Clari vs Gong for Engineering Firms: Pursuits That Take Months

Start with a simple worksheet, one row per active pursuit, columns for the date priced, the expected award date, the number of value-engineering rounds so far, and the permitting status. This is not a CRM replacement, it is a forcing function that makes the real timeline visible before you decide which tool should hold that data long-term.

Most engineering firms underestimate how long their own pursuits actually take until they see the gap between priced date and award date laid out row by row. That gap is the single biggest driver of forecast error in this industry, bigger than win rate or deal size.

Give each pursuit a worksheet row with these columns:

• Date priced: record when the fee was quoted so the gap between pricing and award becomes visible row by row.
• Expected award date: log it for each pursuit and revise it whenever a real event changes the timeline.
• Value-engineering rounds so far: count them, since each round can cut scope and push the decision date back.
• Permitting status: note any hold, because a delay nobody controls can move the client's own timeline.
• Pursuit type: label public competitive bids and repeat-client work so they can roll up separately later.

If your worksheet shows pursuits routinely stretching past six months with multiple stage changes along the way, a value-engineering revision, a permitting hold, a re-scope, Clari's structured stage progression can represent that reasonably well, as long as someone updates the record at each real change rather than letting it sit stale.

The discipline required is significant: a nine-month pursuit needs roughly the same number of honest updates as three separate month-long sales cycles would in a faster-moving industry, and firms that treat quarterly updates as sufficient will find their forecast consistently behind reality.

If most of the substantive back-and-forth in your pursuits happens through submitted documents, value-engineering proposals, revised drawings, written responses to a client's technical questions, rather than live calls, Gong has comparatively little to work with. A bid's fate often turns on a document exchange that no recording captures.

Gong adds more value on pursuits where a client relationship genuinely develops over calls, a recurring client discussing an upcoming project informally before a formal RFP, than on cold, document-driven public bids where the process itself limits informal conversation.

Take one real pursuit from your worksheet and walk it through: priced in March at a fixed fee, first value-engineering round in May cuts scope, permitting delay pushes the client's own timeline in July, a second value-engineering round in September, award in November. At no point in that timeline does a single call decide the outcome.

That pattern argues for Clari as the primary system of record, with Gong, if used at all, reserved for the relationship-building calls with repeat clients that happen outside the formal bid process entirely, where a client's informal comments about an upcoming project are the real leading indicator.

Because pursuit timelines routinely run three to nine months and win rates on competitive public bids tend to run lower than relationship-sourced private work, hold pipeline coverage at the wider end of the typical 3x to 4x baseline, particularly for firms bidding mostly public and competitively bid work¹.

Average B2B sales cycles run around 91 days, well short of a typical engineering pursuit's true timeline, which is a reminder that general sales benchmarks need real adjustment before you apply them to a bid-and-award business².

A firm doing both competitively bid public work and negotiated private work for repeat clients is really running two different pursuit types with different win rates, different timelines and different evidence of momentum. Report them as separate categories inside the same tool rather than one blended pipeline number.

This separation also clarifies where Gong might actually earn its keep: almost never on the public bid side, but potentially on the repeat-client side, where an ongoing relationship produces real calls worth analyzing well before a formal pursuit even begins.

Winning a pursuit does not end the forecasting problem for an engineering firm, because a signed fee often gets renegotiated through change orders once the project starts: a client-requested redesign, a code compliance issue discovered mid-project, a scope addition the original proposal never priced. Each change order is its own small sales cycle, with its own priced-to-approved gap, even though it happens after the original pursuit already closed.

Say a project closes at $400,000 in March: change orders can then grow it by a meaningful margin before the work wraps, and none of that growth shows up in a forecast built only from new pursuits. Firms that stop tracking a project the moment it converts miss this second layer of revenue variability entirely.

If your firm runs meaningful change-order volume, track it as its own pipeline category inside whichever tool you choose, with its own priced date and approval date, rather than assuming the original award number is the last time that project touches your forecast.