How to Size Your Market to Strategically Grow Your Federal Business

IN THIS ARTICLE

Shaping Your Sales Territory

Defining and Sizing Your Market

Powerful Tools and Intelligence

[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.

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.

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.

The Data You Need

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

Defining and Sizing Your Market

Defining and sizing your market is an essential first step for businesses looking to win government contracts. It starts by understanding what your product or service is, how it solves a problem for your customers, and the potential value you can generate for them.

In the case of federal contracting, your customer will obviously be the government, but you can further define this market for a more targeted approach. For instance, a software company might want to target a specific government market, such as IT or professional services, depending on the capabilities of its product or service. Finding your company’s competitive niche inside these markets is vital to building a portfolio of promising leads, establishing business relationships, and ultimately winning government contracts.

With a target market defined, the next step is using research and analysis tools to determine your market size. Free government databases like the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis might be able to help you partially quantify your market potential, but they’re insufficient for complete and accurate estimates.

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

Powerful Tools and Intelligence

Whether you’re performing in-depth market research, industry news, competitive analysis, or opportunity searches, Bloomberg Government has a comprehensive suite of workflow tools and features that can help corporate federal strategists find and capture the right bid-to-win information for their government contracts.

Bloomberg Government offers access to unlimited standardized federal data, making it fast and easy for strategists to find the reliable information they need. BGOV markets include product filter functionality for all of the DOD and GSA category management definitions, along with custom markets developed by our analysts and data team.

The Contracts Intelligence Tool harnesses the power of big data to provide a retroactive glance into any market. With easy access to fast, accurate, and reliable recompete data and agency intelligence, strategists can determine where the government has been spending money and use this information to forecast future trends.

Opportunity Search enables quick and convenient keyword searches in critical documents like amendments and statements of work. While most RFP and RFI searches only scan the title and description, BGOV sifts through it all to uncover more qualified opportunities than competing solutions.

For professional services contracting firms, the Labor Rates Dashboard can help set a fair price for work. It compares industry-specific competitive pricing and government spending to determine the best labor rates for your business and contracts.

Bloomberg Government is an all-in-one platform enabling businesses to streamline their government contracting process. With reliable news coverage, detailed market analytics, and data-driven tools, BGOV has the intelligence and resources strategists need to confidently and efficiently bid on government contracts and grow their businesses. To learn more, today.