Anyone Can Win Once in GovCon, But Can You Win Twice?

The Need to Wear Two Hats

There is an inextricable link in government contracting (GovCon) between effective program management and the ability of a company to position itself well to win a recompete contract. In fact, your existing customer base is the least expensive way to grow your company’s business. The cost to break into a government customer organization the first time to get business is much greater than already being there and trying to expand your business.?For example, marketing, lobbying, business development, and other related costs often necessary get your company its first engagement ever with a particular government organization.

The quality of the Program Manager (PM) and the effectiveness of the corporate support that they receive during the execution of the contract are key to winning a recompete.?In fact, 20 years ago, if a company had a customer-focused PM on a contract and they met cost, schedule, and performance thresholds, that was great; however, today, it is not good enough.

Today a PM must not only be effective at sound program management (this includes employee professional development and morale), but they must possess the attributes of a capture manager as well.?First, the PM must be able to defend their base contract against the competition and position for recompete.?The recompete contract starts the day you win the contract.?The truth is that a company better start positioning itself for a recompete contract no more than half-way through the life of a typical five-year contract (i.e., base year plus four option years), otherwise the competition already likely is 2.5 years ahead of it.?During the time that your company is just focused on successfully executing the contract, the competition is likely focused on figuring out “how” they are going to take that $100 million contract away from your company at the time of recompete.?The competition is doing such things as making early strategic hires; getting key industry certifications, working with lobbyists or consultants to get access to the potential customer; meeting with the potential customer to socialize white papers; inviting the potential customer to the company’s state-of-the-art facilities to see product demonstrations; doing strategic marketing on Linkedin; hosting free webinars; sponsoring industry events that the potential customer would likely attend; doing the right things early to best able strategic pricing at the time of bid (e.g., eliminating unnecessary overhead costs); and more.

Second, the PM must be able to position for and be able to expand business in the customer space that they already are in—Without compromising the quality of the delivery to the current contract.?This means at least a few times a year, doing basic things such as introducing a white paper to the customer; introducing subject matter experts from your company that can give your customer ideas on how they might think about approaching challenges that they face; showing the customer product enhancements that your company has made or demonstrating new innovations that might potentially be of benefit to their mission; etc.?

The Problem

Today, being an effective PM in GovCon is essential to the success of your company, but it is not sufficient.?If a PM cannot protect the base contract and expand company business within an existing customer organization, they are a risk to your company’s business.?If you company has many of such individuals, your business and its future growth really are at risk. A PM must be able to think like a capture manager every day and do the necessary capture-related activities. A good start to do this is by being able to answer these types of questions:

• How long until recompete?
• Level and quality of relationship (i.e., proponent, opponent, indifferent) with key customer contacts (i.e., decision-makers and influencers)?
• Company performance on the contract?
• Issues faced on the contract and how well were they addressed?
• How much improvement company has delivered on the contract?
• Customer and end-user satisfaction?
• Availability of contract information for use in the recompete (e.g., metrics)?
• The level of competition your company is likely to face?
• Customer attitude toward company contract; for instance, does the customer trust your company?
• The potential amount of change the customer may introduce at the recompete?
• Your company’s knowledge of the likely recompete process and customer requirements?
• Uniqueness and relevance to key customer needs of any product or service your company provides (i.e., its differentiators and more important, its discriminators)?
• How prepared is your company for the recompete?
• The availability of recompete resources (e.g., contract staff, technical/functional subject matter experts)?

The bottom line is that enabling a successful recompete takes a lot of upfront thinking, while the current contract is still in execution.

The Need

There is a need today for an innovative capability in GovGon that enables companies and their PMs to successfully ready themselves for their recompete contracts.?Key to addressing this need is having a capability that enables the PM and other members of the pursuit team to have the ability to better perform the upfront thinking and analyses necessary to win a competitive GovCon pursuit.?You can call it a Cloud-based strategic analysis support system (SA2S), which:

• Assesses recompete readiness in both a qualitative and quantitative manner
• Enables key analyses essential to winning a competitive GovCon pursuit. For example:

―???Issue & Key Factor Analyses

―???Notional Winner Benchmark Analysis

―???Competitive Assessment

―???Discriminator Qualification

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―???Win Strategy Development

―???Win Theme Formulation

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• Visually and digitally integrates captured data.
• Preserves digital threads of context of the company, customer, and competition as it pertains to the capture effort at hand.

The Benefits

In particular, the benefits of such a SA2S capability are that it would:

• Help do the necessary “strategic thinking before writing” in the opportunity assessment, capture, and proposal planning phases of competitive pursuits.
• Enable better decision-making, particularly at the C-Suite level.
• Assist with answering the most important question when pursuing a competitive pursuit ― “Why your company?”
• Support the design and development of the solution for your company’s competitive response.
• Store the rich context of how and why a deal was bid to increase overall company value over time.
• Capture the company’s intellectual capital to enable future growth.
• Quantify the growth status of your enterprise.
• Lower the cost of capturing new business.
• Support collaboration across the lifecycle of the pursuit in the post-COVID-19 hybrid work environment just as effectively as if the members of the pursuit team were working face-to-face.
• Protect the customer business that your company already has.

?“Work like there is someone working 24 hours a day to take it all away from you.”―Mark Cuban

There is now available to the GovCon marketspace an innovative Cloud-based strategic analysis support system or SA2S capability.?The SA2S is called “SET?”, and it is specifically designed to enable PMs to successfully ready themselves to win their recompete contract, as well as expand business growth for the company in their existing customer organization.?SET helps to do the necessary “strategic thinking before writing” in the opportunity assessment, capture, and proposal planning phases of competitive pursuits.?As a result, SET enables the winning of more competitive GovCon recompete opportunities and increases the overall enterprise value of GovCon companies by providing the aforementioned benefits and more.

Author: Copyright 11 May 2023, Peter Lierni, Founder, Solutioneering, LLC

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