Mind the Gap: Measuring Pursuit Drift from Qualification to Submission

Every pursuit carries two gaps, and most teams measure neither until the debrief:

1. Inherited at Qualification: the distance between what the customer requires and what your org genuinely brings in capability, competitive position, and relationship. It is knowable before anyone writes a word, and very little of it can be fixed inside the response period.
2. Created during Drafting: the distance between the solicitation and the words on a page. It is produced by silos, unowned narrative, unquantified claims, and drift that nobody was watching for.

This session treats both as measurable, at defined points, using methods that run on a spreadsheet. We walk through a single composite pursuit from kickoff through color team reviews to submission (showing where the gap opened, where it was visible and ignored, and where it stopped being recoverable) and leave attendees with a checkpoint cadence they can run the following Monday.

Learning objectives: This content sits across opportunity qualification and bid/no-bid decision-making, capture planning, compliance and responsiveness, review management, and lessons learned. By the end of the session, participants will be able to:

1. Define pursuit gap, and distinguish gaps that originate at qualification from gaps that emerge during drafting.
2. Identify at least four early indicators that a pursuit is drifting away from the customer’s stated requirements and evaluation criteria.
3. Apply a structured checkpoint cadence, mapped to standard color team reviews, for re-measuring gap at defined milestones.
4. Evaluate whether a gap identified late in the cycle is recoverable, and articulate the criteria for a mid-pursuit scope correction or no-bid.

Reserve your spot today by registering here.

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Presenter Bios

Sophia Martinez — Co-Founder of Riftur and Executive Director of Customer Development at Five Insights. With a BS in Computer Engineering and 10+ years’ experience in software engineering and customer development, she brings a technical foundation and practitioner’s perspective to the proposal profession. At Riftur, she leads the commercial strategy for an AI-powered proposal evaluation platform across government contracting and commercial sectors, with a focus on closing compliance gaps and making AI-assisted review accessible to teams without adding complexity to their existing process.

Guy Rotheram — Founder of PursuitARK. He inherited a professional services bid organization of a multi-national software group in 2016 and rebuilt it around a bid qualification system with structured GO/BUILD/BID decision gates. The framework went global, covering 2,000 proposals annually across 12 LOBs with an 82% win ratio by value. Later he spent four years as a startup CTO, building and commercializing a consumer learning platform and a production retrieval-augmented system for behavioral analysis and persona-based content generation, working at the intersection of what AI does to the human machinery that makes bid teams decide well.