Where the Next Round of Gains Is Sitting?

PSMJ just announced the headline result from its 2026 AE Financial Performance Benchmark, and it's a record: participating firms posted a median 20.5% operating profit margin on net revenue, the highest in the survey's history.

That's a real milestone and worth celebrating.

Tech impact on operational efficiency

But the more interesting part was what PSMJ president Gregory Hart credited for it. He was clear that the top firms aren't “simply benefiting from favorable market conditions”, they're making deliberate investments. And two of the drivers he named were operational efficiency from technology investments and better workforce productivity and utilization.

Read that again if you're on a marketing or pursuit team, because he's describing you.

Record profitability is being built partly on firms getting more out of their people through technology. And pursuits are where a lot of the next gain is still sitting—with the firms already pointing technology at it setting the pace.

Most firms have already pulled real efficiency out of project delivery, out of finance, out of operations. That work is a big reason these margins exist. Pursuits are the next frontier. For a lot of firms the proposal process is still largely manual, still leaning on a few people's memory, still the thing that eats nights and weekends when an RFP lands with two weeks on the clock. That makes it one of the biggest open opportunities left—and the firms already bringing technology and discipline to it are the ones who'll set the next benchmark.

If you want to see this at your own firm, you don't need a tool to start. Pull your last ten or fifteen pursuits and look at three things: 

• How many landed with under two weeks on the clock
• How much of each proposal got built from scratch versus pulled from something you'd already written
• How many leaned on one or two people who just know where everything lives. 

You'll have a real picture of your pursuit process in an afternoon, and it's usually a picture nobody at the firm has looked at straight on.

The distinction to draw though

A financial benchmark like PSMJ's tells you how you performed. It's a survey, it's backward-looking, and it's genuinely useful for knowing where you stand against peers. What it can't tell you is where the time actually went inside a pursuit—how fast RFPs are turning around, how much of every proposal gets rebuilt from scratch, how much institutional knowledge walks out the door with each retirement. That's behavioral data, and it lives in the documents themselves. Which, full disclosure, is the thing we spend our days on at Kantiv.

Both kinds of data matter. But if record margins are the reward for operational discipline, the firms that push that same discipline into how they pursue work are the ones who'll still be at the top of this list in five years.

The 20.5% number is a ceiling worth studying. It's also a signal, the efficiency gains that reshaped delivery and operations are now reaching the pursuit process, and the firms rethinking business as usual there are the ones who'll set the next number.

You can read PSMJ's full release at psmj.com/fin