you even know where to start?

If you don't like the answer, that's a signal. The time to build resilience is before the next departure, not after.

Turnover isn't going away. Is your organization built to absorb that turnover or be disrupted by it?

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Click here to speak with a Shipley consultant.