Background: The content presents a conceptually powerful and attractive framework for understanding the proposal development process to capture the complexity of the steps that contribute to successful grant writing. Based on experiences from 15 years in research administration and using real-life examples, the author juxtaposes the diverse roles required of grants professionals in creating a competitive grant application. In the context of increasing university emphasis on attracting extramural grant funding, this timely article focuses on proposal development skills using a step-by-step process including a sixpart analysis of each role within the framework, dividing the role into primary subtopics all highly relevant to each specific role. By deconstructing the art of grantsmanship, the whole suite of proposal development processes is considered with this approach with the intention that research development professionals will have solid actionable guidance in a cohesively planned delivery to capture the intricate mechanisms that translate to successful grantsmanship and acquire a set of tools to use to train grant seekers.