Smarter Pursuit, Faster Wins: Transforming How GovCons Win New Business

In government contracting, success hinges on more than just checking boxes—it’s identifying the lead before other vendors do, aligning your team and approach quickly then executing with precision. With tight bid response timelines, tighter competition, and increasingly complex solicitations, GovCon teams need tools that do more help with research—they need tools that help them think strategically, move faster, and respond smarter. 

This is where the synergy of AI and human expertise truly shines. Unlike generic AI tools, solutions specifically designed for and by GovCon professionals provide a distinct advantage by working with the unique processes of these teams. In the fast-paced, multifaceted world of government contracting, automation that consolidates and validates source materials, integrates analyst-validated updates, and facilitates expertly prompted proposal planning is essential. These tailored capabilities support business development teams to simplify their processes and pursue efficiently. 

This article will walk through how AI in Deltek’s solutions supports smarter pursuit. GovWin IQ can serve up critical opportunity details via Ask Dela™ in the qualification and pursuit process. Then, easily generate proposal outlines, compliance matrices and proposal drafts in a brand-new Deltek proposal solution to help GovCon teams draft competitive, compelling, and high-quality proposals. Deltek is making winning new business easier, faster, with confidence at every stage. 

Step 1: Serve Up Lead Details for Qualification & Pursuit Decisions

In government contracting, having the right information at your fingertips can make all the difference in qualifying opportunities with confidence. GovWin IQ’s Ask Dela™ Opportunity and Bid Chats transform how business development professionals and proposal managers tackle this critical step. These chats ensure that every inquiry draws from actionable intel found within the lead record to deliver answers tailored to your needs.

Unlike free or generalized tools, this feature integrates with your process as you review leads in real-time from your pipeline. By providing clarity on lead details, compliance requirements, and strategic insights on leads of interest, you can begin your bid/no-bid evaluations. Then by leveraging analyst-sourced updates or centralized bid info, your team can qualify opportunities more effectively with intel directly from government decision-makers, avoiding the pitfalls of misinformation or incomplete data. Whether pursuing large multi-year federal contracts or high quantities of smaller, transactional state and local bids, the more information available can support the appropriate allocation of your bid and proposal budgets. This isn’t just about speed—it’s about equipping your team with the details they need to make smarter, more informed decisions, positioning you for success from the outset.

Opportunity Chat on Analyst-Tracked SEWP VI

Use GovWin IQ’s Ask Dela Opportunity and Bid Chats to effortlessly find the lead details you’re looking for and trust that it’s only pulling from the source material housed in an individual bid or contract record. With the ability to ask multiple questions at a time or specify the formatting of the response you’re looking for, Ask Dela can be a force multiplier on your team. Some of our favorite prompts include:

• Summarize this opportunity
• Explain the requirements in 500 words
• How was this evaluated?
• Who are the incumbents?
• How much spending is occurring?
• How many companies have Smart Fit Scores above 70?
• Tell me about the Interested Vendors

With many answers hyperlinked to relevant content elsewhere in GovWin IQ, you are served up actionable details to support the next stage of your research. Whether performing deep analysis on a few large contracts, researching teaming partners, or looking for clarity in a high-volume bid pursuit environment, you can turn efficiency into a competitive advantage by automating what you can so your team can focus on the strategic elements.

Step 2: Align Your Team & Anchor Your Pursuit Strategy with AI-Generated Proposal Outlines

Starting pursuit early-on with a well-structured proposal outline is invaluable in government contracting, serving as a strategic tool to prevent rework and avoid missing crucial elements. With each outline generated directly from the RFP, agency, state governments, and locality nuances are accounted for. By analyzing the RFP language and generating a tailored framework, proposal outlines map instructions, evaluation criteria, and content areas in a coherent format aligned with government norms. This proactive approach allows teams to focus on strategy and narrative instead of scrambling to build frameworks at the last minute. For contractors following the Shipley Color Team methodology, this might be during your Black Hat review, where you’re analyzing competitors and potential strategies 6-12 months when RFIs or draft RFPs are published.

This is especially true when pursuing teaming agreements. By using a proposal outline to ground the pursuit approach, it fosters better collaboration, enabling subject matter experts and proposal managers to co-own the solution from the outset rather than rushing to align during the final stages. Ultimately, this ensures stronger alignment, reduces the effort spent on corrections, and positions teams to deliver a more polished, competitive proposal with higher confidence in its readiness for submission. 

GovWin IQ’s new AI-generated proposal outlines are created from extensive prompting that was developed and tested by market experts. Unlike uploading an RFP to a free AI tool and asking for an outline, our prompt consistently pulls the right information into an actionable outline with references for confident use. The basic outline serves as a high-level overview and doubles as a robust table of contents that’s perfect for building out your response while tracking page counts and formatting requirements easily. Annotated outlines serve up section requirements, section overviews, and AI suggestions to guide your proposal team strategically. By providing users access to both types of documents, they can get guided suggestions while monitoring their page counts as they near completion.

Easily Download to MS Word with Easy Access to Source Documents

Bid Outline with Overview, Instructions, Evaluation Criteria and Suggestions Called Out

Step 3: Validate & Draft with Confidence with Dynamic Compliance Matrices (Coming Soon)

In government contracting, compliance is essential to success. Missing a requirement or misinterpreting RFP instructions can lead to disqualification—even if your offering is the best fit.  

Compliance matrices can help your team keep track of RFP requirements, offering clarity and confidence from the very start of the proposal process. By flagging all requirements, compliance matrices support strategic BD teams and proposal managers reduce risk, save time, and focus on crafting a competitive narrative. As drafts take shape, teams following color team reviews can use compliance matrices during the Pink and Red Team reviews to address solicitation requirements and confirm compliance before submission. 

The result? A stronger, more polished proposal that’s not only compliant but also strategically aligned with what evaluators are seeking. 

GovWin IQ will soon expand our AI-powered Dela™ capabilities to include compliance matrices. These will automatically extract and organize key solicitation requirements by leveraging expert-crafted prompts to shred RFPs and source documentation. As you draft, you can instantly see what’s covered, what’s missing, and what needs further refinement. 

With AI-generated compliance matrices, you’re equipping your team with enhanced precision without compromising quality or risk. You retain full control over the final product while ensuring that every detail aligns with RFP expectations.  

Step 4: Transform Proposal Development with Deltek’s AI-Powered Proposal Solution (Coming Soon)

Writing compelling, accurate proposals is often the most time intensive stage of pursuing new business. Which means it stands the most to gain for AI-powered efficiency. Deltek’s transforming how government contractors win new business by unveiling a new AI-powered proposal platform. This brand-new solution will help bridge the gap between speed and quality by generating proposal first-drafts using the same Dela technology used in GovWin IQ.

The solution combines the proactive market intelligence from GovWin IQ, the contract management power of Costpoint ERP, and the efficiency of Dela AI into one seamless experience. This powerful suite of solutions serves to provide government contractors with the AI and automation capabilities they need to win more contracts and unlock their growth potential.  Deltek is uniquely positioned to bring the valuable contributions from these two offerings to be to bring something truly unique and compelling to the market for our customers. 

Deltek is Powering Proposals with Precision and Innovation

In the fast-paced world of public sector contracting, success hinges on precision, speed, and strategy. Deltek’s innovative, AI-powered solutions provide the tools your team needs to excel at every stage of the proposal process—from identifying and qualifying opportunities to crafting compelling, compliant responses. By leveraging the strengths of GovWin IQ’s proactive market intelligence, Costpoint ERP’s contract management capabilities, and Dela’s AI-driven efficiencies, Deltek empowers your team to transform challenges into opportunities. 

This isn't just about automation; it's about elevating your competitive edge. Deltek equips you with the clarity to focus on what truly matters: creating proposals that resonate with evaluators, maximizing your resources, and winning more contracts. When you invest in Deltek, you’re not just adopting technology -you’re adopting a smarter, more strategic way of doing business.