How to Build Your Pipeline With the Right Federal Contracts

IN THIS ARTICLE

What Makes a Pipeline Effective?

Finding the Right Opportunity

Creating a Federal Contract Pipeline

Tools and Intelligence for a Robust Pipeline

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

Building an effective federal contracting pipeline requires a whole team effort. However, the slow nature of the federal contracting process — with its many steps, RFP deadlines, and different parties that must weigh in — means that organizations and their business development teams can’t afford to focus on just a single solicitation. Instead, government contractors need to find and act fast on multiple opportunities in their target market at once to maintain cash flow and retain a competitive edge.

Winning federal contracts is an extremely expensive, time-consuming process that can take years of effort. Having the ability to find the right opportunities quickly and efficiently is crucial to building successful pipelines. It also saves you time and money that would otherwise be wasted on prospects that go nowhere, freeing companies to focus their resources on priority contracts.

Business developers often talk about building and optimizing their federal contract pipelines, but there are few tools out there that can adequately streamline this process. Or there are too many micro-solutions spread across various software systems that are impossible to manage.

Bloomberg Government has developed a comprehensive workflow solution offering convenient and extensive search features and data-driven insights on market conditions, agencies, and competing companies. Backed by Bloomberg News and proprietary analysis, BGOV helps these teams find new opportunities faster, expand their pipeline visibility, and ultimately win deals with actionable and lucrative federal contracting pipelines.

Winning Federal Contracts on the Top 20 Contract Vehicles

With the right strategy in place, contractors can find and win new contracts for a predictable pipeline.

What Makes a Pipeline Effective?

A strong pipeline can serve as a strategic road map, allowing the company to align potential opportunities with business growth. But what makes a pipeline successful, and how can business development teams create their own?

While it might seem counterintuitive to the fast-paced process of capturing solicitations, most government contracting businesses find a long-term approach to be the best strategy. This means thinking about the future of your company and the potential strategic partnerships you can forge along the way. Research target agencies and companies in your market space, write down their contact information, and find opportunities with them to build long-lasting business relationships.

Whether you’re partnering with another company in the short term or going after a new contract in an emerging market for your product or service, maintaining these connections with key players is essential to growing your federal contracting business. By making deliberate decisions when teaming or partnering and which contracts to take, business developers can expand their networks while prioritizing high-value agencies for future growth.

[Explore the tenth annual BGOV200 Federal Industry Leader rankings and download the full report.]

The Data You Need

Gain the certainty you need for your business through key information on all federal budget, solicitation, and spending activities.

Finding the Right Opportunity

A common challenge many business developers face is knowing whether or not their company is qualified for a certain opportunity. Different federal agencies have specific compliance requirements and regulations that can be difficult to navigate. Understanding what the solicitation specifications are and determining if your business can accomplish what it asks are vital first steps in the contracting pipeline.

Another problem is finding quality, actionable opportunities in the market. Without enough solicitations or reliable, up-to-date information, federal contract pipelines come to a halt, stalling the process and wasting money. But how can companies find the right opportunities for growth when there’s a shortage in the market?

Bloomberg Government offers a suite of workflow tools that enable business developers to easily uncover new solicitations and contracts. Whereas other software only scans the title and description of RFPs and RFIs, BGOV Opportunity Search is the only solution with keyword search capabilities that take you inside related documents provided by agencies.  The fast, accurate, and reliable information also saves you time and resources to focus on open opportunities.

In-depth agency and company pages also provide you with accurate and timely data on key players in the market. Agency profiles give you a general overview of government spending trends and critical documents to help you find the right opportunities and build a strategic pipeline. Company profiles keep you up-to-date on the latest mergers and acquisitions, provide intelligence on partners and competitors, and gather subcontracting information to help you forge strong business relationships.

BGOV can also help companies determine if a contract is right for them. Surfacing opportunity knowledge and qualification details is quick and easy. Gather recompete data, place of performance information, security clearance requirements and more with the most powerful search tools on the market. With BGOV, business developers save time and money searching for optimal opportunities, enabling them to focus on building robust contract pipelines and securing deals.

Creating a Federal Contract Pipeline

Creating a robust contract pipeline is essential to any federal business as it’s the primary engine driving growth. While the specifics of each strategy will be unique depending on your business, the contract, your competition, and the target agency, there are five general stages of an effective pipeline:

1. Identify Opportunities: The first phase of a federal contract pipeline involves searching for actionable opportunities in your target market with specific keywords. Once you’ve identified a contract you’re interested in, you need to gather as much information as possible for the next step.
2. Qualify Opportunities: Without first understanding the opportunities you’ve identified, you’ll be bidding blindly on every job. You need to know which government agency is buying, what the contract asks for, and the necessary contact information.
3. Connect and collaborate: Federal contracts are often large projects that require multiple parties working together. Maintaining contact with the agency and potentially partnering with another company can help your business build relationships, increase its win rate, and expand its network.
4. Capture the contract: Capture managers come in to help strategize the best way to secure the contract. This requires reliable data on current market conditions, competitors, and the target agency.
5. Bid to win: The final stage of a contract pipeline involves writing and submitting proposals, either alone or with a partner network, to win the deal.

Business developers face numerous challenges in building these pipelines. Whether it’s finding and centralizing accurate data, getting fast and current intelligence, or understanding the larger picture with limited information, creating a viable strategy can quickly become a daunting task.

Bloomberg Government provides a single, reliable source for current information with continuous updates to ensure you stay ahead of the curve on contract updates. Backed by legacy data, artificial intelligence and machine learning pull important details and supporting documentation for your specific contracts and opportunities. And with expert analysis, you receive more context on each opportunity for the entire perspective.

Market Intelligence to Inform Business Development

Bloomberg Government is your source for news, analysis, and data that covers mission-critical developments. From purchasing trends to supply chain, with BGOV, you’re always a step ahead.

Tools and Intelligence for a Robust Pipeline

Building a robust federal contract pipeline is easy with Bloomberg Government. In-depth searches on solicitations, opportunities, contracts, and task orders reveal more options than competing solutions, while reliable data and market intelligence ensure you have the information you need to create a successful bid-to-win strategy.

Agency and company pages provide detailed profiles on potential buyers, partners, and competitors to help you forge strong relationships and stay up-to-date on market trends. The labor rates dashboard can help you determine a fair and competitive rate for your professional services by comparing government spending trends with industry-specific pricing.

Bloomberg Government offers fast and accurate information and analytics powered by data-driven tools. To learn more about how BGOV can help your business build a robust federal contract pipeline, request a demo.