Pursuit
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A pursuit is the complete sequence of coordinated activities a firm undertakes to win a specific contract opportunity, beginning when a lead is first qualified and ending at award or formal debrief, encompassing go/no-go evaluation, RFP response, shortlist interview preparation, and close-out.
Where a pursuit actually starts (and why most firms measure it wrong)
Most firms date a pursuit from when the RFP drops. That is the wrong starting line, and it quietly distorts hit rate calculations firm-wide. A pursuit begins the moment someone decides the opportunity is worth tracking: a relationship is being cultivated, a project is on a CRM watch list, or a seller-doer is walking the client's facility before any RFP is published. The pre-RFP window is where win probability is actually shaped; by the time the solicitation posts, the shortlist of three to five firms the owner already has in mind is largely set. Firms that track pursuits from RFP receipt systematically undercount the investment required to win and misattribute losses to proposal quality rather than insufficient early positioning.
How a pursuit maps to the proposal workflow in practice
The pursuit is the container; the proposal is one artifact inside it. A typical pursuit on a public sector project under the Brooks Act (1972) runs through a Statement of Qualifications, a formal go/no-go decision with a scored scorecard, an SF-330 submission, a two-to-three-week RFP response window, shortlist notification, an interview, and a debrief whether the firm wins or loses. Each phase has distinct deliverables, personnel demands, and decision points. A proposal coordinator managing four active pursuits simultaneously is not managing four identical workflows; each sits at a different phase with different deadlines, compliance requirements under FAR Part 36, and internal review cycles running in parallel.
The institutional knowledge problem pursuits expose
Every pursuit consumes knowledge: past project scopes, relevant personnel qualifications, prior client history, fee structures from analogous work, and win themes that actually held up in debrief. That knowledge is almost never captured in one place, so the next pursuit on a similar project type starts from interviews and folder searches instead of verified context. The most experienced BD directors often carry the critical connective tissue in memory, which means it leaves when they do. Kantiv is built specifically around this gap: it captures pursuit-level intelligence across submissions, project records, and client history, and surfaces it at the moment a new pursuit requires it, so teams start from what the firm already knows rather than reconstructing it under deadline pressure.
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