Background
DarkStar Intelligence is a leading provider to organizations such as the Defense Intelligence Agency of training services for open-source intelligence and tradecraft, and program and contract management services.
DarkStar sought to improve its business development (BD) systems and processes to support its growth. Specifically, DarkStar needed better market intelligence, to increase efficiencies, and to implement more robust capture management than their incumbent systems could provide.
Supporting the Entire GovCon Business Development Lifecycle
DarkStar was experiencing a number of frustrations with the tools they were using to support their BD process. Their incumbent market intelligence tool was not providing the notifications they expected, and needed, resulting in missed opportunities. Furthermore, human analyst support when requested from the vendor was poor quality. These shortcomings combined with premium pricing led them to look for alternatives. And beyond market intelligence, the vendor’s capture management/CRM lacked the pipeline functionality needed for GovCons.
After a search, DarkStar selected Capture2Proposal which met their needs from the start, integrating market intelligence, capture, and proposal management in a single platform. It was so easy to build a pipeline in Capture2Proposal that it was created in ten minutes. Integrated with Capture2Proposal’s pipeline management capabilities is support for the unique capture management processes that DarkStar needed to increase efficiencies, such as information to drive the recruiting process for new hires associated with opportunities.
DarkStar is also able to mature and improve their capture management processes by implementing questionnaires and worksheets associated with the review gates in their business development methodology into the Capture2Proposal platform. By seeing the entire pipeline across free and open opportunities, task order requests, and other unique opportunities, DarkStar can easily make decisions on what to pursue. As part of DarkStar’s gate reviews opportunities are evaluated to determine if they are a good fit using criteria such as how well the work matches employee skills and whether they will enjoy the work, and the likelihood that the incumbent can be beaten.
A Single Source of Truth for Business Development
And critically important for BD management, everything is in one place. Whether coordinating internal and external teams, managing and tracking activity assignments, or storing documents and their revisions, all information needed across the BD lifecycle is directly available in a single repository with Capture2Proposal. Common to most GovCons, shortage of BD resources is a constraint on growth. Jerad Myers, Director of Business Development with DarkStar Intelligence commented on these additional benefits of having everything integrated in one platform. “The automation has increased our capability and ability to react with the resources we have. Our velocity is up! We get early notifications from Capture2Proposal of relevant opportunities, and by immediately building the requirements for data calls we are getting a head start, wowing our primes with our responsiveness! And as we look to find new areas of growth, the built-in analytics with Capture2Proposal gives us data to support our decisions.”
Jerad concluded “Capture2Proposal is on point with our business needs and continues to improve the platform. I don’t know if their intention was to create an evangelist for their platform, but they’ve certainly made one of me!”