As a government contractor, you may think you have a thorough understanding of the fundamentals of the Federal business development lifecycle. But, are you implementing the right practices to identify and capture opportunities specifically targeted to your organization’s strengths? This article incorporates ideas shared by a former Federal Contracting officer on areas to consider for improvement, based on his experiences interacting with GovCons over more than a decade.
Companies that develop a capture plan set themselves up for success before the government even releases a Request for Information, Quote or Proposal (RFI/RFQ/RFP). Creating a dynamic capture plan enables organizations to take a skilled and educated approach to data and information gathering.
How to Shape an Opportunity
As Request for Quotes and RFPs arise, it’s important to shape them to your organization’s advantage in order to influence the decision. But, how can you do this while staying compliant and meeting the complex Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) requirements?
- It’s all about timing. If you are trying to shape a decision after a solicitation or opportunity has been posted, it’s too late. Start early in the capture process to ensure that the customer has an opportunity to share their wants and needs and engage with the industry side early on in the process. Don’t stop the sales and business development, which should be fully aligned with capture plans.
- Always respond to Request for Information (RFI)/Sources Sought notices. This will help set aside your organization from the competition and influence the acquisition strategy.
- Get in early and learn the agency. Look at what they’ve done in the past. What type of set aside was used? Who won the award? What objectives and requirements (Sections L/M) were applied? What are their budget trends for next year? These are all great questions to ask when evaluating the opportunity and shaping it to your organization.
Once you have these items mapped out, identify the customer’s decision making process. Look at their acquisition plans, get to know the end-user and the funding agency to determine who and what has influence on the final decision (including the Technical Evaluation Panel, i.e. “TEP”). Understanding the agency, their policies and organization chart is key to a winning proposal.
Identify, Qualify, and Capture New Opportunities
Capture2Proposal aggregates solicitation, award, long and short-range forecast data, industry briefs and analyst updates from over 80 Federal agencies to provide opportunity-centric intelligence throughout the entire acquisition life cycle. Within the Capture2 platform, it’s easy to identify opportunities tailored to your organization, look up previous awards to predict re-competes, search historical spend data and past budgets, learn about the competition, calculate Probability of Win (PWin), and much more. We provide all the information needed to make the capture process easy and efficient so your team has more time to identify new government opportunities.
Get ahead of the capture status and forecast opportunities for your organization by leveraging the Capture2 Government Market Intelligence Search Engine.
If you’d like more information on this topic, watch our “Ask a Contracting Officer” webinar, or contact us today to find out more about the industry-leading platform we offer to help.
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