Built for Engineering Firm Sales Managers

The CRM engineering sales managers run pursuits and proposals out of.

Sales managers at civil, structural, MEP, environmental, geotechnical, and process engineering firms coordinate 15 to 60 active pursuits across seller-doer principals, project engineers writing scope, and marketing coordinators formatting SOQ and RFP responses. Strkr holds the pursuit, the client contact history, the proposal draft, and the win/loss pattern on one record.

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Why buyers are here

Engineering Firms Sales Managers: the daily pains.

An engineering firm sales manager is a different animal than a software sales manager. The pipeline is not pure sales reps carrying quota against a seat count. It is seller-doer principals splitting their time between billable project work and business development, with the sales manager coordinating pursuit decisions across civil, structural, MEP, environmental, geotechnical, and process disciplines. Pursuits are SOQ (Statement of Qualifications) responses, RFP responses, interview preparation, and relationship-grounded shortlist conversations that stretch 3 to 18 months from go/no-go to notice to proceed. The typical stack lives across Deltek Vision or Vantagepoint for the project accounting system of record, a Deltek CRM module nobody enjoys using, Excel for the active pursuit tracker, SharePoint for the proposal archive, Outlook for the client thread history, and a Teams channel for the Wednesday pursuit meeting. Principals refuse to log activity. Marketing coordinators chase status updates from principals on Friday afternoons. The sales manager answers the Monday leadership question about pipeline on a hunch. The sections below show how Strkr collapses that into one workspace where the pursuit, the SOQ draft, the principal involvement log, and the win rate pattern by client type live on the same record.

Principal activity logging drought

Seller-doer principals will not log activity in Deltek.

An engineering firm pipeline runs on seller-doer principals who bill 70 percent of their time to projects and do business development the other 30 percent. Those principals will not log a client call, a pre-RFP meeting, or a shortlist interview into Deltek Vision because the interface is slow, the fields are built for accounting, and the mobile experience is nonexistent. The sales manager runs the Wednesday pursuit meeting on a hunch instead of a pipeline. Strkr ships native Microsoft 365 and Gmail sync that auto-logs email and calendar activity against the client account without a principal touching the CRM, plus mobile voice-note capture for the principal walking out of a client lunch.

SOQ and proposal sprawl

The SOQ draft lives in 4 SharePoint folders and 3 email threads.

A government SOQ response or a private RFP response is a 40 to 120 page document with firm overview, discipline experience, project resumes, team biographies, project approach, schedule, and fee breakdown. The current draft lives in a SharePoint folder, a prior version lives in a sister folder, principal review comments arrive in email, and the marketing coordinator rebuilds the index every week. Strkr Docs holds every SOQ version on the pursuit record with named versions, timestamped author, and inline comment threads so the sales manager sees exactly which version the firm is iterating on.

Go/no-go on hunch

We bid every RFP that shows up and win 18 percent of them.

An engineering firm with a 20 percent average win rate across indiscriminate RFP response spends 60 percent of its proposal budget on bids it had no realistic chance of winning. The sales manager approves pursuits with no visibility into prior win rate against the specific client, the specific discipline, the specific project value band, or the specific procurement path. Strkr renders a go/no-go decision view with historical win rate by client, by project type, by value band, and by discipline so the pursuit meeting ends in 20 minutes instead of 90.

Interview preparation gap

The shortlist interview is Thursday and nobody built the briefing.

A shortlisted pursuit on a $4M civil engineering contract requires a 60 minute interview with the owner selection panel. The firm interview team needs a briefing with owner selection criteria, prior project retrospectives with this owner, the referenced subconsultants, the project schedule narrative, and the specific win themes to emphasize. In the typical stack, that briefing is a Wednesday night assembly job. Strkr renders the interview briefing from the pursuit record with owner history, prior project touchpoints, referenced subs, and the win theme library pre-loaded so the Thursday interview opens with every principal walking in on the same page.

Marketing coordinator chase

The weekly pipeline update is a Friday afternoon chase email.

The marketing coordinator spends 4 hours every Friday chasing principals for pursuit status updates to prep the Monday leadership meeting. Half the responses come in Monday morning after the meeting started. Strkr runs native pursuit status roll-ups off the deal timeline so the Monday report builds itself from the activity log, and the marketing coordinator spends Friday writing proposals instead of chasing status.

Pursuit cost opacity

I have no idea what we spent chasing the Austin airport bid.

An engineering pursuit on a large transportation contract burns 400 to 1,200 hours of principal and engineer time between go-decision and interview, plus a 20 to 60 thousand dollar proposal production budget. In the typical stack, the pursuit cost lives in Deltek timesheets under a non-billable job number and nobody rolls it up against the win/loss outcome. Strkr runs native pursuit cost tracking against the pursuit record so the sales manager sees cost-per-pursuit and cost-per-win by client type, and the proposal budget allocation gets honest.

How Strkr fits the engineering sales manager week

The primitives seller-doer sales managers actually run on.

Strkr for engineering sales managers ships the same CRM every other role at the firm runs, with role-aware views shaped around pursuit coordination. The primitives below map to the five jobs the sales manager repeats every week: Wednesday pursuit meeting prep with go/no-go decisions, principal activity visibility on the active pursuit set, SOQ and proposal version control with marketing coordinator collaboration, shortlist interview preparation, and Monday leadership roll-up with cost-per-win visibility. When those five jobs happen inside one workspace with the Deltek project data and the historical win rate pattern loaded alongside, the sales manager stops firefighting and starts coaching.

Pursuit pipeline

A pipeline that fits the pursuit lifecycle.

Column-per-stage board grouped by principal lead, discipline, client type, project value band, or procurement path. Drag a pursuit between stages and the flow runs entry criteria for the required go/no-go artifact, surfaces the missing teaming agreement, prompts the proposal production budget confirmation, and routes the SOQ draft to the marketing coordinator queue. The sales manager builds the view that matches today, not the view the admin shipped a year ago.

Account record

One record holds the whole client relationship.

The account record pulls in client contacts, procurement contact history, past-project retrospectives across every discipline, open pursuits, shortlist interview notes, SOQ artifacts, teaming agreements, and win/loss history. A role-aware sidebar renders pursuit fields for the sales manager, discipline fields for the principal, and production fields for the marketing coordinator on the same record without a tab switch.

Go/no-go view

Historical win pattern grounds the pursuit decision.

The go/no-go view renders prior win rate against this client, this discipline, this project value band, and this procurement path, plus the proposal production budget estimate, the principal availability check, and the Monday leadership approval status. The pursuit meeting ends in 20 minutes instead of 90, and the firm stops burning proposal dollars on indiscriminate pursuits.

SOQ document control

Named proposal versions on the pursuit record.

Strkr Docs holds every SOQ and RFP version on the pursuit with named revisions (v1 draft, v2 principal review, v3 client-ready, v4 shortlist update), timestamped author, inline comment threads, and the discipline-specific sections flagged for owner. The marketing coordinator reviews the version the firm is actually iterating on, not a stale SharePoint copy.

Principal activity

Seller-doer activity shows up without manual logging.

Native Microsoft 365 and Gmail sync lands every client email, meeting, and calendar invitation against the account and the pursuit record. The principal does nothing. The sales manager sees the full relationship context, the shortlist interview scheduling, and the pre-RFP meeting cadence on one timeline. Mobile voice-note capture catches the color of the client lunch conversation before the principal has returned to the office.

Interview briefing

The shortlist interview briefing writes itself.

Strkr AI reads the pursuit record, the account history, the prior project retrospectives with this owner, the referenced subconsultants, the owner selection criteria, and the win theme library, and drafts a shortlist interview briefing with the specific messages for each panel member. The firm interview team walks in on the same page without a Wednesday night assembly.

Pursuit cost tracking

Hours and dollars rolled against the pursuit record.

The pursuit record carries principal and engineer hours against the pursuit job number, plus the proposal production budget actual against the estimate, plus the win/loss outcome. The sales manager sees cost-per-pursuit and cost-per-win by client type on one dashboard. The proposal budget conversation becomes a data conversation instead of a hunch conversation.

How Strkr sits next to Deltek Vision or Vantagepoint

Pre-contract on Strkr, post-contract on Deltek, one handoff.

Most engineering firms are not retiring Deltek Vision or Vantagepoint. The project accounting, the timesheet entry, the invoice generation, the WIP reporting, and the AR aging live in Deltek because the finance function requires it. The problem is that Deltek was never a pre-contract sales system, and the firm has been forcing the pursuit motion through an accounting module for a decade. Strkr covers the pre-contract layer (pursuit tracking, SOQ production, principal activity, shortlist interview prep, go/no-go decisioning) and hands off clean to Deltek at notice to proceed. The sections below show the handoff pattern.

Deltek Vision sync

Account and project data syncs both directions.

Strkr Flow ships a Deltek Vision connector that syncs client accounts, project history, principal assignments, and prior-year revenue against each client. The sales manager sees the authoritative Deltek client record alongside the pursuit pipeline. A new client landed in Strkr pushes to Deltek on account creation so the firm never ends up with two client masters.

Vantagepoint sync

Same pattern for the newer Deltek stack.

For firms on Deltek Vantagepoint instead of Vision, Strkr ships the same connector pattern against the Vantagepoint REST API. Clients, contacts, projects, and principal assignments sync both directions. The pursuit motion lives in Strkr, the project accounting lives in Vantagepoint, and the firm stops asking principals to maintain two client contact lists.

Pursuit to project handoff

Won pursuit opens the Deltek project with context.

A pursuit moves to Won and the Strkr Flow creates the Deltek project with the client reference, the principal assignment, the contract value, the scope summary from the SOQ, the referenced subconsultants, and the project schedule narrative. The project accountant opens the Deltek project with the full pre-contract context attached instead of a one-line scope description.

Lost pursuit retrospective

Lost pursuit fires a learning capture.

A pursuit moves to Lost and the flow prompts the principal lead for a 5 minute retrospective (why we lost, who won, what we would do differently, what the owner feedback said), captures the artifacts, and rolls the outcome against the win/loss pattern by client type and discipline. The sales manager runs the quarterly pattern review on real data instead of hearsay.

Subconsultant tracking

Teaming partners live on every pursuit.

Strkr custom objects hold the subconsultant teaming partner on every pursuit with discipline coverage, prior teaming history, teaming agreement status, and historical performance notes. The sales manager sees which subs the firm teams with most often, which subs the firm wins with, and which teaming combinations the owner selection panels respond to.

The weekly rhythm Strkr makes possible

Monday through Friday on the sales manager cadence.

A pre-contract sales manager at a 100 to 400 person engineering firm has a predictable weekly rhythm. Monday reads the pipeline and prepares the leadership roll-up. Tuesday catches up with principals on open shortlist interviews. Wednesday runs the pursuit meeting with go/no-go decisions. Thursday supports proposal production. Friday closes out the week on cost-per-win and lessons learned. Strkr is organized around that cadence so the surface the sales manager needs on each day is loaded with the right cut of the pipeline, instead of a cold Deltek screen reconstructed every morning.

Monday leadership roll-up

The pipeline report builds itself overnight.

The Monday leadership meeting opens with a Strkr-generated roll-up: pursuits by stage, pursuits by principal, pursuits by discipline, win rate trailing 90 days, cost-per-pursuit, and the three pursuits where leadership attention would move the needle. The sales manager narrates against the data instead of apologizing for incomplete pipeline information.

Tuesday principal catch-up

Each principal gets 15 minutes on their open pursuits.

The sales manager opens each principal view, sees the three to five open pursuits with the latest activity timeline from Microsoft 365 sync, and runs a 15 minute conversation on the specific next steps. The principal walks away with clear accountability without a 60 minute meeting. The marketing coordinator sees the updated pursuit status on the record instead of a Friday chase email.

Wednesday pursuit meeting

Go/no-go decisions in 20 minutes.

The Wednesday pursuit meeting opens with the pursuit queue: new RFP invitations with the go/no-go view rendering historical win rate, new SOQ opportunities with the principal availability check, and shortlist interview preparations. The firm approves or declines each pursuit on data instead of hunch. The meeting ends in 20 minutes and the proposal production team starts work with clear direction.

Thursday proposal support

Marketing coordinator and principal collaborate on the record.

The marketing coordinator drafts the SOQ in Strkr Docs on the pursuit record, routes the discipline-specific sections to the principal owners, collects comments inline, and iterates to the client-ready version. The sales manager sees the production status on the pipeline board. The proposal ships on deadline because the version-control chaos stopped.

Friday close-out

Win/loss and lessons learned captured in the moment.

Friday closes with the pursuit outcomes from the week: wins fire the Deltek project creation, losses fire the retrospective capture, and shortlist interviews schedule the follow-up conversation. The sales manager rolls the pattern into the quarterly win rate review. Monday opens with a clean board instead of unresolved week-ending debris.

Head-to-head

Strkr vs the Deltek + SharePoint + Excel pursuit stack.

A typical engineering firm pre-contract stack runs Deltek Vision or Vantagepoint for project accounting and a half-used CRM module, Excel for the active pursuit tracker, SharePoint for the proposal archive, Outlook for the client thread history, and a Teams channel for the Wednesday pursuit meeting. Strkr collapses the pre-contract layer into one workspace with the Deltek connector preserving the accounting system of record and the historical win pattern surfaced in the pursuit decision view.

What matters Strkr Deltek CRM + SharePoint + Excel
Tools the sales manager opens daily 1 (Strkr) plus Deltek for accounting 5 to 7 (Deltek, SharePoint, Excel, Outlook, Teams, proposal tools)
Principal activity logging Auto-logged via native Microsoft 365 and Gmail sync Principals refuse to log, sales manager runs on hunch
SOQ and proposal version control Strkr Docs with named versions on the pursuit record SharePoint with race conditions between workstations
Go/no-go decision support Historical win rate by client, discipline, value band on the view Hunch and principal preference, no data grounding
Shortlist interview briefing Strkr AI drafts off account history and win theme library Wednesday night manual assembly from 3 sources
Pursuit cost tracking Hours and dollars against the pursuit record, cost-per-win visible Deltek timesheet non-billable code, no rollup against outcome
Subconsultant teaming history Native custom object with teaming partner on every pursuit Principal memory, scattered Excel teaming trackers
Monday leadership roll-up Auto-generated against live pursuit data Marketing coordinator Friday afternoon chase email
Deltek handoff on Won Native flow creates project with SOQ scope and schedule Manual retype into Deltek by project accountant
Admin changes to pursuit process Self-serve for sales manager and marketing coordinator Deltek admin queue, firm IT prioritization, quarterly release

See the CRM engineering sales managers actually run pursuits in.

Start a 14 day trial with the full engineering firm sales manager stack enabled: pursuit pipeline board, Microsoft 365 and Gmail sync for auto-logged principal activity, Strkr Docs for SOQ and RFP version control, Deltek Vision or Vantagepoint connector for the client master, go/no-go decision view with historical win rate pattern, Strkr AI for interview briefing and qualifications drafting, and the subconsultant teaming partner object on every pursuit. The pricing page lays out the per-seat line in full, and the sales forecast feature page shows the pursuit forecast surface across disciplines if that is the piece to pressure-test first.

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Common questions

Engineering Firms Sales Managers buyer FAQ.

Does Strkr replace Deltek Vision or Vantagepoint?

No, and most engineering firms should not try to replace Deltek. Project accounting, timesheet entry, invoice generation, WIP reporting, AR aging, and multi-office consolidation have 20 years of regulatory depth inside Deltek, and the finance function requires it. Strkr covers the pre-contract layer that Deltek was never built for (pursuit tracking, SOQ production, principal activity, shortlist interview prep, go/no-go decisioning) and hands off clean to Deltek at notice to proceed through a native connector. Client accounts, contacts, projects, and principal assignments sync both directions. The firm stops asking principals to maintain two client contact lists and stops forcing the pursuit motion through an accounting module.

How does Strkr handle seller-doer principals who will not log activity?

The honest problem with engineering firm CRM adoption is that seller-doer principals bill 70 percent of their time to projects and will not open a CRM to log a client call. Strkr solves that structurally with native Microsoft 365 and Gmail sync that auto-logs email, calendar, and meeting activity against the account record without the principal touching the CRM. Mobile voice-note capture catches the color of a client lunch conversation on the drive back to the office. Role-aware views render 3 fields the principal cares about instead of the 40 fields a CRM admin shipped. Principal adoption lands at 70 percent or higher inside the first quarter because the system is not asking the principal to do new work.

Can Strkr handle a federal SOQ response or a state DOT RFP?

Yes with honest caveats. Strkr handles the firm-side pursuit workflow (SOQ draft versioning, principal review, teaming partner coordination, interview preparation, go/no-go decisioning, cost tracking) better than Deltek CRM or SharePoint. For the compliance-specific pieces (SF 330 formatting, DBE participation documentation, SEI calculation, specific state DOT prequalification requirements, bond and insurance documentation), Strkr Docs holds the artifacts and the historical statements but does not auto-generate the SF 330. The firm proposal manager still owns the compliance assembly. Strkr makes the compliance assembly faster because the referenced project resumes, timekeeper biographies, and prior performance narratives are one query against the account history instead of a SharePoint hunt.

How does the go/no-go decision view actually work?

When a new RFP invitation lands and the sales manager marks the pursuit for go/no-go review, Strkr renders a decision surface against the pursuit record with historical win rate against this client (if the firm has prior pursuits with them), historical win rate within this project value band, historical win rate within this discipline, historical win rate within this procurement path (negotiated, qualifications-based, low-bid, best-value), the proposal production budget estimate against the firm cost-per-pursuit average, the principal availability check against the pursuit calendar, and the specific win themes the firm has used successfully against similar pursuits. The Wednesday pursuit meeting reads the data, discusses the three to five judgment calls the data does not resolve, and ends in 20 minutes. The firm stops burning proposal dollars on indiscriminate RFP response.

What is Strkr AI doing on the pursuit record?

Strkr AI is a $49 per month add-on module with 5,000 included calls and $0.012 per call overage. On the engineering firm pursuit workflow, Strkr AI drafts the first-pass shortlist interview briefing from the account history, drafts the first-pass qualifications and scope narrative from the owner RFP and the firm boilerplate, drafts the first-pass pursuit summary for the Wednesday meeting, and classifies the agent intent on inbound owner emails. Everything Strkr AI drafts is a first pass, not a final document. The sales manager, the principal, and the marketing coordinator edit for voice and accuracy. The time savings compound across 15 to 60 active pursuits per quarter.

What is the right starting point for an engineering firm sales manager evaluating Strkr?

Start with the pursuit pipeline board, the Microsoft 365 sync for principal activity auto-logging, and the Strkr Docs version control for SOQ production. Those three primitives alone resolve the three most expensive pains the role carries (hunch-based pipeline reporting, missing principal activity, and SOQ version chaos). Layer in the go/no-go decision view in week two to tighten the pursuit meeting. Turn on the Deltek Vision or Vantagepoint connector in week three to sync the authoritative client master. Turn on Strkr AI in week four for interview briefing drafts. The pricing page lays out the per-seat line at Starter 29 dollars per seat per month, Pro 59, Scale 119, plus the AI 49 dollar add-on. Most engineering firm sales teams run Pro seats for the principals who need SOQ document control.

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