Practitioner describes those individuals with responsibilities for obtaining—and retaining—government business. This term includes customer representatives, capture managers, proposal managers, proposal coordinators, contracts specialists, estimating specialists, as well as those on the periphery of the business development process. University students planning a career path to include these functions are considered "practitioners-in-training" or "practitioners-in-waiting."
Speaking now to active practitioners: As such, you are successful or you would not be interested in this book. If you are like virtually everyone in the field, you would like to be ever more successful. Getting from where you are to where you’d like to be certainly involves gaining and maintaining an understanding of “best practices†in your field. Today, those practices are both complex and continuously evolving. Therefore, the only way of being truly successful in this field is to continuously refresh your individual and organizational skills and knowledge.