Introduction
Federal Business Development success includes five key practices: focus, relationship-building, value connection, micro-engagement, and consistency. Successful companies target a few key Federal agencies, leveraging their strengths and past performance. They build strong relationships within these agencies systematically, ensuring connections with the right people early on. They map their best values to the players at every layer. Consistent and meaningful engagement throughout the procurement cycle is essential for initial breakthrough wins. It also lowers your costs and improves your profit by supporting organic growth, contract extensions, and successful recompetes.
1. Focus
The most successful companies set a tight focus on the 2-3 Federal agencies where they are confident they can be the most successful in terms. If you’re not sure how to focus with confidence, use these three factors: Past Performance, Contract Award Data, and Relationships.
Factor one: past performance, for two reasons: First, Federal buyers who are new to you are some of the most risk-averse life forms on the planet. They want to know that you’ve solved…their problem…for someone who looks just like them…yesterday afternoon. The more past performance you can show them with similar size and scope to their needs, the lower the risk and greater their confidence that you’re a safe choice. Second, organic growth is your least expensive approach to new wins. Be more profitable by expanding and winning recompetes from customers who already know and love you.
Factor two: Past Federal Contract Data. And it’s free. Sam.gov – Contract Data or USASpending show you who buys what you do, how they buy, how much they buy, and who they’re buying from…so you can spend your time on people with money.
Factor three is relationships…which we’ll cover in best practice number three! But before we dive into building relationships, we have to dial in the message: Why do we matter to our Federal buyers?
2: Value Mapping
Let’s say you’ve picked the three agencies where you’re going to focus. You’ve researched your players at all the layers. Now you need to get their attention, and get them to return your calls. That starts with Value Mapping.
Your best values, as a company, are the three or four differentiators that are ideally quantifiable and objectively verifiable – and represent source selection criteria that a buyer might include when they want to meet their goals, maximize project success and minimize risk. Big picture, think about things like number of years in business, experience and education of key staff, low turnover, number of recent projects of a similar size and scope, number of Outstanding or Exceptional CPARS. Then map those best values to the players at each layer.
When you’re trying to get through, consistently emphasize the differentiators, or best values, that appeal most strongly to the person based on their responsibilities in the agency.
For example, the Small Business Specialist might get excited to meet an 8a Service disabled woman veteran in a HUBZone. If that company wins a contract, then the Small Business Specialist might advance several goals at once.
Your End User keeps talking about innovation, but got right back to you when you cited recent past performance on similar size and scope.
The Contracting Officer wants to have a file filled with responsive offers, but they already said in the solicitation that they only want to work with suppliers who are on the vehicle they plan to use.
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Explore our proprietary PALM – The Players And Layers Methodology® resource hub. You’ll find resources for the whole team, including complimentary videos, tactical infographic, and our popular GovCon Personas Guide.
3: Relationships
Your Federal “buyer” is more than one person. For example, the Contracting Officer has the legal authority to award a contract, but they are (usually) not the person to whom you’re providing your services or products. If you need to work with one or more teaming partners to close the business, that’s three “layers,” just for starters, and multiple people at each.
Successful govcons have many strong relationships in the account, long before the solicitation hits the street. They focus their capture resources in the accounts where they not only know the most people, but also where they have the right mix of strong relationships.
Best Practice #3 – my Players and Layers Methodology (PALM) ® – lets you see who you know, shows you who you don’t know, but the data says you need to know, and gives you a methodical, systematic, way to close the gaps. In short, there are players in five roles, or what I call “Layers”, who affect whether you win – or lose – in every Federal agency where you want to win work.
Here they are: Small Business Specialist, Contracting, End Users, Industry, and Stakeholders.
Winning govcons learn who they are, structurally, and the distinct things that the players at every layer care about. Then it’s time to get personal: In every account where you want to serve your Federal buyer, you’ve got to find out as much as you can about the specific individuals are in each of those roles, or “layers.” The successful vendor is the one who woos them, and gets them all onside, long before the competition formally begins.
Need more ideas? Get my complimentary GovCon Personas Guide for insight into the roles and goals of those key contacts to help you build value, trust, and connection, in every call, voicemail, and conversation. >>MORE
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4: Micro-Engagement Momentum
Once you’ve established two-way communication with your players at all the layers, that’s a big milestone…but the journey is just beginning. Imagine a situation where there’s eight months til the solicitation is released. Your next challenge: How can you stay top-of mind, keep in touch, keep your shine on, without being annoying, from first contact all the way to Solicitation Day?
Best Practice Four is Micro-Engagement. Not micro-purchase – micro-engagement.
Here’s how it works: our brains generate the feel-good chemical, dopamine, in response to experiences that help us thrive. That neurochemical reward makes us seek more of those experiences. Here’s the cool thing: the wave of dopamine from an everyday victory, like “found my car keys” is almost as strong as the hit we get from a big achievement like “awarded a giant contract.”
Ever have a small positive experience that shifts your whole day for the better? The same thing happens for your Federal buyers, because they’re just as human as we are.
Micro-engagement is what you get when, every time someone connects with you, they feel good because you created a positive experience for them. Maybe it’s simply the upbeat energy in your voicemail. The moment you asked how their family is doing with the recent move they told you about in the previous call. The link you sent about that conference they hadn’t heard about. Little moves like that add up so that yours is the call they’ll return…once you activate Best Practice number five.
5: Consistency
There’s no such thing as doing business with “The Government.” The government doesn’t sign your contract. A real person does. People do business with people they know, like…and trust. Successful govcons discover how to build trust with their Federal buyers long before money has changed hands.
How do they do it? Research shows that Consistency – reliability – is one of the seven elements of trust.
Do you do what you say you’re going to do, every time? Did you find out how your Federal buyer likes to hear from you – phone, text, email, office visit – and how often? How well did you honor that wish? As somebody with an ADHD brain, consistency is a best practice I find especially challenging. I start out with good intentions, but then I get distracted and OH! SQUIRREL! If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
One solution to consistency in engagement through the business development process is to build personalized Micro-engagement contact cadences for the players at each layer in an account that’s important to your Federal goals. Is this a ton of work? Yes, especially at first. Which takes us back to best practice number one.
Detailed engagement plans are only feasible when you focus. Like building any muscle, the more consistently you use it, the stronger your skills get.
Bonus tip: make it easier. Borrow an idea from the successful GovCons who build library of proposal templates: the most effective text and content from their winning proposals, available for everyone to copy and adapt for next time. Your sales and marketing experience is also generating valuable content. Notice what resonates with, and engages, your specific players at every layer. Build your team’s library of sales and marketing information assets, sequences, and tactics you can draw from when you’re planning capture activities in a specific account.
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