Part 2 of 3 · Federal Sales Hot Wash Series — leads to Part 3: Make It a Habit + Facilitator Guide
It’s easy to say you’ll “review how things went” after the Federal fiscal year ends. But the truth? Most teams never do. Q4 closes, a shutdown drags on, and everyone moves straight into the next chase.
A Federal Sales Hot Wash breaks that cycle. It’s the structured pause that turns experience into learning—and learning into performance. Done well, it gives your organization something most GovCons lack: a consistent process for reflection, accountability, and trust.
Begin with Purpose, Not Paperwork
A real Hot Wash isn’t a box to check; it’s a deliberate review of how your Federal sales machine performed. The goal isn’t to fill out a template—it’s to create clarity about how you pursue, win, and deliver Federal work.
Start by defining why you’re gathering. Are you diagnosing capture strategy, buyer engagement, teaming, or ROI on outreach? Clarity keeps the conversation focused and prevents “let’s-talk-about-everything” fatigue.
Gather the right information:
- Pipeline data and win/loss results.
- Marketing and event investments.
- CPARS, subcontractor, or teaming feedback.
- Agency conversations or debrief notes.
Invite the people who see the whole system—BD, capture, proposal, delivery, finance, and leadership. In larger firms, bring division or program leads who speak directly with contracting officers; they connect operations reality with business strategy.
From years of observing GovCons of every size, one truth repeats itself: teams that prepare before they meet learn faster when they do. Preparation converts opinion into evidence. It also signals respect for everyone’s time and insights.
Encourage pre-work: three short prompts—
- What worked?
- What didn’t?
- What should we change next year?
That simple frame turns the Hot Wash from commentary into analysis.
Preparation doesn’t just produce better discussion—it reveals patterns. Teams that bring real data to the table can see which capture efforts actually led to engagement, where budgets generated ROI, and which outreach tactics fell flat. It’s a chance to reconnect action to outcomes before the next chase begins.
Who’s Invited To Our Federal Sales Hot Wash?
If it’s a sales Hot Wash then…the people who do the selling, right?
The list may be longer than you think! Here’s why.
Sales includes research into who you want to woo. It includes recognizing or creating an opportunity. It includes building connections and trust with Federal humans — lots of them — long before the proposal is written. Sales absolutely includes everyone who’s in the account today delivering, creating what’s going to become your past performance.
My most successful clients all tell me, “Everybody sells.” Just about everyone on our team has a unique contribution to make, because just about everyone in our company contributes to the customer experience, in building our relationships with prospects and clients — whether they talk to our clients or never meet them.
The Invitation List
Let’s start with…
- The C-suite or business owner
- The sales and business development leadership
- Those involved in direct sales – those making calls to prospects, having conversations with prospects and clients
- Team members involved in proposal development – whether written in-house or by a contractor, consultant, or specialist
- Support personnel, research assistants, interns, analysts in the company
- Contract Administration staff – those managing the customer experience and the contract terms and condition
- Program managers and account leads, who are subject matter experts, with a close ear to the ground
- Those involved in frontline service delivery
- Maybe key partners and resellers!
In short, team members in just about every functional area in the company can contribute to — and benefit from — participating in a Hot Wash.
Create a Space Where People Can Speak Honestly
Even a perfect agenda can fail if the culture isn’t ready for honesty. Psychological safety—trust that people can speak without fear of judgment—is the single strongest predictor of team performance.
Set the tone up front:
“This is a learning conversation, not a performance review. No blame, no defensiveness. Every voice matters.”
If you lead the meeting, go first. Name one decision you’d handle differently next time. That single act of vulnerability gives permission for everyone else to drop their guard.
When people feel safe to tell the truth, you move from post-mortem to progress.
In her newest book, Strong Ground, Brené Brown writes that courage and vulnerability are the twin roots of trust. Why you care: high-trust teams are high-performing teams. She defines strong ground as the space where accountability and openness coexist—where people can admit mistakes and still belong.
Leaders in Brown’s earlier work, Dare to Lead, describe this as the shift from command-and-control to connection-and-courage. The Strong Ground concepts reflect decades of research, including Google’s Project Aristotle, which found that psychological safety was the top factor in high-performing teams.
When you hold a Federal Sales Hot Wash in that spirit, you’re not just reviewing results—you’re engineering trust. Every candid exchange strengthens the foundation your team stands on. And every time a leader responds to hard truth with curiosity instead of criticism, your organization gets stronger.
Trust turns feedback into fuel.
What Are the Steps To Doing a Federal Sales Hot Wash?
Even the best conversations can lose focus without structure. The most effective Hot Washes move through three clear stages — Reflect, Explore, and Act.
Reflect & Gather Information
Start by casting a wide net to capture ideas, intuition, and observations as well as facts and data from the whole team. Look at what actually happened, what surprised you, and what succeeded by design versus luck.
The Hot Wash leader sorts through those inputs and groups related ideas into themes, recommending a short list of topics to explore in depth during the next stage. The management team can decide whether and how to work with other items that are still important but can’t be tackled in a single day session.
Discover & Explore
Now comes the learning conversation. The session leader—whether from within your own team or an experienced facilitator—brings everyone together to explore the “why” behind your results.
Why did engagement spike with one agency and fade with another?
Why did one partnership thrive while another stalled?
Honest “why” questions move your team from description to discovery. This is the time to listen for patterns, lessons, and opportunities for innovation.
Decide & Act
Your Hot Wash is only as good as your follow-through. Once your team is aligned on lessons learned, convert every insight into action. Assign an owner, define what success looks like, and set a date.
When responsibilities are visible, accountability becomes cultural—and that’s how insight becomes impact.
A good session closes with clarity: next steps, next milestones, and a shared sense of ownership for the year ahead. By the end of your Hot Wash, you’ll have a firm foundation—and probably a few new resources or relationships—to carry forward into your business plan for the new year.
Show The Data: Make Preparation Visible
Data anchors discussion in reality. Project dashboards or shared screens that show pipeline, spending, and contact activity keep the group grounded.
Numbers aren’t the story—they’re the trail of breadcrumbs that are the appetizer for a team that is hungry for insight. Use data as your starting point to invite deeper questions, not defense:
“We met 18 new buyers but sustained only four relationships—what would help us maintain momentum?”
“We doubled our event spend but outcomes stayed flat—how else could we reach this audience?”
Transparency combined with curiosity and vulnerability transforms data from report to conversation.
Capture and Share What You Learn
The most common Hot Wash failure is not that teams lack insight—it’s that they let it dissipate rather than building on it! When lessons-learned vanish in notebooks or chat threads, we’re all left reinventing the wheel before next month’s status meeting.
Here’s how to leverage your Hot Wash to change that.
Within 48 hours, publish a short, visible summary:
- Five key takeaways
- Agreed-upon actions and owners
- One quick win to implement immediately
Keep the Hot Wash summary – and, if you have one, your visual facilitation record – accessible to everyone who participated. Store it in your CRM, Teams, or shared drive—anywhere except someone’s inbox. Start your next review by asking, How well are we doing what we said we would?
That simple question transforms reflection into accountability and momentum.
Download the Federal Sales Hot Wash Checklist
✅ 10 clear steps to plan, hold, and follow through on your Federal Sales Hot Wash
✅ A quick, actionable framework to review your year and launch your next one with focus
✅ Ideal for busy teams who want a simple, high-level process they can implement right away
Use this high-level checklist to get your Hot Wash on the books — and follow the link inside to access the full, detailed Hot Wash Guide for step-by-step tools, templates, and facilitation tips.
Download the Federal Sales Hot Wash Checklist (Free)
(No form required.)
Keep the Momentum Going: Turning Reflection into Routine
The checklist gives you structure—but structure is only the start. The real power of a Hot Wash comes when reflection becomes a rhythm, not a one-off event.
A single Hot Wash captures what happened; repeated ones shape how you operate. When you review quarterly, you build agility, not bureaucracy. Problems surface early, and progress stays visible.
Short, regular check-ins keep energy high and memory fresh. Schedule ninety minutes every quarter for a “mini Hot Wash.” Focus on what you tried, what you learned, and what you’ll do next. Keep it honest, short, and consistent.
Leaders who normalize that rhythm show that learning is part of the job. The result? Less firefighting, more foresight. You’ll find that the calmest teams in Q4 are the ones that pause intentionally in Q1, Q2, and Q3.
Reflection isn’t downtime—it’s data time. Speaking of Rhythm: in Part Three of this blog series, I share the ideas and free resources of another bestselling author for an easy, proven, powerful method to create a 13-week cadence for continuous performance momentum and accountability.
Explore How Hot Wash Works Now!
Join Sean Doherty, CEO of GovDash and Judy Bradt in this lively discussion about how a Federal Sales Hot Wash’s data-driven reflection leads to smarter strategy.
Watch the Federal Sales Hot Wash Webinar here – ungated, no forms. Just play!
Scale the Practice to Fit Your Organization
Whether your team is two people or hundreds, the Hot Wash principle scales easily. What changes is scope and rhythm—not the fundamentals.
At the project level, delivery teams review customer communication and satisfaction.
At the division level, capture managers identify process strengths and bottlenecks.
At the executive level, leadership aligns strategy and resources based on shared insight.
Larger organizations often see immediate payoff when they introduce cross-level Hot Washes. Communication and synergy improve. Re-work declines. Leadership gains visibility into early-stage risk. Team members can get the support they need to course-correct and change performance trajectory sooner.
Scaling doesn’t require more meetings. It takes consistent language and expectations. Everyone learns the same discipline—gather, reflect, decide, act.
Keep People at the Center
Behind every spreadsheet and capture plan are people: buyers, partners, colleagues. A good Hot Wash reminds everyone of that truth.
Use this time to appreciate, not just analyze. Which relationships deepened this year? Which partners built real synergy? Where did communication break down, and how can you repair it?
Brené Brown writes in Strong Ground that trust is measurable through behavior — through how we listen, respond, and make space for one another’s truth. When people feel seen and safe, they speak up sooner, take smart risks, and innovate faster.
That’s the invisible ROI of reflection: higher engagement, steadier morale, and better collaboration—the qualities Federal buyers sense in every proposal and meeting.
Turn Lessons Into Measurable Results
A Hot Wash means nothing unless it changes what you do next. Convert lessons into adjustments across your systems:
- Update capture templates and checklists with what you learned.
- Tighten opportunity qualification in your CRM.
- Shift marketing or event budgets toward proven channels.
- Add early buyer engagement checkpoints to your project plans.
As you evaluate your sales and marketing initiatives, connect Hot Wash insights to tangible Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): win rates, average capture cycle time, number of proactive buyer engagements, qualified lead attraction, lead conversion to wins, and internal collaboration scores.
Continuous improvement deserves better focus before you throw more money at it.
If your Hot Wash shows you that a time-honored activity – like an association membership, conference, trade show, podcast, webinar series – is not delivering the results you envisioned, you’ve got two options.
- Choose the tactical changes you’ll implement starting now, with the goal of improving outcomes for this activity to a level that meets a defined minimum return on investment to keep this activity 12 months from now; or
- If no one can come up with, and be accountable for, a plan to improve the outcome of the activity, it’s time to say goodbye.
The upside of enduring the discomfort of change is that you open up reclaimed resources—time, attention, and money—to experiment with new approaches and ideas. That’s the real ROI of reflection: doing more of what works and less of what doesn’t.
When those metrics move, you’ll know the culture shift has taken hold.
Measure the Payoff
You’ll know your Federal Sales Hot Wash is paying off when:
- Capture cycles shorten.
- Win rates edge upward.
- Teams start discussions with data, not opinions.
- Meetings become shorter, clearer, and more purposeful.
- Collaboration between BD, delivery, and leadership feels easier, not forced.
These changes don’t come from a single event. They emerge from a new habit of attention—from choosing to notice, to talk, and to learn together.
Over time, that habit becomes a competitive advantage. Organizations that learn faster than the market changes don’t just survive; they lead.
Closing Thought
A Federal Sales Hot Wash isn’t about re-hashing the past. It’s about reinforcing the culture you want to build for the future—one based on trust, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Every time you run one, you strengthen your organization’s “strong ground”—the foundation where vulnerability and responsibility meet. That’s where high performance starts.
Reflection is discipline in action. And the teams that practice it don’t just react to change—they shape it.
Finish Strong! Join us for Part 3 – Make It a Habit + Facilitator Guide