Skydiving was never on my bucket list. My reaction to my friends proudly handing me a gift certificate surprised them—I asked them what possessed them to pick a gift like that. Were they tired of me? To which they argued it seemed like a great idea, since last year I rode a rollercoaster for the first time and even did aerobatics in a military jet. Somehow I am starting to get a reputation. It didn’t click in my head that shooting machine guns, defensive driving, tree climbing, hostage rescue training, racing Jaguars, and doing barrel rolls in a plane made me seem like a daredevil, an obvious candidate for one half of a plane ride.
Customer engagement is the cornerstone of capture, and yet many Government contractors miss out on building customer intimacy and all of its perks. They either start too late in the game, or are in touch with only one or two people who may not be the decision makers or who won’t talk to them, or wait until the industry day to find out who the customer is—when it’s way too late to influence acquisition strategy and other important facets of a procurement. Luckily, there are numerous professional tools out there to help capture managers figure out who the customer is early, and navigate customer organizations like a pro.
Many companies reach a point at which they have to start maturing and growing their business development, capture, and proposal capability. It usually happens when they have a constant volume of bids and they are looking for a more efficient way to develop proposals and win consistently. They want to scale up, grow aggressively, and create a true business development engine.
Business growth in the federal market does not happen by accident. Many companies grow to a certain point through hard, albeit, rather chaotic efforts. Many are stuck, however, at a certain size, and their ability to compete for new market share begins to shrink. We recommend that you implement proper strategies to grow aggressively in the federal market.
Anyone in the know in business development doesn’t get too excited if they happen to see something that looks exactly like what they are trying to bid on when searching FedBizOpps.gov (FBO). The Federal Government is supposed to post all unclassified opportunities over $25,000 on FBO. It is safe to say, however, that FBO is pretty much useless to you for bidding purposes because most of the opportunities that appear there have been discovered already by your competitors.
Your competitors may have been planning for these opportunities for a while, throughout the entire acquisition process from when the opportunity was created to the point of its culmination in a Request for Proposal (RFP) or Quote (RFQ). Rarely do you stand a chance of winning if you pick an opportunity off a website as public and popular as FBO late in the game, once a draft RFP, and especially the final RFP, has been issued. It has probably been “spoken for” or “wired” by some company that has taken its time to prepare.
