Welcome to the New Era of Business Development

It’s no secret that there are fewer new opportunities in the government market, thanks to looming budget cuts and an increasing trend away from the use of new contract awards in favor of established governmentwide acquisition contracts.

However, companies can increase their ability to compete and even boost their win rates and revenues if they invest in and optimize their business development and capture management processes and tools.

More companies are fighting for smaller pieces of business out here in the market, but those companies that invest and work hard to build and optimize their processes will do better in competition. Making the decision to invest is easy, but implementing it is not.

The world has changed considerably in government contracting to the point that there are only two options in this competitive space now, You’re either on the front end of developing relationships and gathering human intelligence and staying on top of your opportunities, or you’re on the back end: reactive, dependent, chasing, selling.

The life cycle involved in identifying a business opportunity and the time frame involved in going after it has been compressed considerably and is much less contingent on a Rolodex approach to business development and more reliant on cooperation and information sharing within an organization. Adjusting to these changes requires a shift both in how companies think and how they operate during the very front end of the business development process.

It can be difficult, but it is necessary if companies are to remain in a competitive position. Managing a pipeline today has become equally important as all of the history around compliance. Compliance in the past has always been the key to government contracting, and there’s been a tremendous focus and investment on compliance, but pipeline management now rivals compliance as a fundamental business area of investment.

With time and competition pressures at an all-time high, companies that don’t invest in streamlined, effective processes will lose out on — and potentially go out of — business. For a contractor to be able to identify an opportunity, build a team, look at their past performance, get the right resumes in place, build a proposal, get their costs right and win it within days to weeks is a tremendous process, You simply cannot expect to go about business as usual in today’s environment and survive. “Get Help”