How to Size Your Market to Strategically Grow Your Federal Business

[Use Bloomberg Government’s focused data sets, proprietary tools, and expert analysis to fill your pipeline and grow your business now.]

Tracking trends and identifying target markets in federal government spending is no simple feat. In the contracting space, market strategists are under constant pressure to find cost-effective, efficient opportunities that enable long-term business growth. However, before discovering this potential, strategists must effectively size their market to determine which contracts the company can win and which ones it should pass on.

Strategists rely on accurate data and competitive intelligence on current market conditions to help size their market, anticipate trends, and drive decision-making. One of the biggest challenges they face is breaking down and understanding where and how the government is spending money. But this spending data is often filed in a variety of formats, both digital and physical, on disparate platforms.

For instance, federal budget data and contracting data, are not standardized – and oftentimes accessed on different systems. Procurement forecasts could be saved as spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, or HTML code on a website. With an abundance of data produced by the government and a vast pool of opportunities to sort through, finding the right information to size your market and shape your territory can be incredibly tedious and time-consuming.

Shaping Your Sales Territory

To create a winning plan of action for the next year, federal strategists must first have a thorough understanding of current industry events, market conditions, government spending, and their competitors. Strategists need to know where their company stands in the market before they can decide to diversify or consolidate their pipeline efforts and whether they can beat the competition. However, shaping a sales territory requires strategists to overcome a few challenges.

• • Defining your market: The first step in creating a federal strategy to win government contract bids is to define and size your market. This means identifying what product or service your company is trying to sell and determining where it fits in the government market.
  • Determining the who, where, and how: Once you know where your products or services fit into government market definitions, you’ll have to figure out which government agencies are buying the most and most consistently. You’ll also need to anticipate where the government is investing based on current events and historical data and how it is buying. Are they using conventional contracts, multiple award contracts, or other transaction agreements?
  • Evaluating competition: After assessing the government market conditions, it’s time to shift focus to your competitors. Evaluate their individual strengths and weaknesses, but don’t forget to take a critical, holistic look at the broader market. Is it currently oversaturated with similar products or services? Does your company fill an emerging or neglected niche?
  • Tracking data and current events: To accurately forecast government investing, evaluate market conditions, and ensure a winning strategy, you’ll need to track all data and news that impacts or relates to government spending. This can help you predict how the government will react to current events and give your company a competitive advantage in the market.