How to Optimize Your Federal Business Development Workflow
[Use Bloomberg Government’s focused data sets, proprietary tools, and expert analysis to fill your pipeline and grow your business now.]
Managing federal business development workflows can quickly become an unwieldy process, especially when it involves large government contracts that need input and coordination across multiple parties. Building and monitoring the entire opportunity pipeline, from the initial draft request for proposal to winning the final contract, often requires extensive research on information that’s fragmented across multiple platforms, spreadsheets, emails, and messages.
For business developers, this means a lot of time spent finding and gathering both quantitative and qualitative data on individual opportunities, market trends, government spending, networks and partnerships. Optimizing this workflow is essential to building robust pipelines, closing contracts, and growing your federal business.
How to Define Your Federal Business Development Strategy
Before you’re able to optimize your workflow, you must first define your business development strategy. This is the plan of action your company will use to identify new opportunities, build out their pipeline, write the proposals, and ultimately win contracts. Accomplishing this goal requires a detailed plan and an immense amount of research into market conditions, government spending trends, and competitor analysis.
To define your company’s business development strategy and optimize your workflow, consider conducting both a Black Hat and White Hat review. These assessments provide valuable insights into the current market size, your company’s current position in it, and your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
Black Hat Review
A Black Hat review is all about the competition. You’ll want to write a proposal from their point of view to gain a better understanding of how they would secure the deal. Make a note of any advantages your competitors might have, either in the products or services themselves or their opportunity funnels, and keep track of their weak points.
This exercise can help you determine how your company stacks up to the competition, the right competitive price point at which to market your solution, and whether or not you can win the contract. You’ll also gain key insights on how to position your company against your competitors while building customer relationships with program managers and contracting officers.
White Hat Review
Whereas a Black Hat review focuses on your competitors, a White Hat review targets your company’s capabilities and solutions. This is when you utilize the actionable information from research and assessments to improve your win probability.
Assess and minimize your own weak spots, and explore how your market solutions compare to the competition. It might reveal that you need a partner for a contract or that a niche is oversaturated. In any case, you can use this time to tackle any internal issues, adjust pipeline goals, and target competitor pitfalls with your solutions.
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Difficulties in Federal Business Development
While it might be easy to say “define your business development strategy,” taking the necessary actions to create and implement a detailed pipeline plan is no simple feat. Business developers face many challenges throughout their workflows, from time-consuming research on opportunities to qualifying partnerships and contract leads.
Some common frustrations among business development teams include:
- Identifying areas of opportunity in a niche market.
- A shortage of pipeline opportunities and inaccurate information.
- Aggregating and analyzing accurate, reliable data and contracts to win work.
- Staying up-to-date on government spending trends and market conditions.
- Finding the right agency and vendor contacts.
- Facilitating calls or meetings to gain information and expand their networks.
- Clearly communicating with contracting officers.
- Ensuring accurate release dates for RFPs.
With information buried across a multitude of channels, business developers spend most of their time tracking it down or contacting people. These difficulties often hinder strategic growth planning, resulting in companies falling short of their pipeline goals. However, there are strategies and solutions that can help you overcome these hurdles with numerous added benefits.
Tools and Intelligence to Streamline Your Workflow
Bloomberg Government offers a powerful suite of features designed to optimize your entire federal contracting workflow. With BGOV, business developers can easily create viable pipelines that win task orders on contracts and close deals.
Opportunity Search is the market’s most comprehensive search tool. With fast, accurate, and reliable information and access to a vast database of 31+ million contracts, BGOV provides business developers with the resources they need to save time while pursuing government contract opportunities.
BGOV Alerts offers proactive email updates on opportunities and markets of interest. Based on recompete data, machine learning algorithms can forecast which competitors might bid on the same project. BGOV Workspaces can also help you build your pipeline, qualify potential opportunities, and collaborate with team tools.
Backed by the power of Bloomberg News and proprietary expert analytics combined with powerful market intelligence tools provide business developers with a centralized platform for reliable information on current market conditions, government spending trends, and new contract opportunities. Not only does this present valuable context for current strategies and business decisions, it also saves time researching information by organizing disparate data stored on separate systems platforms.
With enhanced pipeline visibility and access to key market insights and information, BGOV enables business developers to produce accurate forecasting and strong opportunity pipelines. This translates into more contracts won and deals closed, growing your federal contracting business and network.
Bloomberg Government helps you streamline the process of taking an opportunity search result from potential to pipeline – and proposal ready. Unparalleled document search capabilities allow you to seek out undiscovered opportunities, gaining a competitive advantage. Track these solicitations and perform competitive analysis to better understand your current market position. Competitive and contract intelligence provides you with accurate, up-to-date information so you can save time on research and focus on business development.
With Bloomberg Government, you receive reliable, actionable data that can propel your opportunities through your pipeline and deliver results. To learn more about how BGOV can help optimize your business development workflows, request a demo .