AEs & BDRs: Win SLED Deals Before Your Competitors Even Know They Exist

You know that sick feeling when someone drops a link in Slack to a six-figure RFP in your territory… and your competitor is already written into the spec?

If you’re an AE or BDR selling into SLED, that’s not a freak event. That’s just how the game has worked for years. RFPs show up late. Contracts quietly expire. Councils approve projects on a random Tuesday night YouTube stream. And by the time anything filters down to you, someone else already has the inside track.

Pursuit is built to flip that dynamic: instead of chasing deals after they’re public, it helps you spot in-motion opportunities early—often before your competitors even know they exist.

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An AI teammate quietly working your territory

Imagine starting your day not by wondering where to focus, but by opening an email that says, in effect: “Here are the deals that moved in your territory last night.”

That’s the idea behind Pursuit for AEs & BDRs. While you’re off the clock, it’s on:

• Watching city and county websites
• Reading agenda packets and PDFs
• Monitoring news and FOIA data
• Even listening to council and committee meetings from thousands of government entities

It’s not looking for generic “signals.” It’s looking for your kind of opportunity: contract expirations, RFPs, hearings, budgets and projects that line up with what you sell. By the time you open your laptop, Pursuit has already done the part you rarely have time for—digging for signs that something is actually happening.

You start the day with a short list of real movement: a contract expiring in February, a new RFP posted over the weekend, a public hearing scheduled to discuss spending on tools exactly like yours.

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From signal to pipeline in a couple of clicks

The difference isn’t just that you know something is happening; it’s how fast you can act on it.

Click into one of those alerts and you land on the opportunity inside Pursuit. You’re not staring at a vague note that “something might be going on.” You’re looking at the exact RFP, linked to the specific page where your category is mentioned, or a meeting where the project is being discussed on the record. You can literally hear or read the stakeholders describe their problems, goals, and budget in their own words.

From there, turning it into pipeline is simple. You add the opportunity to your queue and move on to the next one in your For You view—a prioritized list of what’s worth your attention right now across your territory. Within a few minutes, you’ve gone from “no idea what’s going on” to “I have multiple live projects to work with, and I know why they matter.”

Instead of hoping you bump into something at a conference months from now, you’re catching these deals when they’re still forming—and when being early actually matters.

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Multi-threading without the contact chaos

Once you’ve found the opportunity, the next challenge is always the same: Who do I talk to, and how do I get in front of them fast?

In SLED, a single city can have hundreds of potential contacts across planning, IT, finance, and leadership. Hunting them down manually is slow. Trying to do it inside a generic data tool is clunky. Most people end up picking a couple of obvious titles and hoping for the best.

Pursuit takes a more practical route. For each entity, it can surface a deep bench of contacts, then let you quickly narrow that down to the people who actually care about your problem—say, planning and building officials for an e-permitting solution, or IT/security leaders for a cybersecurity platform. You see verified email addresses, bounce risk, and titles that clearly map to your buying committee, and in a few seconds you’ve built a solid, multi-threaded list without doing “contact surgery” by hand.

From there, you hit Engage. Behind that button, Pursuit runs the same research engine it used to discover the opportunity: scanning web pages, news, documents, and public records. Using prompts set up by RevOps or marketing, it drafts an email, a LinkedIn message, and even a call script that are all grounded in what’s actually happening in that city—recent grants, projects, motions, or challenges.

You’re still in control. You edit for tone and personality, but you’re never starting from a blank page. And because this is all tied to a real, in-motion project, your outreach reads like you’ve been following the city for months, not like yet another generic spray-and-pray sequence.

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All inside the tools you already live in

None of this works if it lives off in a silo you’ll forget to open.

That’s why Pursuit doesn’t ask you to abandon your existing workflow. With the Chrome extension, everything you’ve just read about shows up right where you spend your time—on the account page in Salesforce or in your browser while you’re on a city’s website. You can see which contacts you’re missing, pull in the right stakeholders from Pursuit in a couple of clicks, and keep your CRM up to date as a side effect of your prospecting, not as extra admin work you’ll do “later.”

The result is a virtuous loop: the more you work your territory, the better your data gets; the better your data gets, the more accurately Pursuit can watch your patch, and the more high-quality opportunities it can surface for you each week.

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What this really changes for AEs & BDRs

On the surface, Pursuit is a research tool. For you, it feels more like a territory partner that:

• Spots projects, contracts, and RFPs while they’re still fresh
• Hands you the context to sound like an insider on your first touch
• Helps you quickly assemble the real buying group
• Keeps everything synced back into Salesforce as you go

You stop living in constant fear that there’s a hidden RFP in your backyard with a competitor’s name already written into it. Instead, you start to recognize a different pattern: you’re the one reaching out early, referencing real events and real priorities, shaping the conversation before anyone else is even aware a deal exists.

That’s what “winning SLED deals before your competitors even know they exist” actually looks like. Not luck. Not magic. Just your territory quietly working for you—even when you’re not.

Want to be first to every SLED deal in your patch? Let's talk.