Pursuit Strategist
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A pursuit strategist is the BD or marketing professional at an AEC firm who owns the win strategy for a specific pursuit: translating client intelligence into positioning decisions, guiding the narrative arc of the proposal, and ensuring the team is competing on terrain where the firm can actually win.
Where the pursuit strategist sits in the pursuit hierarchy
The title rarely appears on an org chart. In practice, the pursuit strategist role is played by whoever has enough client knowledge and organizational authority to make real positioning calls: sometimes a BD director, sometimes a senior proposal manager, sometimes a practice area leader who knows the client. The distinction that matters is between someone who shapes the strategy and someone who executes against it. Most AEC firms conflate the two, which is why so many proposals read like capability inventories instead of arguments. The strategist's job is to answer the question the client is actually asking, which is almost never "who has done this exact project type most often."
What pursuit strategy work looks like inside a live pursuit
A pursuit strategist enters the work at or before go/no-go, not at kickoff. By the time the RFP drops, the positioning should already be directionally set: which project experiences anchor credibility, which team members signal the right expertise, and what the win themes will be before anyone has written a single word of Section E on an SF-330. During the proposal itself, the strategist is the person who pushes back when a technical lead defaults to firm-centric language or when the project approach section describes process instead of demonstrating understanding. After shortlist, the strategist owns the interview prep, connecting the written narrative to what the selection panel actually needs to hear in 30 minutes.
The gap between strategy and execution most firms don't solve
The most common failure mode is a strong win strategy that never reaches the page because the people writing the proposal didn't have access to the reasoning behind it. A strategist can define a sharp angle on a pursuit and still watch the proposal drift generic because the writer is working from last year's boilerplate with no context about what makes this client different. The second failure mode is a strategist who is spread across too many concurrent pursuits to stay in actual contact with the content being produced. Kantiv addresses this by capturing the strategic rationale alongside the proposal assets, so when a writer pulls a past pursuit for reference, the positioning logic travels with the content rather than disappearing when the pursuit closes.
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