Driving GovCon Growth with Deltek: Harnessing AI and Innovation for Smarter Business Development

Government contractors are redefining their growth strategies to tackle pressing industry challenges, including rising competition, market diversification, pricing to win, and crafting winning proposals. To overcome these hurdles and stay competitive, business automation, including the use of AI, has become a critical investment for contractors seeking to streamline operations and win more business.

To address these challenges head-on, Deltek’s government contracting solutions empower business development teams with purpose-built workflows, automation, and AI-driven capabilities via Dela™. From building a proactive pipeline of best-fit leads to strategic planning, relationship management, and efficient proposal planning, Deltek provides the tools needed to thrive in today’s complex market.

Discover the strategies driving success for top industry performers and see how Deltek’s ecosystem of business development and proposal management solutions can help you achieve your growth goals—now and into the future.

Market Challenges are Straining Business Development

Government contractors face numerous challenges that significantly limit business development in the public sector. According to Deltek’s Clarity 2024 Government Contracting Study, 81% of contractors reported the need for better opportunity identification to remain competitive, underscoring how difficult it can be to find the right leads to pursue. 

Contract consolidation and the growing reliance on GWACs and IDIQs are contributing to this challenge, reducing the number of prime contracts available and intensifying competition for every opportunity. As a result, many organizations are exploring new markets—partnering with unfamiliar agencies or diversifying offerings—to increase their total addressable market and sustain growth. However, entering a new agency or launching a new offering demands extensive research, careful planning, and significant time, adding complexity to business development efforts.

Even after identifying a lead and committing to pursuit efforts, contractors face additional hurdles when crafting winning proposals. Inflation continues to pressure margins, making it challenging to set competitive multi-year rates. Companies must develop price-to-win strategies that protect profitability while remaining attractive to government buyers.

Despite the highly competitive market, many contractors expect their win rates to improve in the upcoming year. These obstacles are driving nearly 80% of government contractors to invest in innovative AI technology for business development efforts, as cited in Clarity. By optimizing processes, enhancing decision-making, and improving business performance, AI-driven automation is emerging as a critical tool for overcoming public sector business development barriers and achieving sustainable growth.

Develop a Proactive Pipeline of Best-Fit Opportunities

GovWin IQ uniquely identifies leads up to 5 years before an RFP is released with analyst-tracked opportunities gathered directly from government decision-makers. However, gaining early access to leads is only valuable if you can easily narrow down the thousands of possible leads to find the few that are a good fit for your business to pursue. By pairing a proactive sales development strategy with AI and innovative automation, you can transform how your organization finds and wins new business. GovWin IQ uses AI to make finding relevant leads easy with Smart Search for contracting opportunities. By using natural language to search our opportunities database, you can describe what you’re looking for and apply AI-enabled filters to return relevant results without too much noise. Then, easily customize the results with additional AI-powered suggestions to optimize your search.

You can also apply Smart Tags, our analyst-backed ontological system, to Smart Search results or filtered searches to easily identify opportunities with confidence knowing you’re using the same keyword language across agencies. This powerful automation takes the guesswork out of ensuring you’re using the same language as your buyers for a holistic view at your total addressable market.

As you begin to return opportunities, you’ll need to identify the best-fit leads to further qualify for a go/no-go decision. As reported in Clarity, top performers are leading the industry in leveraging AI to find contracting opportunities with the highest win probability. With AI-powered Smart Fit Scores, you can easily identify your highest-scoring leads from the search results with confidence, knowing scores are based on your company’s published award history and scored against the most popular qualifying criteria. Smart Fit Scores are broken down to include your company’s history with the opportunity’s NAICs codes (federal only), Smart Tags, opportunity title, any experience with the agency, and place of performance history.

By pairing early visibility with efficient opportunity search and initial qualification, you can allocate more time to research activities and ensure you’re spending your bid and proposal budget pursuing the right leads.

Simplify Strategic Planning & Market Research

Once a lead is identified, research activities should begin. AI can effortlessly take large amounts of data and manipulate it into actionable insights, which makes it an ideal tool for strategic planning and market research. Learning about your buyer, assessing competitors and consuming procurement documents that will influence your proposal are paramount to success, and AI can simply that process.

Because contract awards are published publicly, you can leverage Smart Fit Scores beyond lead identification to include identifying top-scoring competitors or potential teaming partners on opportunities of interest. With top-scoring companies listed directly on opportunity records, you can quickly identify who to research further.

 AI-generated Smart Summaries™ in GovWin IQ make it easy to digest the most important information about an opportunity, agency, historical award, or even companies you might be interested in partnering with or competing against. These summaries can guide your market research and support your overall pursuit strategy by answering the most important questions in an easily consumable format.

Then, easily interrogate opportunity details and procurement documents with Ask Dela™ directly in GovWin IQ. Efficiently learn about an incumbent, how an opportunity will be evaluated, or who your competitors might be. Then, search single documents or entire ZIP files containing solicitations, amendments, and more to inform your proposal theme and ensure critical requirements are met as you gear up for proposal development.

AI streamlines strategic planning and market research by transforming vast amounts of data into actionable insights. This makes it easier to learn about buyers, identify competitors, and analyze procurement documents, ultimately accelerating the proposal development process.

Craft Competitive Proposals

GenAI is disrupting the proposal generation process by making it more eloquent, efficient and accurate. As our Clarity research shows, contractors are recognizing this value, with 94% of Deltek customer respondents leveraging AI to either analyze RFPs/RFIs for key requirements and compliance or to develop text for proposals & RFIs. AI-driven capabilities can flag important details, ensuring all requirements are met and streamlining the overall workflow.

When beginning your pursuit activities, use expertly prompted proposal outlines to align your team and anchor your pursuit strategy. By being proactive, you can reduce risk of making preventable mistakes and endless rounds of rework for your proposal team. At every stage, you must think about compliance. You can easily generate a complimentary starter compliance matrix from an RFI or RFP document in GovWin IQ via Visible Thread or by integrating GovWin IQ data with SalesFed, a Deltek marketplace partner product. Then, you can generate an initial draft of your proposal by sending the RFP or RFQ to SalesFed to generate a proposal outline and Pink Team Draft that’s written in hours instead of days. 

With an initial version done, you can schedule a review with the well-written draft in your company’s voice that’s structurally compliant and captures your win theme, technical approach and other key differentiators.

With the help of AI-driven capabilities and purpose-built automation, contractors can also better manage proposal cost, pricing and compliance data to win more bids. Quickly review historical spending with Smart Summaries in GovWin IQ on opportunities, contracts or task orders. For labor and material estimating, ProPricer can pull material data from Costpoint Procurement to populate the Bill of Materials (BOM). By pairing ProPricer and BOE Pro, you can automate the capture process to instantly translate Basis of Estimate (BOE) justification text to priced inputs, saving you weeks of time reformatting data to substantially reduce your current manual processes. Ask Dela can be used to help you find the features and functions you need to get the job done faster.

With more time to pursue best-fit leads and by harnessing AI in your workflow, you can properly evaluate your go/no-go decisions and tailor your proposals to address your buyer’s challenges, differentiate your offerings, and price-to-win. This is especially critical for contractors in highly regulated verticals with strict proposal compliance requirements.

Dela Powers Successful Business Development and Beyond

As government contractors redefine their growth strategies to tackle rising competition, market diversification, and the need for crafting winning proposals, AI and innovative automation have become essential investments. Deltek’s government contracting solutions, powered by AI-driven automation and purpose-built workflows, empower our customers to address these challenges head-on, enabling them to win more than 60% of all federal awards in 2023. Looking ahead, Deltek customers who participated in Clarity are holding to that optimism with over 80% expecting their win rates to increase in the next 12 months.

Curious what comes after the award? Learn how Deltek AI and automation can help you manage your contract and support you throughout the entire Project Lifecycle – from opportunity identification to contract closeout. With Dela supporting our purpose-built solutions, you can distill data into concise insights, predict project success, and intelligently explore project details effortlessly to lower labor costs on the most tedious tasks. By pairing AI and automation with centralized projects, people, and financial data, you gain the visibility and traceability to stay compliant and the ability to thoroughly monitor the health of your projects. Deltek solutions support your business growth by shortening billing cycles, improving cash flow and efficiency, and resulting in more projects coming in on or under budget for continued growth and success that scales.