A $70M aerospace and defense business was facing significant pricing pressures. To enable further gross margin growth and value creation, my team had to develop a sophisticated proposal development process in 3 months.

The key was to integrate all sites with a standard proposal development process. By having a more strategic product opportunity funnel and bid/no bid process, the number of quotes reduced. This allowed our teams to focus on innovation, technology, and cost reduction ideas as part of a meaningful value proposition offer.

We created a BET (Business Engagement Team) process, consisting of Operations, Sales, Quality, Finance and Engineering functional team members. This team’s job is to create one coherent proposal, consisting of market and customer review completed by Sales team, and product cost owned by Engineering teams. Both elements tie together into a financial presentation to the Executive team, and then mutual approval prior to submittal to customer.

In a two and half year period Revenue grew by 81%, gross margin experienced 122% growth and the overall profitability gain 1,100 bps. The overall win rate improved from 22% to mid-40s%.